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

生态学在识别和研究新问题方面一直很差。例如，对耐除草剂转基因作物的生态研究是在该产品上市（并被撤回）之后进行的。这是低效的，给生态学带来了不好的名声。我们的建议是使用一种新的协作技术来确定可能影响英国生物多样性的问题。我们计划与英国领先的生态和保护团体、领先的学者和科学记者合作，以确定最重要的和正在研究的问题，这些问题在未来50年对英国生物多样性有重要的潜力，但在过去并不重要。我们希望这一水平扫描练习能发表在一本领先的生态学杂志上。这项工作应该是相当重要的，因为它有助于为一系列组织制定政策议程，包括NERC的“与环境变化共存”计划。它还可能对决定学术界的研究轨迹产生影响。

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the ecological research on GM herbicide tolerant crops were carried out after the product had been on the market (and withdrawn).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.