All together now for BioChange

Many of the State's biodiversity researchers are uniting their efforts in a national project aimed at protecting our flora and…

Many of the State's biodiversity researchers are uniting their efforts in a national project aimed at protecting our flora and fauna, writes Dick Ahlstrom.

Ten research institutions have joined forces with the Environmental Protection Agency in a national initiative on biodiversity and environmental change.

The €1.6 million "BioChange" project pulls together most of the State's researchers working on biological diversity and this new group will study how diversity is being affected by human development and climate change.

The idea is that research results will be there to inform any policy decisions that have the potential to affect diversity, explains project manager, Dr Louise Scally.

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"The basic idea is, in terms of policy we cannot conserve what we do not know and can't conserve what we don't understand," says Scally, of environmental consultants BEC Consultants Ltd, who will be coordinating the entire project.

"The project will gather baseline information so policy decisions can be made," says Scally. Researchers will also look at the mechanisms behind species loss and try to find ways to mitigate it, "all with the aim of being able to inform the management and conservation of our biodiversity", she adds.

The EPA is providing the funding and the research groups include Trinity College Dublin, NUI Galway, University Colleges Cork and Dublin, the University of Limerick, the Galway Mayo Institute of Technology, the Marine Institute, the National Botanic Gardens and the Central Fisheries Board.

Dr Steve Waldren of Trinity is project co-ordinator and having a national research network on biodiversity was his idea, says Scally. "He is the person who conceived of the project to pull together all of the biodiversity researchers in the country."

BioChange or "Biodiversity and environmental change - an integrated study encompassing a range of scales, taxa and habitats", to give the project its full title, is the first integrative, multi-disciplinary research framework in support of national biodiversity policy here, Scally says. It will involve 20 researchers, four post-doctoral researchers and 10 post-graduates.

The initial focus will be on the Co Clare Galway Bay area and the Aran Islands. These represent areas where "anthropogenic influences" are being felt, she says. "Studying these areas first will give us quite a good handle on Ireland as a whole," she believes.

The EPA's director, Larry Stapleton, launched the programme last week. The agency already funds a number of research initiatives relating to biodiversity, he says. "This one is larger and looks at how pressures act on an area to affect biodiversity. We are trying to look at the forces that are impacting on us."

BioChange is also important because it will bring together researchers across a range of institutions. "That is one of the big things. We are hoping that the whole will be better than the sum of the parts," he says.

"That is a very important aspect to it. We need to build a critical mass of research in the area if we are to have an impact."

The EPA actively supports environmental research and currently has an annual research budget of about €7 million. It has about 400 projects on its books ranging from short desk studies to large programmes such as BioChange.

BEC Conservation is a specialist environmental consultancy made up almost entirely of PhD researchers. Its board includes academic researchers such as Waldren, and it conducts environmental studies in support of Government, State agencies and the EU.

"Work packages" defined for BioChange include landscape conservation - loss and fragmentation in a habitat mosaic; non-native species - impacts on biodiversity, strategies for management and predictions of future invasions; pollution as a driver of biodiversity change-impacts, indicators and long-term monitoring; natural resource exploitation and global change - the need for improved sustainable management to protect biodiversity; biodiversity politics - policy, planning and public understanding; an expandible web-based inventory and keys to the flowering plants and seaweeds of Co Clare and the Aran Islands; and species distributions, past, present and future.