This special issue of the journal Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability presents a collection of interdisciplinary scientific articles and commentary on biodiversity. It includes new research in key areas such as food security and climate change.

It also reviews major initiatives that will be released or discussed during 2010, the International Year of Biodiversity. These include the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, a new remote sensing project called the Group on Earth Observations — Biodiversity Observation Network, and key issues such as access and benefit sharing.

This letter to Nature outlines argues against the idea that ecological criteria alone should be used to drive conservation strategies - a blueprint put forward by the non-governmental campaigning organisation, Conservation International.

Paul Jepson, a geographer at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom, argues that fencing-off protected areas is not a people-friendly solution to conserving biodiversity. Based on data from Indonesia, he says that local communities are often resistant to the idea of protecting areas as 'hotspots' as they face losing homes and livelihoods if they are moved off land they have been occupying often for centuries.

This is one of several research articles that gives scientific weight to the idea that governments should prioritise the protection of 25 regions of the world – dubbed 'hotspots' – where exceptional concentrations of endemic species are undergoing exceptional loss of habitat. The authors argue that in this areas threatened endemic species should be free from human activities.

The article’s lead author and main proponent of the hotspots thesis is Norman Myers who is at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom. He famously calls this approach the 'silver bullet' strategy for conservation. Myers' co-authors are from the NGO Conservation International and its offshoot, the Centre for Applied Biodiversity Science.