Panel Discussion, continued...
HANDLEY: Well, I certainly don't find them at the same rate because with changed techniques [inaudible]. They are out there waiting to be found [inaudible]. I want to point out about the voucher thing that more and more the local people are getting into inventory. I don't have to go out and inventory anymore because they are doing it. They have got lots of students that are coming on and they are trained to learn about that so I am converting my studies of bats [inaudible].
CRACRAFT: There is one thing that you brought up. We are supposed to be in an extinction crisis yet there are lots of people out there in the world saying, no, there is not an extinction crisis. Not at all. You can't prove to me that if I cut down all that forest, anything is going to go extinct. To some extent, they are right. To some extent, it is very, very hard cry. Very difficult for any systemisist to go out into this big spance of rain forest and say X number of species are going to go extinct when you cut that down because documentation of extinction means that you know what is there. You know how big it's distribution range is. If we are going to estimate the number of species on the globe and the rate at which extinction has happened, if we are going to make rational conservation decisions about how big of an area we have to conserve. If we are interested in things other than just fuzzy wuzzy's that make a charismatic vertebrae as Terry called them and we are really concerned about the distributions and extinction's of things other than those, we need to know what is there and how big the range is.
Many a time there is antidotal information by systemists. Yeah, I was on that ridge, I found ten plants up there that no where else and next time I come back to the ridge, it is gone. Yet, that person still may not have gone over on other ridges and other ridges to know in fact whether his statement was correct or not. Collecting and having these vouchers in museums is really, really important from that standpoint.
The other thing is that now countries of the world are yelling and screaming at museums that harbor diversity from their country to have this up on the web, to make it available to them so they would maybe use that information for conservation planning or land management. There is a problem of getting all that information up on the web but it is also the more information you have, the more valuable it is. In effect, countries are very interested in knowing what they have biodiversity wise.
HANDLEY: We are studying bats. The first thing we have to do is develop a protocol so that we can communicate station to another. We looked as far as fragments of various sizes, [inaudible] with replicas of each so that we could be sure that we weren't dealing with a peculiar air day of a particular locality. Then we had similar sizes of replicas of continuous forests. [Inaudible] to see what the founder was before resignation. We found dramatically that the smaller the fragment, the less species that we will have there and they are characteristic species that immediately drop out the fragmentation. The other thing is there are species that are attracted to the edges and to each generation with the lead stuff that comes back [inaudible]. That is an abundant [inaudible], it is not the bats that were there three years ago.
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