Counteracting the decline of biodiversity and ensuring the sustainable management of ecosystems requires insight into the socio-economic processes and structures, which directly or indirectly impact on them. However, there is a discrepancy in the amount of research work carried out in the economic domain, and the amount of work done in the more strictly social domain. The more purely social dimension of protection of biodiversity and ecosystems is still under-explored, and it is premature to talk about a well-established European field of social research on biodiversity and ecosystem management, or of a coordinated international research programme. Still, the work that has been done indicates that sociological knowledge and research methodologies can be successfully applied to issues concerning ecosystem and biodiversity management.

Despite this obvious potential to support ecosystem and biodiversity management, social research is not yet sufficiently integrated in the development and implementation of biodiversity policy. Many biodiversity policy makers are unfamiliar with theoretical concepts and methodologies of the social sciences and are unsure how and where to involve social research. Furthermore, there is room for advancement in the translation of insights concerning the societal context of ecosystem and biodiversity management into policy tools, such as models.

Involving leading researchers from Germany, Hungary, Norway, Spain, Romania, the Slovak Republic and the United Kingdom, the overall aim of SoBio is to stimulate relevant social research contributing to the management of biodiversity and ecosystems, and especially to the development of successful policies in this field.

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