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There are many techniques to deal with uncertainty when modeling data. However, there are many forms of uncertainty that cannot be dealt with mathematically that have to be taken into account when designing a biodiversity monitoring system. Some of these can be minimized by careful planning and quality control, but others have to be investigated during monitoring, and the scale and methods adjusted when necessary to meet objectives. Sources of uncertainty include uncertainty about stakeholders, who will monitor, what to sample, where to sample, causal relationships, species identifications, detectability, distributions, relationships with remote sensing, biotic concordance, complementarity, validity of stratification, and data quality and management. Failure to take into account any of these sources of uncertainty about how the data will be used can make monitoring nothing more than monitoring for the sake of monitoring, and I make recommendations as to how to reduce uncertainties. Some form of standardization is necessary, despite the multiple sources of uncertainty, and experience from RAPELD and other monitoring schemes indicates that spatial standardization is viable and helps reduce many sources of uncertainty. Copyright William E Magnusson.

The protection of biodiversity is a complex societal, political and ultimately practical imperative of current global society. The imperative builds upon scientific knowledge on human dependence on the life-support systems of the Earth. This paper aims at introducing main types of uncertainty inherent in biodiversity science, policy and management, as an introduction to a companion paper summarizing practical experiences of scientists and scholars (Haila et al. 2014). Uncertainty is a cluster concept: the actual nature of uncertainty is inherently context-bound. We use semantic space as a conceptual device to identify key dimensions of uncertainty in the context of biodiversity protection; these relate to [i] data; [ii] proxies; [iii] concepts; [iv] policy and management; and [v] normative goals. Semantic space offers an analytic perspective for drawing critical distinctions between types of uncertainty, identifying fruitful resonances that help to cope with the uncertainties, and building up collaboration between different specialists to support mutual social learning.

This Editorial presents the focus, scope and policies of the inaugural issue of Nature Conservation, a new open access, peer-reviewed journal bridging natural sciences, social sciences and hands-on applications in conservation management. The journal covers all aspects of nature conservation and aims particularly at facilitating better interaction between scientists and practitioners. The journal will impose no restrictions on manuscript size or the use of colour. We will use an XML-based editorial workflow and several cutting-edge innovations in publishing and information dissemination. These include semantic mark-up of, and enhancements to published text, data, and extensive cross-linking within the journal and to external sources. We believe the journal will make an important contribution to better linking science and practice, offers rapid, peer-reviewed and flexible publication for authors and unrestricted access to content. The journal Nature Conservation was established within the framework of the European Union's Framework Program 7 large-integrated project SCALES: Securing the Conservation of biodiversity across Administrative Levels and spatial, temporal, and Ecological Scales, www.scales-project.net (grant 226852; Henle et al. 2010).

INTRODUCTION In current conservation parlance, “biodiversity” has become a generic term for everything that is good and worth preserving in living nature. It was originally used as a rallying cry of conservation biologists/ecologists/conservationists in the 1980s; Takacs (1996) describes the process, starting from the arrangement of the Forum on BioDiversity in Washington, D.C. in 1986. After the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, biodiversity became a staple theme in international politics. Parallel to this institutional solidification of biodiversity on the political scene, the term itself has acquired more and more scientific credibility. E. O. Wilson's widely acclaimed monograph (Wilson 1992) was important for making the literary public familiar with the term. The most ambitious scientific project to date is headed by the Princeton ecologist Simon A. Levin, aiming at an Encyclopedia of Biodiversity ; a five-volume printed version was published in 2001 (Academic Press), and a much larger electronic version is under preparation. The preceding paragraph summarizes briefly the history of biodiversity as an environmental issue. The term broke through into scientific, political, and public consciousness remarkably quickly. It was invented in the early 1980s by a group of ecologists and evolutionary biologists, basically as a political slogan (see Takacs 1996). In other words, biodiversity rose to the position of an important environmental issue through deliberate social construction (Hannigan 1995; Haila 1999a).

The management of landscapes for biological conservation and ecologically sustainable natural resource use are crucial global issues. Research for over two decades has resulted in a large literature, yet there is little consensus on the applicability or even the existence of general principles or broad considerations that could guide landscape conservation. We assess six major themes in the ecology and conservation of landscapes. We identify 13 important issues that need to be considered in developing approaches to landscape conservation. They include recognizing the importance of landscape mosaics (including the integration of terrestrial and aquatic areas), recognizing interactions between vegetation cover and vegetation configuration, using an appropriate landscape conceptual model, maintaining the capacity to recover from disturbance and managing landscapes in an adaptive framework. These considerations are influenced by landscape context, species assemblages and management goals and do not translate directly into on-the-ground management guidelines but they should be recognized by researchers and resource managers when developing guidelines for specific cases. Two crucial overarching issues are: (i) a clearly articulated vision for landscape conservation and (ii) quantifiable objectives that offer unambiguous signposts for measuring progress.