Species monitoring seen helping slow extinctions

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

OSLO (Reuters) - A planned new network to monitor life on earth from microbes to whales could help guide governments struggling to slow extinctions, experts said on Wednesday.

A three-day meeting of 100 scientists and officials in Potsdam, Germany, will end on Thursday with a deal on building blocks for a "Biodiversity Observation Network" for animals and plants facing threats such as pollution or climate change.

Until now, the world has lacked a system for tying together knowledge about the diversity of life -- most observations are local, such as of butterflies in part of the Amazon rainforest or of rice growth in Indonesia.

"We haven't had the capability to knit it all together," Woody Turner, an earth scientist at NASA which is helping put together the global network that will include research institutes and governments, told Reuters.

He said the network would help plug gaps since the time of 19th century naturalists such as Charles Darwin, who published the theory of evolution in 1859 based partly on observations of

The new monitoring network "will advance international efforts to rescue the world's vanishing biological diversity," the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), backed by more than 70 governments, said in a statement of the Potsdam plan.

U.N. reports say the world may be facing the worst spate of extinctions since the dinosaurs vanished 65 million years ago due to human activities such as emissions of greenhouse gases. a tiny fraction of life in the Galapagos.

A U.N. Earth Summit in 2002 set a goal of slowing the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010 but set no baselines for judging success or failure.