Taking Stock of Nature

Anna Lawrence has been working for nearly 20 years in participatory conservation and social forestry research. Following degrees from Cambridge and Oxford Universities, her early career in South America and Asia inspired a focus on interaction between local and scientific knowledge, and linking research to policy and practice. At the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford, she established and led the Human Ecology research group for seven years. After working in more than 20 countries she has recently moved to focus on issues closer to home, as Head of Social and Economic Research in the British government's Forestry Commission.

• 1. What does participatory biodiversity assessment mean for planners and policy makers? Anna Lawrence; 2. Monitoring and assessment of biodiversity under the Convention on Biological Diversity and other international agreements Ruth Mackenzie; 3. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment: a multiscale assessment for global stakeholders Ciara Raudsepp-Hearne and Doris Capistrano; 4. Conservation of biological diversity in El Salvador shade coffee: the importance of taxonomic capacity for participatory assessments Alex Monro and David Jones; 5. Taking stock of nature in species-rich but economically poor areas: an emerging discipline of locally-based monitoring Finn Danielsen, Neil Burgess, Mikkel Funder, Tom Blomley, Justin Brashares, Amina Akida, Arne Jensen, Marlynn Mendoza, Greg Stuart-Hill, Michael K. Poulsen, Hadija Ramadhani, Moses K. Sam and Elmer Topp-Jørgensen; 6. Researching local perspectives on biodiversity in tropical landscapes: lessons from ten case studies Manuel Boissière, Marieke Sassen, Douglas Sheil, Miriam van Heist, Wil de Jong, Robert Cunliffe, Meilinda Wan, Michael Padmanaba, Nining Liswanti, Imam Basuki, Kristen Evans, Peter Cronkleton, Tim Lynam, Piia Koponen and Christiana Bairaktari; 7. Participatory resources monitoring in SW China: lessons after five years Jeannette van Rijsoort, Zhang Jinfeng, Marlon Ten Hoonte and Wang Lei; 8. Forest inventory in Nepal - technical power or social empowerment? Jane Hull, Hemant Ojha and Krishna Paudel; 9. Perceptions of landscape change in British Columbia's Northwest: implications for biodiversity and participatory management John Lewis; 10. How thousands planned for a billion: lessons from India on decentralized, participatory planning Seema Bhatt and Tejaswini Apte; 11. Inside monitoring: a comparison of bird monitoring groups in Slovenia and the United Kingdom Sandra Bell, Mariella Marzano and Dan Podjed; 12. The personal and political of volunteers' data: towards a national database in the UK Anna Lawrence; 13. Improving forest management through participatory monitoring: a comparative case study of four community-based forestry organizations in the Western United States Heidi L. Ballard, Victoria Sturtevant and Maria E. Fernandez-Gimenez; 14. Conclusions: towards effectiveness in participatory biodiversity assessment Anna Lawrence.