EU conservation policy is

This paper summarises discussions in a workshop entitled "exploring uncertainties in biodiversity science, policy and management". It draws together experiences gained by scientists and scholars when encountering and coping with different types of uncertainty in their work in the field of biodiversity protection. The RESEARCH ARTICLE Launched to accelerate biodiversity conservation A peer-reviewed open-access journalYrjö Haila et al. / Nature Conservation 8: 45-75 (2014) 46 discussion covers all main phases of scientific work: field work and data analysis; methodologies; setting goals for research projects, taking simultaneously into account the agency of scientists conducting the work; developing communication with policy-makers and society at large; and giving arguments for the societal relevance of the issues. The paper concludes with a plea for collaborative learning that would build upon close cooperation among specialists who have developed expertise in different fields in research, management and politics.

Stocks with low market value are rarely included in stock assessments because their catch records are generally lacking, thus adding to the already large number of un-assessed fisheries at a global scale. T his deficiency is more evident in the Mediterranean Sea where stock assessments are relatively fewer. A new method (AMSY) has been recently developed to assess stocks for which only abundance trends from scientific surveys are available. The AMSY method was used in the Aegean Sea to assess the status of 74 fish and invertebrate stocks (50 actinopterygians, 4 sharks, 5 rays, 12 cephalopods, and 3 crustaceans) for which catch data are lacking; 20 of them have medium or high market value and are being targeted by fishing fleets, while the remaining 54 are either not targeted, but by-caught and often discarded, or are not exploited at all. Overall, 31 of the 54 non-targeted stocks (57%) were healthy in terms of biomass (B/Bmsy > 1), whereas only 6 of the 20 targeted stocks (30%) were healthy. Of the 23 unhealthy non-targeted stocks, 12 were near healthy (B/Bmsy > 0.75), compared to only 1 of the targeted stocks, whereas 10 non-targeted stocks (19%) and 10 targeted ones (50%) were outside safe biological limits (B < 0.5Bmsy). Cephalopods and crustaceans were generally in a better status compared to fishes. The results confirm that fishing does not only affect commercial stocks, but it may also affect by-catch stocks. In general, stocks that are targeted by fishing fleets are in a worse status in terms of biomass compared to those that are only occasionally collected as by-catch or those that inhabit environments that are not accessible to fishing fleets.

Citation: Magnusson WE (2014) Uncertainty and the design of in-situ biodiversity-monitoring programs. Nature Conservation 8: 77-94. doi: 10.3897/natureconservation.8.5929 AbstractThere are many techniques to deal with uncertainty when modeling data. However, there are many forms of uncertainty that cannot be dealt with mathematically that have to be taken into account when designing a biodiversity monitoring system. Some of these can be minimized by careful planning and quality control, but others have to be investigated during monitoring, and the scale and methods adjusted when necessary to meet objectives. Sources of uncertainty include uncertainty about stakeholders, who will monitor, what to sample, where to sample, causal relationships, species identifications, detectability, distributions, relationships with remote sensing, biotic concordance, complementarity, validity of stratification, and data quality and management. Failure to take into account any of these sources of uncertainty about how the data will be used can make monitoring nothing more than monitoring for the sake of monitoring, and I make recommendations as to how to reduce uncertainties. Some form of standardization is necessary, despite the multiple sources of uncertainty, and experience from RAPELD and other monitoring schemes indicates that spatial standardization is viable and helps reduce many sources of uncertainty.

Assessing spatial and temporal patterns of biodiversity change is essential to understand how communities vary over time and confront to environmental changes for the resilience of ecosystem functioning. We use data from two bird atlases of Britain collected during the breeding periods 1988–1991 and 2008–2011 to measure temporal β‐diversity of taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic dimensions and examine the relationship and the level of congruence of the three dimensions of temporal β‐diversity and their respective partitioned components (turnover‐nestedness). Temporal β‐diversity, turnover and nestedness patterns were highly congruent for the taxonomic and phylogenetic dimension, although these dimensions were weakly associated with the functional dimension. We found higher levels of temporal changes for the taxonomic (mean Jaccard β‐diversity 0.27) and phylogenetic (mean Jaccard β‐diversity 0.21) dimensions than for the functional dimension (mean Jaccard β‐diversity 0.09), implying that despite the changes in species composition the functional composition of the communities remained less affected. For taxonomic and phylogenetic dimensions, turnover contributed more than nestedness to shaping β‐diversity, while for functional β‐diversity the two components contributed similarly. Communities at higher altitudes were also more functionally similar in 20 years but with more changes in taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity possibly due to environmental filtering. We hypothesize that the low congruence might be due to species with extreme trait values persisting throughout time and retaining the volume of functional space and thus contributing to the low temporal change of functional diversity despite the high levels of change in species composition, perhaps an indication of functional “stability.”