What about the nematodes? Taxonomic partialities in the scope of UK biodiversity conservation

Since their inception in 1980 the concept of biodiversity and the practical techniques of biodiversity conservation have experienced a meteoric rise in popularity as a mode of understanding and governing the environment. This paper draws on concepts from science studies and posthumanist geography to outline a new approach to biodiversity. In contrast to the objective, disembodied and panoptic definition offered in the official documentation, it explores what biodiversity comes to mean in practice in a UK context. It argues that biodiversity must be understood as the discursive and material outcome of a socio-material assemblage of people, practices, technologies and other non-humans. It then applies this understanding to examine the scope of the assemblage that performs UK biodiversity conservation. In so doing it maps a set of taxonomic divisions. Drawing on empirical fieldwork, it examines one particular arena within this assemblage—species surveillance—and identifies the importance of the detectability of a species and taxonomic divisions in resources for accounting for these partialities. In conclusion, it reflects upon the benefits of this new approach for understanding biodiversity and biodiversity conservation.