Biodiversity Monitoring and Conservation Bridging the Gap Between Global Commitment and Local Action

About this book

As the impacts of anthropogenic activities increase in both magnitude and extent, biodiversity is coming under increasing pressure. Scientists and policy makers are frequently hampered by a lack of information on biological systems, particularly information relating to long-term trends. Such information is crucial to developing an understanding as to how biodiversity may respond to global environmental change. Knowledge gaps make it very difficult to develop effective policies and legislation to reduce and reverse biodiversity loss.

Biodiversity Monitoring and Conservation: Bridging the Gap Between Global Commitment and Local Action explores the gap between global commitments to biodiversity conservation, and local action to track biodiversity change and implement conservation action. High profile international political commitments to improve biodiversity conservation, such as the targets set by the Convention on Biological Diversity, require innovative and rapid responses from both science and policy. This multi-disciplinary perspective highlights barriers to conservation and offers novel solutions to evaluating trends in biodiversity at multiple scales.

Contents

Contributors
Acknowledgements

Chapter 1 Biodiversity monitoring and conservation: bridging the gaps between global commitment and local action (Ben Collen, Nathalie Pettorelli, Jonathan E. M. Baillie, & Sarah M. Durant)

PART 1: Species based indicators of biodiversity change
Chapter 2  Tracking change in national level conservation status: National Red Lists (Ben Collen, Janine Griffiths, Yolan Friedmann, Jon Paul Rodriguez, Franklin Rojas-Suárez, & Jonathan E. M. Baillie)
Chapter 3 The Wildlife Picture Index: a biodiversity indicator for top trophic levels (Timothy. G. O’Brien & Margaret F. Kinnaird)
Chapter 4 Tracking change in abundance: the living planet index (Ben Collen, Louise McRae, Jonathan Loh, Stefanie Deinet, Adriana De Palma, Robin Manley, & Jonathan E. M. Baillie)

PART 2: Indicators of the pressures on biodiversity
Chapter 5 Satellite based indices to monitor land use and habitat changes (Nathalie Pettorelli)
Chapter 6  Indicators of climate change impacts on biodiversity (Wendy Foden, Georgina M. Mace, & Stuart H. M. Butchart)
Chapter 7 Monitoring change in biological invasion, its impacts and policy responses (Piero Genovesi, Stuart H. M. Butchart, Melodie A. McGeoch, & David B. Roy)
Chapter 8  Exploitation indices: developing global and national metrics of wildlife use and trade (Rosamunde E. A. Almond, Stuart H. M. Butchart, Thomasina E. E. Oldfield, Louise McRae, & Steven de Bie)
Chapter 9 Personalized measures of consumption and development in the context of biodiversity conservation:  connecting the ecological footprint calculation with the human footprint map (Eric W. Sanderson)

PART 3: The next generation of biodiversity indicators
Chapter 10 Indicator Bats Program: a system for the global acoustic monitoring of bats (Kate E. Jones, Jon A. Russ, Andriy-Taras Bashta, Zoltán Bilhari, Colin Catto, István Csõsz, Alexander Gorbachev, Péter Gyõrfi, Alice Hughes, Igor Ivashkiv, Natalia Koryagina, Anikó Kurali, Steve Langton, Alanna Maltby, Georgiana Margiean, Ivan Pandourski, Stuart Parsons, Igor Prokofev, Abigel Szodoray-Paradi, Farkas Szodoray-Paradi, Elena Tilova, Charlotte Walters, Aidan Weatherill &Oleg Zavarzin)
Chapter 11 Occupancy methods for conservation management (Darryl I. McKenzie & James T. Reardon)
Chapter 12 Monitoring and evaluating the socio-economic impacts of conservation projects on local communities (Katherine Homewood)
Chapter 13  Science to policy linkages for the post 2010 biodiversity targets (Georgina M. Mace, Charles Perrings, Philippe Le Prestre, Wolfgang Cramer, Sandra Díaz, Anne Larigauderie, Robert J. Scholes, Harold A. Mooney)

PART 4: Biodiversity monitoring in practice
Chapter 14  Building sustainable national monitoring networks (Sarah M. Durant)
Chapter 15 Monitoring in the real world (Julia P. G. Jones)
Chapter 16  Monitoring in UNDP-GEF biodiversity projects: balancing conservation priorities, financial realities and scientific rigour (Sultana Bashir)
Chapter 17 Scaling up or down?  Linking global and national biodiversity indicators and reporting (Philip Bubb)
Chapter 18 Conserving biodiversity in a target driven world (Simon S. N. Stuart & Ben Collen)

Index

Customer Reviews

Biography

Ben Collen is head of the Indicators & Assessments Unit at the Zoological Society of London.  His research is focussed on developing indicators to monitor change in biodiversity and help guide policy responses to conservation problems.  He conducts local scale monitoring on tropical forest fauna in Liberia, and penguins in the Antarctic.   

Nathalie Pettorelli is a population ecologist, whose research is centred on predicting the impacts of global environmental change on biodiversity. Her work was among the first to explore the usefulness of satellite data (in particular, the Normalised Difference Vegetation Index) in the context of population ecology and dynamics.

Jonathan Baillie is Director of Conservation at the Zoological Society of London.  He is responsible for conservation projects focusing on threatened species and habitats in over 50 countries around the world. His research focus lies in defining the status and trends of the world’s species and ecosystems.

Sarah Durant is head of the Tanzania Carnivore Centre in Arusha, and the Range Wide Conservation Initiative for Cheetah and Wild Dog. She has been working for over 20 years in carnivore conservation in Africa, focussing on developing effective and sustainable approaches to conserve threatened species.