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Biodiversity: Putting a price on nature

Nature volume 462, pages 270–271 (2009)Cite this article

Gretchen Daily knows the value of ecosystems — but can ascribing financial worth to them help to maintain biodiversity? Emma Marris meets an ecosystem-services evangelist.

When Gretchen Daily was young, she watched acid rain slowly killing the forests around her in Germany's Taunus mountains. As a researcher, she cut her teeth studying extinctions under Paul Ehrlich, an ecologist famed for his predictions of mass starvation. Last month, Daily travelled to Japan in advance of next year's meeting of the Convention on Biodiversity in Nagoya, where the world will hear how spectacularly that treaty has failed to protect the planet's species. All this makes it remarkable that Daily is, eternally, sunny.

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  1. Emma Marris
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Additional information

See Editorial, page 251 , Opinion, page 277 , and the biodiversity special at http://www.nature.com/darwin .

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Gretchen Daily

Natural Capital Project

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Marris, E. Biodiversity: Putting a price on nature. Nature 462, 270–271 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/462270a

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