This year's theme is ....

"Biodiversity is Life - Biodiversity is Our Life".

Biodiversity, the variety of life on Earth, is crucial to sustaining our lives. It produces air for us to breathe, food to eat, water to drink and even medicines to cure our ills. It also provides value to us through activities such as walking or birdwatching and inspiration for art. We need it for our overall health, wealth and wellbeing.

With these thoughts in mind, we have set the theme for Scottish Biodiversity Week as "Biodiversity is Life - Biodiversity is Our Life" in order to emphasise the critical links between us and our amazing, complex world.

Ideas to get you started...

We look forward to hearing about your events this year.

To help spark yet another year of brilliant ideas, here are examples of the kinds of events that have been held in the past!

• Sea kayaking in Plockton - to view marine wildlife and landscapes from the unique perspective that this fun sport offers (we wish we could have gone!)
• A fossil finding tour in Fife to discover giant prehistoric insect tracks - fantastic!
• Tree safari in Peebles - to visit and learn about the magnificent heritage trees in the region - some of them are apparently centuries old. Tree-mendous!
• Film festival in Dundee - with internationally acclaimed environmental films such as "The Cove".
• School held events - where pupils planted wildlflowers in their school grounds and in their local communities. We love that you are learning from nature.
• Tayside held a whole Biodiversity Festival! What an inspiration.
• Cairngorms National Park held a three day biodiversity extravaganza of events which they called the Big Bio Buzz. Brilliant.
• Churches held talks about nature and faith teachings on environmental stewardship - perfect.

There have been many great events and sadly we can't list them all but we thank everybody for their great ideas and for helping making Scottish Biodiversity Week such a huge success.