ABSTRACT
The EU/UK EIA legislation (§1.4) refers to the biological component of EIAs as fauna and flora. Dictionaries usually define these simply as “all the animals and plants in a given place or time, and a description of them”. This is not sufficient for EIA which requires an understanding of how organisms are affected by environmental conditions and may respond to changes in these. The scientific study of the relationships between living organisms and their environments is ecology, so ‘fauna and flora’ refer to the ecological component of EIA.
