Big Data Vs. The Sixth Great Extinction Event

The world's wildlife is dying off, fast. A new study just published in Science reveals that the worldwide extinction rate is 1,000 times the 'background rate'—what it would have been if humans weren't tearing up habitats and overfishing and causing global warming. That's a lot.

Previously, in the pre-industrial, pre-globalized, pre-wildlife slaughterhouse world, one species went extinct per every ten million, each year. Now, ten species for every one million are biting the dust. That might not sound like a lot, but it's a huge acceleration in the rate of extinction, and scientists expect it only to grow. As of now, it's about ten times faster than they'd previously thought.

But don't despair yet, the scientists say; the study's authors have identified a silver lining.

"Online databases, smart phone apps, crowd sourcing and new hardware are making it easier to collect data on species," Duke University's Stuart L. Pimm said in the study's press release, which is titled 'New technologies making it easier to protect endangered species'.

"When combined with data on land-use change and the species observations of millions of amateur citizen scientists," Pimm said, "they are increasingly allowing closer monitoring of the planet's biodiversity and threats to it. For our success to continue, however, we need to support the expansion of these technologies and develop even more powerful technologies for the future." Big data, in other words, is becoming more of a force in conservation.

Databases like TimeTree, Global Biodiversity Information Facility, the Ocean Biogeographic Information System, the Tree of Life, and the granddaddy, the digitized version of the IUCN's Red List of Threatened Species, are becoming increasingly compatible, and scientists and citizens are getting better at sharing information across them.

More information is always better, of course, but apps and crowd-sourcing aren't going to turn back what some scientists are already calling the Sixth Great Extinction event. The truth is, we have enough knowledge to be plenty concerned—there's no doubt that humans are razing rainforest to the ground, developing millions of acres once home to wildlife, acidifying oceans with carbon pollution, overfishing stocks around the world, and poaching big game species with reckless abandon. Deforestation. Pollution. And so on. If we want to stop mass extinction, we need to find a way to stop this:

Yes, we should absolutely be marshalling more resources to these scientists so they can understand this massive loss of biodiversity as best they can—but no amount of information technology is going to put a dent in this trend. Not even anti-poaching drones or camera traps, two very worth resources for gathering data and staving off predators, are likely to amount to much. This is the engine of global consumption we're talking about now. No techno-band aid we can whip up will stem the bleeding it's causing.

Obviously, these scientists aren't arguing that new technologies are sufficient, or that they alone can save the hundreds of species now dying off every year. But there's a concern that the public will hear the buzzwords—crowd-sourcing, innovation, smart phone apps—and will figure, as we're increasingly prone to do, that technology's got this one covered. It doesn't.

Preserving the world's fast-waning biodiversity will mean radical systemic change—vast changes in our consumption patterns and reductions in our carbon emissions—as well as an array of new technologies to help us do it. But it starts with our policies, our institutions—not our startups.