IN THE race to catalogue and protect biodiversity before it vanishes, history may offer the best guidance. The unenviable task of deciding how to spend precious conservation funds could be made easier by a technique that focuses on areas where the climate has remained stable for millennia.
That some regions of the Earth are rich in a wide variety of species is well known. But some biodiversity hotspots, such as the Atlantic forests of Brazil, are in remote and little-studied tropical areas, leaving conservationists unsure as to where to best direct their efforts. “We need to know at a…
