Alex Antonelli on learning from nature's biodiversity to adapt to climate change

The Life Scientific

BBC

Technology, Personal Journals, Society & Culture, Science

4.6 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 19 September 2023

⏱️ 28 minutes

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Summary

With the world's biodiversity being lost at an alarming rate, Alexandre Antonelli, Director of Science at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, has made it his life's mission to protect it. He is a bio-geographer revealing how changes to the Earth's landscape, such as the formation of mountain ranges and rainforests, leads to the evolution of new species and causes plants, fungi and animals to move around the world. His work is a masterclass in joined-up thinking, bringing together different fields of research by starting conversations between scientists who would rarely talk to one another. Together, they paint a more holistic picture of how our planet's biodiversity has developed in the hope of informing how we can protect it in the future. Alex tells presenter Jim Al-Khalili about a life spent in the wild, beginning with his earliest memories of growing up in Brazil cataloguing life in the Atlantic Rainforest. That passion is still with him today. We've only scratched the surface of understanding what lives here on Earth, he says, more than 4,000 new species are found every year. Alex is passionate that we need to speed up the rate at which we document the richness of life, arguing if we don't identify what there is we can't protect it. Presented by Jim Al-Khalili Produced by Tom Bonnett

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts
0:04.6	Hello and welcome to the podcast edition of the Life Scientific.
0:08.0	I'm Jim Alkalili and this is the show where I get to talk with some of the world's leading
0:12.0	scientists and you get to find out what drives them. So sit back, get comfortable and enjoy the episode.
0:18.6	Hello, my guest today has spent almost his entire life exploring the world's most
0:23.6	biodeiverse habitats and I do mean almost his entire life. He grew up not far from the
0:29.3	Atlantic rainforests of Brazil and as a young boy on family trips he'd collect wildlife
0:34.7	specimens in matchboxes. Since then, and over the course of an impressive scientific career,
0:40.1	he's discovered new species, literally bumping into a new type of coffee plant.
0:44.9	Oh and a new blue bell species and orchid species have been named after him.
0:50.0	Alexander Antonelli is the director of science at the Royal Botanic Gardens Q
0:55.1	and professor of biodiversity at the University of Gothenburg. He is a biodeographer,
1:00.7	an expert in revealing how geography, in particular the formation of mountain ranges,
1:05.4	is responsible for the earth's remarkable biodiversity. His mission has been to bring together
1:10.8	scientists from different disciplines to build a more holistic understanding of the way life
1:15.3	has changed in the past and help protect it in the future from the impacts of climate change.
1:20.5	Alexander Antonelli, welcome to the Life Scientific.
1:23.2	Thanks so much, Jimmy. It's a great honor to be here today.
1:25.8	Now we're used to hearing about how life on earth has been shaped by major climactic events
1:30.5	like ice ages, but you focus on local changes, the formation of mountain ranges and rainforests,
1:36.2	for example, and how they force the species in those regions to adapt.
1:41.4	Yes, exactly. So if you look at how species have accumulated over time across different regions,
	...

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