Shedding light on the biodiversity and ecosystem impacts of modern land use.

Bioenergy implications for Biodiversity and Ecosystems, GMO impact monitoring and a tool for the assessment of urban and industrial expansion impacts on riparian habitats are the topics of the present issue of BioRisk three topics from within the field of modern or contemporary land-use developments, representing typical drivers which put biodiversity and ecosystems at risk. When it comes to the question whether we can fuel the world with feedstock from bioenergy crops without losing the ability to feed a still growing world population of humans, an answer often ready at hand is to turn abandoned and marginal land to agricultural use. This either to increase crop yields in general or to cultivate dedicated energy crops on those lands in order to avoid land-use competition. Those concepts of cultivating or re-cultivating of seemingly surplus land are often based on optimistic assessments in the order of millions of hectares being available globally (German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina 2012; Offermann et al. 2011). The question whether those estimates of land potentials would bear up against calculations taking environmental and socio-economic constraints into account systematically was adopted in the opinion paper by Dauber et al. (2012; this issue). It is stated in this paper that confusion in the applicability of concepts suggesting the utilization of surplus land for bioenergy crop cultivation is caused by ambiguity in the definition and characterization of surplus land as well by uncertainties in assessments of land availability and of potential yields of bioenergy crops when grown on surplus land. The authors suggest BioRisk 7: 1–4 (2012)