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Towards a strategy for Scotland's biodiversity
THE RESOURCE AND TRENDS
PREFACE
In preparing for the draft Scottish Biodiversity Strategy,
Biodiversity Matters, the Action Plan and Science Group (APSG) of the Scottish Biodiversity Forum felt it essential to collect together information that could be useful to many groups of people. The kind of questions that were initially asked were "What is important about Scotland's biodiversity?" and "What do you consider are the priorities?". When you think about these questions, other questions immediately start to occur, such as "How is Scotland's biodiversity changing?" and "What have been the successes and failures so far?"
In many ways these are scientific questions, and it is therefore correct that the APSG should have addressed them. There are many other questions about people, their knowledge of biodiversity, the impact of Scotland's biodiversity upon their lives and work, and the impact that Scotland has had, and is having, in relation to many other countries in the world. As members of the APSG thought more about the biodiversity strategy, the importance of a suite of indicators has become increasingly clear. This has raised a whole host of questions about data, what has been collected, what is being collected, what might need to be collected, and how such data can be used to compile indicators. The separate APSG paper, Developing Candidate Indicators of the State of Scotland's Biodiversity (Wilson
et al, 2003) concentrates on the scientific issues associated with the development of indicators of the state of biodiversity in Scotland, whilst recognising that there are many other approaches to indicators that relate more closely to human pressures on, and responses to, biodiversity.
The APSG has developed two papers that are now edited into the chapters of this publication. The first chapter is a review of Scotland's biodiversity resource, and essentially focuses on its state at the start of the 21st century. The second chapter is a review of current trends in that resource. We offer these chapters in the knowledge that the contents rely on a far wider base of information, which is quoted, and also in the hope that this publication will bring together many concepts that will be helpful to anyone considering biodiversity in Scotland. Comments on the contents of these chapters would be welcomed by the APSG, who can be contacted via the Scottish Biodiversity Forum Secretariat based at the Scottish Executive.
The whole of this publication is essentially a collaborative exercise between many people. Chapter 1 was developed largely by James Curran with help from Ian Fozzard, Mary Gibby, Ed Mackey, Scot Mathieson, Ian Walker and Jeremy Wilson. Chapter 2 was developed by Alister Jones with a considerable input from Ed Mackey, Noranne Ellis and Joanna Drewitt. Although these people have been named as contributing to the chapters, and their input is acknowledged by all of the members of the APSG, thanks are also due to many other people who have assisted in many ways in providing detail, commenting on draft sections, and suggesting topics for inclusion.
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