Integrating Local and Global Biodiversity Values: A review of biodiversity assessment

Biodiversity is managed and valued locally but also provides value globally, attracting many interest groups. Formal biodiversity assessments have tended to emphasise global values. But this focus is being replaced by awareness that pluralist, adaptive management of biological resources needs biodiversity assessments able to express and communicate multiple values of biodiversity. This review looks at some of the assessment tools on offer, and some examples of actual practice, to identify how biodiversity assessments do - and how they could - integrate the different values that people attach to biological variety and variability.