Biodiversity: the chasm between what we know and we need to know

In this review I focus on what we need to know to make decisions relevant to land-use planning. I discuss four questions: What information about the distribution of biodiversity is available to decision makers? What sort of information is required at a local scale? Can we use species-distribution modeling to compensate for the lack of empirical information at larger scales? Can we use surrogates based on remote sensing for all our decisions? To be effective, biodiversity information needs to be based on standardized sampling with data made available during the initial planning phases of infrastructure projects, which are now based only on engineering or social considerations and occur several decades before construction starts. The RAPELD method is now being used in many environmental-impact studies to generate standardized data, but there is presently no mechanism to include biodiversity information in the initial phases of decision making, and this has unfavorable consequences for economic development and the environment.