The conservation of biological diversity is one of today's most important environmental issues. Biologists have always argued that the preservation of biodiversity is of utmost importance, but have a hard time proving why this should be so. Some of the problems that have not been solved yet are very fundamental, such as the definition of an ecosystem, and objective measures of the health of an ecosystem. However, the exact ways in which a decreasing biodiversity affects the functioning of ecosystems is unclear. Most ecosystems do not 'collapse' at a certain moment.
Ecosystems are dynamic, their properties and species compositions change over time.
Yet, conservation efforts are often aimed at the protection of rare species, not complete habitats. These are just some of the gaps in our current ecological knowledge that hamper the setting of targets for sustainable ecosystem management and the incorporation of ecosystem integrity and function values in biodiversity evaluation. Sustainable ecosystems are not stable, so any ecosystem management has to be adaptive. More fundamental biodiversity research will not bring us any new ready-made conservation tools in the near future. So what we need in the first place is a better implementation and integration of existing EU spatial planning and legal measures.