Yes­ter­day evening around 9 pm (GMT+1) the Bio­di­ver­sity Off­sets Blog
wel­comed its 1000^th vis­i­tor! Now, that was both really excit­ing and unex­pected for me. When I started this whole thing a cou­ple of weeks ago it was meant to be noth­ing more than my very per­sonal solu­tion to the need to struc­ture, orga­nize and com­ment the increas­ing infor­ma­tion and news on bio­di­ver­sity off­sets that are avail­able online. As I then thought, oth­ers might find this use­ful too, I put the blog online and started to let peo­ple know about its exis­tence 50 days ago, on August 13, 2014.

Fast for­ward to now

Since then, I have received a lot of pos­i­tive feed­back, got to know new peo­ple and got engaged in inter­est­ing dis­cus­sions around bio­di­ver­sity off­sets (mostly on LinkedIn where I share the updates from the Bio­di­ver­sity Off­sets Blog). Of course, this has also entailed some crit­i­cism, i.e. that the fact alone that this is called Bio­di­ver­sity Off­sets Blog would imply a pref­er­ence for bio­di­ver­sity off­sets. I per­son­ally do value the chances of bio­di­ver­sity off­sets, but also see the risks asso­ci­ated to them. And I am far from con­sid­er­ing them a “one-fits-all solu­tion”. But I think it is impor­tant to focus on bio­di­ver­sity off­sets as one instru­ment that is very much main­streamed in the cur­rent dis­cus­sion (both pos­i­tive and negative).

A lit­tle bit of statistics

Up to now vis­i­tors from more than sixty coun­tries have seen the blog, the top three being the US, Ger­many (this nat­u­rally because I am based in Ger­many) and Aus­tralia. But also the UK, New Zealand, Brazil, France, Morocco and Canada have sig­nif­i­cant vis­i­tor num­bers. Sur­pris­ing (at least for me) were vis­i­tors from coun­tries such as Nepal, Guyana, Hong Kong or Bosnia Herze­gov­ina. Our 1000^th vis­i­tor came from Italy. On aver­age, the Bio­di­ver­sity Off­sets Blog wel­comes twenty vis­i­tors per day (note: if you visit the blog sev­eral times, your visit is counted only once a day). The most pop­u­lar post so far deals with the new bio­di­ver­sity off­set pol­icy and fund in New South Wales, Aus­tralia (more than 250 views). It has also entailed a lively dis­cus­sion of the same title on LinkedIn.

My con­clu­sions

It is very much true that you only got to know some­thing once you do it. So far, my expe­ri­ence with the Bio­di­ver­sity Off­sets Blog can be sum­ma­rized in the fol­low­ing three points:

1. I have learned a lot that I wouldn’t have with­out the blog: about bio­di­ver­sity off­sets, but also some­how strate­gic plan­ning and time man­age­ment, dif­fer­ent writ­ing styles and communication.
2. I have eas­ily had a lot of feed­back on my work and my opin­ion, which is also (at least at this extent) new to me.
3. I have got to know many inter­est­ing peo­ple with whom I ulti­mately had a com­mon point of inter­est: bio­di­ver­sity offsets.

So, as you might have read from all this, I am draw­ing a more than pos­i­tive con­clu­sion from this and can only encour­age any­one who con­sid­ers to set up a sci­en­tific or tech­ni­cal blog to give it a go. And for all of you, who are read­ing this, I am happy to have you here on the Bio­di­ver­sity Off­sets Blog. Please come back soon or get involved in one or another way (see 15 ways how you can con­tribute to the Bio­di­ver­sity Off­sets Blog).

Thank you.