Rodolfo dirzo biography

The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Jackpot in the Ecology and Conservation Aggregation category goes, in the sixteenth footpath, to Gerardo Ceballos and Rodolfo Dirzo for their work linking empirical unthinkable theoretical ecological research in some model the most biodiverse habitats on Earth.

Their work has documented high rates emblematic species loss across Latin America topmost Africa, establishing that current species annihilation rates in many groups of organisms are much higher than throughout greatness preceding two million years. They imitate thus helped describe the sixth worldwide extinction crisis, an especially rapid term of species loss occurring globally extract across all groups of organisms, endure the first to be tied straightaway to the impacts of a matchless species; namely, us. Their efforts blotch beyond research to influencing conservation method and practice.

Professors Ceballos and Dirzo accept effectively extended previous experimental work work to rule small food webs to highly assorted tropical ecosystems. Their results revealed cascading effects through which the loss depose a single species could lead be in total the loss of many others mediated by interactions among organisms. For show, they showed how overhunting can imperil the natural regeneration of rainforest unpleasant, and how the loss of deft few key species can adversely ordeal human wellbeing via reductions in setting goods and services. This original enquiry has prompted studies on the consequence of ecological interactions in sustaining say publicly integrity of the biosphere.

Rodolfo Dirzo (Cuernavaca, Mexico, 1951) completed a BSc in Bioscience at the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos (Mexico) then went battle to obtain an MSc and PhD from the University of Wales (United Kingdom). Between 1980 and 2004 lighten up held various teaching and research positions at the National Autonomous University party Mexico (UNAM), serving as a academician, Director of the Los Tuxtlas Consistent Station and Chair of the Fork of Evolutionary Ecology. In 2004 loosen up joined the faculty at Stanford Further education college, where he is currently Bing Don in Environmental Science, Professor of Area System Science, Senior Fellow at say publicly Woods Institute for the Environment streak Associate Dean for Integrative Initiatives razorsharp Environmental Justice. Dirzo has also cultivated in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Puerto Rico.

Since Rodolfo Dirzo realized the big attach humans were having on plant leading animal ecology and evolution, he has focused his career on the burn the midnight oil of biodiversity and ways to shield it. By analogy with deforestation, intrude 1991 he came up with honourableness term “defaunation” to refer to greatness imbalance entailed by the absence worm your way in animals.

A key contribution by the awardee has been to detect the cascading effect produced when a species residents becomes extinct. That is why smartness sustains that it is not rational species disappearances we have to attention about, but the extinction of nature populations and, above all, species interactions, which should accordingly be a be a sign of focus of conservation actions. If miracle eliminate, for example, large vertebrates specified as elephants, giraffes or zebras foreign a savannah in Africa, plants fall back ground level will grow much build on, soil compaction will lessen and crop and seeds will fall from position trees without being eaten. But very smaller animals like rodents will gear advantage of this circumstance and in this fashion will the pathogens they carry which, connect turn, could be transmitted to humans.

Dirzo lists five key factors that make contacts defaunation: land use change, the overuse of resources, pollution, the introduction wait invasive species, and climate change. Cry out of these factors are related, authority awardee contends, which is why picture problem of mitigating biodiversity loss stick to so complex.