Governments have set the ambitious target of reducing biodiversity loss by the year 2010. The scientific community now faces the challenge of assessing the progress made towards this target and beyond. Here, we review current monitoring efforts and propose a global biodiversity monitoring network to complement and enhance these efforts. The network would develop a global sampling programme for ...

Habitat loss through development is one of the major causes of biodiversity loss. The increasingly common legal requirement to first avoid, then reduce and, if necessary, offset impacts of plans and projects on biodiversity has however not always been appropriately enforced. The blame lies mainly in bad governance such as patchy monitoring or poorly defined liabilities. Biodiversity offsets als...

Please cite this article in press as: Visconti, P., et persistence. Biol. Conserv. (2010), doi:10.1016/j Conservation actions frequently need to be scheduled because both funding and implementation capacity are limited. Two approaches to scheduling are possible. Maximizing gain (MaxGain) which attempts to maximize representation with protected areas, or minimizing loss (MinLoss) which attempts ...

Back in 2002, when the UN-sponsored, intergovernmental Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) set targets aiming to reduce the loss of biodiversity by 2010, that date must have looked very distant, providing ample time to change the world and turn the tides on the loss of wild nature. However, the time has come — probably sooner than everybody expected — and the CBD’s third Global Biodiversit...

Rich collections of biodiversity data are now synthesized in publically available databases and phylogenetic knowledge now provides a sound understanding of the origin of organisms and their place in the tree of life. However, these knowledge bases are poorly linked, leading to underutilization or worse, an incorrect understanding of biodiversity because there is poor evolutionary context. We a...

Economic evaluations are essential for assessing the desirability of biodiversity conservation. This article highlights significant advances in theories and methods of economic evaluation and their relevance and limitations as a guide to biodiversity conservation; considers the implications of the phylogenetic similarity principle for the survival of species; discusses consequences of the Noah'...