LIFEPLAN

Currently, close to 80% of all species on Earth are still waiting to be discovered. At the same time, we are losing biodiversity at an alarming rate. Through the LIFEPLAN Project, an international team of scientist aim to establish the current state of biodiversity worldwide and generate accurate predictions of its status under future scenarios. In LIFEPLAN, the team characterize biological diversity through a global sampling program and develop the bioinformatics and statistical approaches needed to make the most of these data. It is being generated the most ambitious, globally distributed and systematically collected dataset to date on a wide range of taxonomic groups. Importantly, the use of modern sampling methods that do not require taxonomic knowledge from those collecting the data and that will result in data that are directly comparable across different locations.

The IER participates with the “Tucumán” site, which is one of the 100 sites selected around the world to integrate the LIFEPLAN Project (https://www.helsinki.fi/en/projects/lifeplan), which seeks to develop global models of joint distribution of species that describe the spatiotemporal structure of life on Earth. From mid-2022 to the end of 2025, we will be taking systematic samples of biodiversity (mainly bacteria, fungi, flying insects, birds and mammals) in a site in good state of conservation and in a rural site in the foothills of the Yungas forests in Tucumán Province, Argentina.

The work team includes Pedro G. Blendinger (site coordinator), Roxana Aragón, Cecilia Blundo, Silvia Lomáscolo, Giselle Mangini and Sofía Nanni, with the technical support of Carolina Cuezzo, José Luis Tisone and Loreley Cuadrado.