Monitoring Biodiversity: Combining Environmental and Social Data

This book is an exciting reappraisal of the role and practice of biodiversity monitoring, showing how new technologies and software applications are rapidly maturing and can both complement and maintain continuity with the best practice in traditional field skills.

Environmental monitoring is a key component in a large number of national programmes and constitutes an important aspect of understanding environmental change and supporting policy development. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Monitoring Biodiversity begins by discussing monitoring as an established field and examines the various budgetary and technological challenges. It examines different methodologies, the variation between countries, and the design features relevant to understanding monitoring systems created for new policy goals or different funding situations. The huge variety of methods revealed across 18 chapters, which vary from statistical designs to remote sensing, interviews, surveys, and new ways of stacking and combining data and thematic information for visualization and modelling, underlines just how mature and multifaceted the modern practice of monitoring can be. It concludes with several problem-based chapters that discuss the design and implementation of environmental monitoring in specific scenarios such as urban and aquatic areas. All chapters include key messages, study questions, and further reading.

With a focus on Europe but with international relevance, Monitoring Biodiversity will be an essential resource for students at all levels of environmental monitoring, assessment, and management.

Anna Allard is researcher in the Division of Landscape Analysis, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. She has worked for many years in national monitoring of biodiversity on the landscape scale, in several ongoing monitoring schemes including seashores and mountains as well as national digital vegetation mapping. Her expertise is in landscape ecology and analysis of the landscape and vegetation by remote sensing.

E. Carina H. Keskitalo is professor of political science in the Department of Geography, Umeå University, and a guest researcher at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. She has published widely on forest and natural resource policy and use applying qualitative methods.

Alan Brown has worked for one of the UK nature conservation agencies as the senior remote sensing manager, previously as the lead on terrestrial monitoring. His professional background is in upland ecology, vegetation survey and monitoring, computer programming, and multivariate and statistical analysis.