The availability and usage of high-quality, cross-scale baseline information for risk assessment

摘要: The assessment of risks for biodiversity and ecosystems at any scale inevitably demands high quality baseline data on the biodiversity (or selected components of it), environment, and scenario projections. This obvious pre-condition for reliable risk assessment is still frequently being neglected or even ignored in public funding schemes and biodiversity-oriented strategic policy planning. Without knowledge of current or historical biodiversity patterns, as well as states of environmental conditions, it is impossible to make inferences about current processes and temporal dynamics. This knowledge, however, is crucial when deducing potential impacts derived from the change in state (see Maxim et al., this atlas, pp. 16f.) of important environmental drivers as imposed by global change and its components (eg, climate change, land use change, environmental chemicals, invasive species or declining pollination services …