Anne Magurran

Discovery

BBC

Science, Technology

4.3 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 20 April 2020

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Anne Magurran started her career as an ecologist counting moths in an ancient woodland in northern Ireland in the 1970s, when the study of biological diversity was a very young science. Later she studied piranas in a flooded forest in the Amazon. Turning descriptions of the natural world into meaningful statistics is a challenge and Anne has pioneered the measurement of bio-diversity. It’s like an optical illusion, she says. The more you think about bio-diversity the more difficult it is to define. After a bout of meningitis in 2007, she set up BioTime, a global open access database to monitor changes in biodiversity over time and is concerned about ‘the shopping mall effect’. Just as high streets are losing their distinctive shops and becoming dominated by the same chain stores, so biological communities in different parts of the world that once looked very different are now starting to look the same.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and trust me you'll get there in a moment but if you're a comedy fan
0:05.2	I'd really like to tell you a bit about what we do. I'm Julie Mackenzie and I commission comedy
0:10.1	podcast at the BBC. It's a bit of a dream job really. Comedy is a bit of a dream job really.
0:13.0	Comedy is a fantastic joyous thing to do because really you're making people laugh,
0:18.0	making people's days a bit better, helping them process, all manner of things.
0:22.0	But you know, I also know that comedy is really
0:24.3	subjective and everyone has different tastes. So we've got a huge range of comedy on offer from
0:29.8	satire to silly, shocking to soothing, profound to just general pratting about.
0:35.0	So if you fancy a laugh, find your next comedy at BBC Sounds.
0:40.0	This is Discovery from the BBC. I'm Jim El Killelli and in today's program I'm in conversation with a leading scientist about their life and research. Welcome to the life scientific.
0:52.0	A million species of animals plant. Welcome to the Life Scientific.
0:53.0	A million species of animals, plants and insects are thought to be at risk of extinction,
0:58.2	according to a recent international study.
1:00.4	Charismatic animals like the Snow Leopard, the the pygmy hippo and mountain gorilla are vulnerable.
1:06.0	Birds, bees, creepy crawleys and wildflowers are disappearing from gardens and common land.
1:12.0	When Anne McGurham began her career, counting moths in an ancient
1:15.6	Irish woodland, the study of biodiversity was a very young science. We can all sense that a tropical
1:21.8	rainforest is more diverse than a field of wheat,
1:25.0	but turning what we see in the natural world into a meaningful statistic is a challenge.
1:30.0	It's like an optical illusion, Anne says.
1:32.0	The more you think about biodiversity, the more difficult it is to define.
1:37.0	That hasn't stopped her from trying, and in 2007 she set up BioTime, a global database of how biodiversity has changed over time in many
	...

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