24/04/2009: One hundred questions to conserve global biodiversity

Living With Environmental Change’s Director Andrew Watkinson is one of the authors of a new paper that identifies 100 scientific questions that, if answered, would have the greatest impact on conservation practice and policy.

Conservation experts from 21 world-leading organisations including the WWF, Conservation International and BirdLife International compiled a longlist of more than 2,000 questions which were then whittled down by a process of email voting and workshops to the final list of one hundred questions.

The questions are divided into 12 categories, most of which (including ecosystem function and services, and climate change) broadly relate to the key objectives of Living With Environmental Change.

What impact will the melting of polar ice have on the human use of high-latitude ecosystems? (Photo: Adventfjorden, Spitsbergen by E. Parnell)

 

"With the current crisis in the loss of habitats and species it is important that we ensure we are carrying out the most important research," says Professor William Sutherland of the University of Cambridge, lead author of the study and Miriam Rothschild Chair in Conservation Biology. "When research is designed to meet the needs of real natural resource protection projects, it can lead to substantial gains for biodiversity," he adds.

The research was funded by two of Living With Environmental Change’s partners, the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).

The paper, 'One hundred questions of important to the conservation of global biological diversity', is published online in Conservation Biology, 23 April 2009, doi:10.1111/j.1523-1739.2009.01212.x

It can currently be read online at:
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/122351358/HTMLSTART

More information on this story can also be found at NERC's PlanetEarth Online pages.