Representations of biodiversity loss create awareness of existential threats.

Representations are developed by drawing on and incorporating existing representations of related objects. Through communication, people try to understand new scientific concepts such as ‘biodiversity’, relating these concepts to already existing representations of more familiar objects. As such, the understanding of a new object becomes anchored (Moscovici 2000). Through the process of anchoring, people attribute certain characteristics to biodiversity, partly based on representations of more familiar concepts like nature, landscape and cultural diversity. Thus, an analysis of public understanding of the concepts of biodiversity has to take social representations of such related concepts into account. Overall, prior experience, knowledge and the social context shape social representations. Therefore, different groups such as farmers, foresters, or urban and rural people may hold different representations of biodiversity. In turn, this has important implications for public and stakeholder responses to biodiversity management policies and measures. As social representations of objects tend to inform attitudes towards concrete behaviour related to the object, analyses of social representations used by different groups of the general public may shed light on the reasons for public protest against and lack of support for management approaches (Buijs et al. 2006; Fischer and Van der Wal 2007).