forest, waiting for its first blood meal. Imagine a newly hatched tick resting on the floor of a northeastern U.S. Chivian and others are also trying to raise awareness of how widespread extinctions hamper medical research. “We saw these changes as Armageddon in slow motion, something that would affect the globe in ways just as catastrophic as nuclear war.” In particular, researchers began uncovering how biodiversity losses appear to fuel the rise and spread of many infectious diseases. ![]() ![]() “By the 1990s, there was a growing awareness among physicians in the anti-nuclear movement that we had to enlarge our perspective to include global environmental changes,” Chivian says. Concerns about climate change quickly followed. That same year, he recalls, scientists discovered an ozone hole widening over the Antarctic. “Above all,” Chivian explains, “we’re trying to reach beyond specialists to help everyone grasp the urgencies involved in species loss.” It’s no coincidence that in 1985 Chivian shared a Nobel Peace Prize for cofounding the International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War. But rather than a dry academic text, it takes the form of a richly illustrated coffee table book with chapter authors writing in language accessible to a general audience as well as their fellow scientists. The 542-page tome draws on the research and expertise of more than 100 scientists. In 2008, it published Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity. Over the past decade, the Harvard center has been working with three United Nations agencies to draw together what scientists do know. ![]() “But these services depend on an enormous diversity of species about whose interactions we know very little.” “The natural world provides so many services vital to our health,” says Eric Chivian, founder and director of Harvard Medical School’s Center for Health and the Global Environment. The Rutgers study is just one of many new investigations into the link between biodiversity and human health. “There’s not much that can grow under this stuff,” Shappell says of the exotics overrunning the Rahway River wetland she is surveying. “Reduce plant diversity and you may reduce bird diversity as well.” And across North America, nonnative invasives like Japanese knotweed pose one of the greatest threats to plant diversity. The link to plants? “Birds need a variety of plant species and habitats for nesting and foraging,” Shappell explains. The research builds on previous studies showing that areas with high bird diversity tend to have less West Nile virus, which mosquitoes can transmit from birds to people. After characterizing each plot, they will compare the diversity of its plant communities with bird diversity and the prevalence of West Nile virus within mosquito populations. Led by Rutgers wetland ecologist Joan Ehrenfeld, the group is looking at plant diversity in a variety of freshwater wetlands in New Jersey. ![]() “If I’m not out in 10 minutes, send help,” she called back.Ī graduate student at Rutgers University, Shappell is a member of a research team exploring the link between biodiversity and human disease. The plants towered over her head, and their deer-trampled stalks crunched under her boots as she vanished into the mass of pale green leaves. ON A RECENT AFTERNOON, Laura Shappell followed a slender deer trail into a thicket of invasive Japanese knotweed. Scientists are discovering that species extinctions fuel the rise and spread of infectious diseases and hinder medical research
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