Review of indicators system developing for biodiversity monitoring

Biodiversity monitoring is a periodic or aperiodic surveillance of biodiversity to determine to what extent it is coherent or deviated from expected standards. Biodiversity monitoring has become to be the focus of biodiversity research and conservation in recent years. Biodiversity indicators are biotic or environmental attributes whose measurement signals the status and trends of biodiversity and the effects on biodiversity of pressures caused by human activities, which can facilitate communication among academy, government and people and consequently enhance biodiversity management. In the last decade, international organizations, governments and scientists have taken great effort to develop biodiversity indicators system for global, national and regional biodiversity monitoring, and some indicators have been adopted by biodiversity monitoring projects. This paper reviewed general principles for indicator selecting and main theories and models for monitoring system construction and several kinds of indicators which have been advanced by previous authors or applied in biodiversity monitoring projects. This may afford references for our country to develop biodiversity indicators system at regional or national scales. Although considerable progress is being made at in agreeing a set of indicators, problems remain. In essence the problems fall into three kinds: (1) Lack of clarity about what is meant by biodiversity and therefore on how best to measure it. The term biodiversity has become so wide in use that all available indices can seem to have drawbacks, (2) Illegibility of the meaning of biodiversity indicators which embarrasses its applicability and (3) Gaps in knowledge and data. In conclusion, we propose that the most urgent matters must be taken into consideration in developing indicators in our country is to: (1) construct adaptive indicators system according to actual conditions to reinforce monitoring of representative ecosystems and areas, (2) develop indicators in relation to social-economic attributes to provide scientific foundation for biodiversity conservation and regional sustainable development.