Project Aims to Catalog Island Ecosystem

Scientists hope to gain a better understanding of how natural ecosystems work by cataloging all the non-microscopic life forms on an entire island, according to news from the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley).

Funded by a $5.2 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the three-year-project aims to take a genetic inventory of all the animals, plants and fungi on the South Pacific island of Moorea. Researchers chose the 51-square-mile island because its ecosystem is complex enough to be comparable to larger ecosystems around the world, while the area is small enough to manageably study and catalog.

"This information will show how organisms fit together in the ecosystem, and because we will characterize every species on Moorea, we will be able to reconstruct the entire food web," said Chris Meyer, a research zoologist at the Smithsonian Institute. "With such a tool, ecologists in French Polynesia can pioneer a whole system approach to investigating how island food webs respond to disturbance, such as when invasive species enter the picture or sea temperatures rise."

Moorea has at least 5,000 different species of non-microbial life, although Meyer said he'd be "disappointed" if researchers didn't eventually identify at least 10,000 types of fungus, plants and animals. (By comparison, the state of California has an estimated 30,000 different species of insects alone.) Samples for the Moorea Biocode Project will be processed in a new laboratory building on the island, UC Berkeley's Richard B. Gump South Pacific Research Station.

The project expands upon a pilot effort undertaken in 2005, when researchers compiled genetic barcodes for Moorea's fish, geckos and certain insects.

By cataloging every form of life on the island, from its coral reefs to its mountaintops, scientists hope to gain a better understanding of how species interact and respond to changes in their environment. These changes could include everything from climate change and overfishing to the introduction of invasive species thanks to globalization.

"Virtually all the ecosystems in the world are under these same stresses, and how they are responding to them is what we need to understand," said Neil Davies, executive director of the Gump Station and the project's lead principal investigator. "A model ecosystem approach to ecology will benefit conservation much like model organisms -- from fruit flies to roundworms -- in molecular biology have benefited medicine. There is a great deal of insight researchers can obtain about very complex systems by first studying simple ones. Much of what we learn at Moorea will be applicable elsewhere."

Eventually, researchers plan to assemble a library of genetic markers and physical data for Moorean life and make that information available online for ecologists and evolutionary biologists.

University of California, Berkeley, "$5.2 Million Grant from Moore Foundation Funds Ambitious Project to Barcode an Entire Ecosystem." URL: (http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/12/06_moorea.shtml)