Coordination: Prof. Dr. Klaus Henle , Dr. Josef Settele
Staff responsible: Prof. Dr. Klaus Henle , Dr. Reinhard Klenke, Dr. Guy Pe'er, Dr. Henning Steinicke, Annegret Grimm, Dr. Christoph Schröter-Schlaack, PD Dr. Irene Ring
Funded by: Seventh Framework Programme (FP7),
(SPF Code: 226852 FP7-ENVIRONMENT ENV.2008.2.1.4.4.)
Project management: Dr. Reinhard Klenke, Dr. Henning Steinicke
Project duration: 01.05. 2009 - 31.07. 2014

Motivation & Description

Human actions, motivated by social and economic driving forces, generate various pressures on biodiversity, such as habitat loss and fragmentation, climate change, land use related disturbance patterns, or species invasions that have an impact on biodiversity from the genetic to the ecosystem level. Each of these factors acts at characteristic scales, and the scales of social and economic demands, of environmental pressures, of biodiversity impacts, of scientific analysis, and of governmental responses do not necessarily match. However, management of the living world will be effective only if we understand how problems and solutions change with scale.

SCALES seeks ways to build the issue of scale into policy and decision-making and biodiversity management. It advances our knowledge of how anthropogenic and natural processes interact across scales and affect biodiversity. It further evaluates how this knowledge can be used to improve the scale-sensitivity and effectiveness of policy instruments for conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity. SCALES emphasises approaches that utilize existing biodiversity databases as they are the most widely available information in applied biodiversity conservation. SCALES will integrate the most appropriate assessment tools and policy instruments into a coherent framework to support biodiversity conservation across spatial and temporal scales. SCALES is setting-up a Science Policy Dialogue Group to foster exchange with policy and other stakeholders.