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P. LOWRY/MISSOURI BOTANICAL GARDEN   Over the past decade, botanist Pete Lowry has noticed a worrying trend in his field. An expert on the Sciodaphyllum (formerly Schefflera) genus of neotropical plants, he used to have a relatively easy time doing fieldwork abroad, he says. Now, however, he and his colleagues at the Missouri Botanical Garden face a mountain of logistical hurdles to gain permission to work in the various countries they want to visit, let alone bring samples back home with them.  For example, although one of Lowry’s study species, S. patulum, extends from southeastern ...

An economic case for competing in the XPRIZE Rainforest contest (commentary) by Jonah Wittkamper on 1 March 2021 In 2019, XPRIZE Rainforest opened its doors and challenged the world to develop new biodiversity assessment technologies by offering a $10 million prize for the best one. In this commentary, Jonah Wittkamper, President of the Global Governance Philanthropy Network and co-founder of NEXUS, makes an economic argument for participating in the contest. Wittkamper says a great deal of value could be unlocked with the ability to rapidly assess rainforest biodiversity. This post is a com...

Above: San Children in Andriesvaal, Kalahari, South Africa (by Migail de Klerk). Exporting unethical practices to low- and middle-income countries has become the new face of exploitative research, writes Doris Schroeder The Biologist 66(3) p22-25 Bioscientists and biomedical scientists rely heavily on external resources to do their research . While philosophers can publish groundbreaking research after a quiet stay in a mountain hut, bioscientists generally need access to research participants, genetic samples, microorganisms and experimental animals, to name just a few resources. This means...

To print this article, all you need is to be registered or login on Mondaq.com. The Nagoya Protocol is a global agreement, supplementary to the Convention on Biological Diversity, which regulates the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from the utilisation of genetic resources and traditional knowledge associated with them among the user and provider countries (parties), thereby contributing to the conservation and sustainability of biological diversity. Although it was drafted in 2010 and signed between 2011 and 2012, it only entered into force on October 1...

In 2018, a new species of centipede graced the pages of the prominent taxonomy journal Zootaxa. More than 14 centimeters long, with striking teal-colored legs, it lives in the montane and mossy forests of the Philippines. Now, however, the centipede is in a harsh spotlight. The Philippine government says the Spanish neurologist and amateur biologist who described the species acquired his specimens illegally. Neither the journal’s editors nor its peer reviewers caught the lapse—and the journal has no policy requiring documentation that specimens have been collected with proper permits. So...