# What Biodiversity Can Measure by Patrick Mellor May 9, 2024 Albrecht Dürer - The Large Piece of Turf (_Das große Rasenstück_ **_)_**, 1503. One of the first known photorealist depictions of a plant community [Downe Bank](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downe_Bank), Darwin’s original tangled bank. > _It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth..._ - Charles Darwin, _On the Origin of Species_, 1859 (final paragraph) ## A path forward for quantitative biodiversity credits Biodiversity is correctly characterized as a property of an ecological system that it is good to maximize and protect... A focus on functional connectivity will help clear our lenses when it comes to concepts of both biodiversity and natural carbon capture. ## Examples in Functional Connectivity Sea urchins offer a lesson in functional connectivity – in terms of understanding, measurement, and informed intervention... **While appeal to the interconnected nature of the biosphere in justification of ecological conservation and restoration has a long history...** Highly functionally connected species often have beneficial impacts when the energy transfer is bidirectional. For example, in tropical forests, many plants produce food specifically for ants... **Source:** [Unravelling Darwin's entangled bank: architecture and robustness of mutualistic networks with multiple interaction types](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.2016.1564) In the image above, from a study of mutualistic interactions in a forest in Veracruz... Species that contribute to the functioning of an ecology through their wide interactions with others are known as keystone mutualists... ## How to Map Keystone Mutualists Identifying keystone mutualists requires a relational understanding of ecology, and a model of ecosystem functioning focused on energetics... ## Human Intervention to Achieve a Quantifiable Benefit Once we understand how to measure the health of an ecosystem in terms of keystone mutualists and measures of functional connectivity... ## How Increasing Biodiversity and Removing Carbon Can Go Hand in Hand On the largest scale, the goals of Living Carbon are to restore functional ecological communities to land previously degraded by human extractive use... ## A Biodiversity Framework for Heavily Modified Landscapes A biodiversity framework centered on functional connectivity is especially important when considering heavily modified landscapes... The [Taylor Yard G2 River Park Project](https://tayloryardriverprojects.lacity.gov/about/faqs) sits atop a former railroad maintenance site... In 2022, in cooperation with [Friends of the LA River](https://folar.org/) and [Sand County Environmental](https://www.sandcountyenv.com/), Living Carbon provided 40 hybrid poplar saplings for an experimental planting... Visiting the site after two years, we saw robust growth and clear tolerance of the challenging site conditions by our original trees... _A hummingbird perched on a Living Carbon tree at the Taylor Yard site_ We advocate for biodiversity credits that are relevant not only to restoring pre-industrial ecosystems, but also to the necessary regeneration of degraded landscapes, such as brownfield sites... By focusing on the flow of energy in a system, we can become clear about what we value and structure markets accordingly – incentivizing the great scope of repair that will be necessary for our future thriving as a species.