**8. Rearranging clouds in times of global changes?**

We are in the midst of the worldwide race for economic development and global trading, with their extraordinary demands on natural resources and their inevitable environmental issues. While striving to maintain social equilibrium at the same time, why not take a pause and ask ourselves not only where we are going, but simply how we are going? How can we know how we are going?

The prestigious graduate schools, the most popular jobs in western and industrialized countries are linked with the world of finance. Get closer to the sources, react faster and make the optimal decision before anyone else does. Sophisticated algorithms are being developed by highly paid experts to better analyze tendencies and make predictions, from a phenomenal amount of cross-analyzed sources of diverse natures. Lists of potential customer's addresses are sold, exchanged, stolen. Cloud metadata and then triturated and sent back to the average human as a continuous shower of commercial ads, enticing e-mails, spurious spams, in the hope of creating habits and develop ruinous compulsions? Along the same line, potential crime scenes can now be anticipated with amazing probability rates by the Californian police, thanks to the work of metadata experts.

Global changes are on the way, noticeable since the70's with the accelerating atmospheric enrichment of greenhouse gases. Science and technology have made extraordinary progress at the same time, but mostly dedicated to the continuing exploration of the unknown "before it is too late", and too little to addressing pressing environmental issues with the huge losses in biodiversity that are envisioned by many in the next decades.Cutting edge medical research has been fuelled by the need to face new challenges, in cancerology, in microbial pathologies, in immune or rare diseases. Highly efficient molecular investigations from gene mining to the knowledge and control of their expression repertoire, whole organism approaches, continu‐ ously updated cutting-edge equipment - are being applied to exploratory science and projec‐ tions into future scenarios. Huge supercomputers are piling up petabytes of data waiting for bioinformatics advances to organize and make sense of them, and in the quest of the reassuring "big picture" that will once for all settle intellectual disputes, quench the thirst for the unknown, and with the hope that, ultimately, some biogeoclimatic equilibrium will be automatically restored no matter what.

environmental consequences are in the long term. Thousands of synthetic molecules - insec‐ ticides, herbicides, pharmaceuticals, conditioning agents, food additives, fuel additives, lubricants, household products, plasticizers, flame retardants, to name a few- have been synthesized without sufficiently questioning their degradability and speciation once released in the environment or abandoned, or offering detoxication, storage/disposal or reusability solutions. Highly reactive pesticides can cause immediate non-specific destruction to useful pollinizing insects and kill birds, others may insidiously find their way up the food chains and eventually poison top predators - this is the case of highly stable and carcinogenic biphenyl organohalogens. Chronic allergies and cancers are documented through the regular exposure to more and more food additives and household products. Specific information can be obtained

If there are no simple replacement solutions in most cases, perhaps revisiting global commer‐ cial practices, promoting local products and values and favoring educational resources (preferably non-virtual) centered on the practical resolution of local issues, will help establish

We are in the midst of the worldwide race for economic development and global trading, with their extraordinary demands on natural resources and their inevitable environmental issues. While striving to maintain social equilibrium at the same time, why not take a pause and ask ourselves not only where we are going, but simply how we are going? How can we know how

The prestigious graduate schools, the most popular jobs in western and industrialized countries are linked with the world of finance. Get closer to the sources, react faster and make the optimal decision before anyone else does. Sophisticated algorithms are being developed by highly paid experts to better analyze tendencies and make predictions, from a phenomenal amount of cross-analyzed sources of diverse natures. Lists of potential customer's addresses are sold, exchanged, stolen. Cloud metadata and then triturated and sent back to the average human as a continuous shower of commercial ads, enticing e-mails, spurious spams, in the hope of creating habits and develop ruinous compulsions? Along the same line, potential crime scenes can now be anticipated with amazing probability rates by the Californian police, thanks

Global changes are on the way, noticeable since the70's with the accelerating atmospheric enrichment of greenhouse gases. Science and technology have made extraordinary progress at the same time, but mostly dedicated to the continuing exploration of the unknown "before it is too late", and too little to addressing pressing environmental issues with the huge losses in biodiversity that are envisioned by many in the next decades.Cutting edge medical research has been fuelled by the need to face new challenges, in cancerology, in microbial pathologies, in immune or rare diseases. Highly efficient molecular investigations from gene mining to the knowledge and control of their expression repertoire, whole organism approaches, continu‐ ously updated cutting-edge equipment - are being applied to exploratory science and projec‐

from associative websites.

88 Biodiversity - The Dynamic Balance of the Planet

we are going?

to the work of metadata experts.

respectable ethics and restore some dignity.

**8. Rearranging clouds in times of global changes?**

How most of us are doing depends not on fluctuations of the stock market, nor on the price of the latest hi-tech widget, nor on whether the next crime scene is going to take place in our neighborhood, but on how fast our natural environment is going to degrade. Why not redirect our priorities and efforts to better understand how our biosphere functions, how species interact, how biomes are connected, how biodiversity is maintained in marine and terrestrial environments?

We generate enormous amounts of data of genomic, chemical, taxonomic, pharmacological, biotechnological value that can be better analyzed.

Dealing with environmental issues, the first question is the preparation of environmental databases, our "clouds"- the crucial initial step. What "standard" environment will be suitable to monitor long-term changes? Climatic changes being *global* (temperature rises, ocean acidification etc.) and heavily influenced by human activities, one can only define a study zone as representative of a "standard environment" if it is not *locally* impacted by *direct* human interference (habitat destruction, introduction of alien species, chemical and microbiological pollution…). Fluctuations in parameters of interest must not be subjected to amplitudes higher than those of experimental (read: impacted) study zones, and sampling must be large and statistically significant for the "standard" database to be robust and reliable enough to evidence mild to severe changes in same parameters from experimental study zones. This applies not only to physico-chemical parameters, but also to genomics, transcriptomics or metabolomics metadata (e.g. microbial metagenomics). We need markers within variables, sentinel species within populations, signatures within metabolomes, early responses within complete tran‐ scriptomic repertoires, and so on. Some advocate the use of artificial biological systems, a synthetic biology approach, to standardize sampling procedures. Whole-area imaging can make use of drones that interfere very little with wildlife and biological processes. Coupled with appropriate mathematical tools, automation can be achieved and time-dependent evolution of e.g. natural processes can be predicted.

Thus, whether comparing experimental vs. control areas, or monitoring the evolution of the same locality in time, or analyzing *connectivity*, enormous amounts of data are being generated that need trimming, arranging, cross-checking to be usefully interpreted. And beyond assessing the evolution of a situation, we need to predict, for example, the degradation in the biodiversity of impacted areas if no corrective action is taken. Neural networks that are "educated" by so-called genetic algorithms are currently very successfully exploited, in economics, in business, and in forensic science, to open what is known as "windows of opportunities" (to seize, but also to take corrective measures). These were created by scientists to treat scientific questions in the first place! Beyond our biosphere's apparent complexity, what it contains are quantitatively and qualitatively finite entities, subjected to predictable dynamics. There is no reason not to apply these analytical methods to create ready-to-use tools legislation can rely upon to regulate the appropriation of natural resources: water, wood, sand, fossil fuel, minerals… and wildlife. In the same way as DNA tests are used to help solve criminal investigation by 'showing irrefutable evidence', molecular tools applied to systems biology in association with multi-scale imaging tools can be tailored by analysts to guide our choices towards a more responsible management of natural resources.

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We need a generation of motivated young analysts to use their skills to extract the useful information and blow away the dust. The big pictures might then emerge at last, as the clouds dissipate, ready to inspire us with a better scenario. The following phrase by Salvatore Manga no [50] *"Genetic Algorithms are good at taking large, potentially huge search spaces and navigating them, looking for optimal combinations of things, solutions you might not otherwise find in a life‐ time"* makes needle-in-the haystack problems tractable. After all, we live on a planet with finite resources, our only problem now is to make them last for the benefit of the generations to come. If machines can learn, hopefully humans can too….
