An assessment of the potential novel future threats and opportunities to UK biodiversity: a horizon scanning approach

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Ecology has been poor at identifying and researching novel issues. For example the ecological research on GM herbicide tolerant crops were carried out after the product had been on the market (and withdrawn). This is inefficient and gives the science of ecology a poor reputation. Our proposal is to use a novel collaborative technique to identify issues that could potentially affect UK biodiversity.We have planned a collaboration of the leading ecological and conservation groups in the UK, leading academics and science journalists in order to identify the most important and under researched issues that have the potential to be of importance for UK biodiversity in the next 50 years but have not been of importance in the past. We expect this horizon scanning exercise to be published in a leading ecological journal. This work should be of considerable importance is helping set the policy agendas for a range of organisations, including NERC's Living with Environmental Change programme. It is also likely to be influential in determining the research trajectories of academics.