Late on the jump as far as breaking news goes, but here a must-write-about concept. I watched this story leap around the eco-tech blogosphere, and finally had an “aha” moment as to how totally awesome it really is when I listened to my regular dose of 60-Second Science yesterday. The idea is essentially this:

Google has a great way to rank pages in order of importance. Trusting that you, dear reader, embody the geek side of EcoGeek, I don’t need to go into detail on Pagerank. Just as ranking webpages is complicated, so to is tracing the links of the food web and ranking the impact species extinction will have on ecosystems. Stefano Allesino has outlined a “new” way to track the importance of species within ecosystems – copy Google. While everything is indeed dependant on everything else, there are still some critters that cause far more noticeable impact than others when present or absent from an area. So, as one organism impacts multiple others, it rises in importance.

Using similar alogorithmic methods to rank species as Google uses for webpages, conservationists will have an easier time knowing where to focus immediate efforts and resources for endangered flora and fauna. This is one of those exciting and cool uses of technology for the environment that don’t seem to pop up too often. The concept behind it can be widely spread out to include the ranking of whole ecosystems in keeping the world’s functions in balance, and ranking the negative impacts organisms have on their environments (ahem, humans, ahem). The interdependence of living things can make this pretty tricky, but I can’t wait to see the system come to fruition.

photo via befuddledsenses

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