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1.
The “parks vs. people” debate – i.e., the dispute over whether conservation projects and policies should prioritize biodiversity and landscape protection or poverty alleviation and human livelihood improvement – should be quite familiar to most conservation scientists and policy scholars today. Yet, it is clearly a more expansive debate than the argument over whether a particular conservation project should emphasize biodiversity protection or development: it is also a wider disagreement about the proper value and ethical foundations of biological conservation in the age of sustainability, as well as the wisdom and consequences of making complex trade-offs among rivalrous conservation goals in practice. This essay introduces a special section of Biological Conservation focused on this larger dispute, what we are calling the “New Conservation Debate” to distinguish it from the historical debate in the US between “wise use” conservationists and preservationists at the turn of the 20th century. Articles in this special section explore the normative and ethical dimensions of the debate, as well as more pragmatic considerations relating to trade-off analysis and decision-making in real-world conservation plans and projects that impact both biodiversity and human well-being. Collectively, the papers in this section clarify many of the ethical and strategic divisions in the New Conservation Debate, while also revealing opportunities for reconciliation and principled compromise among advocates of strong nature protection and human welfare in the conservation community. 相似文献
2.
Conservation involves making decisions on appropriate action from a wide range of options. For conservation to be effective, decision-makers need to know what actions do and do not work. Ideally, decisions should be based on effectiveness as demonstrated by scientific experiment or systematic review of evidence. Can decision-makers get this kind of information? We undertook a formal assessment of the extent to which scientific evidence is being used in conservation practice by conducting a survey of management plans and their compilers from major conservation organizations within the UK. Data collected suggest that the majority of conservation actions remain experience-based and rely heavily on traditional land management practices because, many management interventions remain unevaluated and, although some evidence exists, much is not readily accessible in a suitable form. We argue that nature conservation along with other fields of applied ecology, should exploit the concept of evidence-based practice developed and used in medicine and public health that aims to provide the best available evidence to the decision-maker(s) on the likely outcomes of alternative actions. Through critical evaluation, we present the challenges and benefits of adopting evidence based practice from the decision-makers point of view and identify the process to be followed to make it work. 相似文献
3.
We provide an overview of publications from three prominent conservation journals (Biodiversity & Conservation, Biological Conservation and Conservation Biology) published in 2001 (n = 547 papers). We found a wide breadth of studies of different topics from different climates and habitats and across a range of spatial scales. Most studies were quantitative (89%) and used inferential statistics (63%). Research was biased towards vertebrates, forests, relatively pristine landscapes, and towards studies of single species and assemblages rather than communities or ecosystems. Despite assertions in the literature that conservation is synthetic, eclectic and multi-disciplinary, few studies were truly cross-disciplinary (13%). In addition, few studies investigated the loss of native vegetation (2%), or specifically studied introduced (4%) or non-threatened species (4%). 20% and 37% of studies had high relevance to policy and management, respectively. However, only 12.6% of studies actively went out to test or review conservation actions. Although many topics are covered in the literature, improvements are possible. We suggest: (1) broadening the number of habitats, taxonomic groups and scales studied and (2) providing closer and clearer links with other disciplines and research approaches, and with policy and management. 相似文献
4.
Doing more good than harm - Building an evidence-base for conservation and environmental management 总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1
The problems of environmental change and biodiversity loss have entered the mainstream political agenda. Given the call from an increasingly influential environmental lobby for government and wider society to make both financial and personal sacrifices to address these problems, it seems likely that conservation biologists and environmental managers will be asked tough questions of the general form ‘are conservation interventions effective?’ and, ‘are they doing more good than harm?’ Science constantly advances and must remain open to challenge, but managers and policy formers require an interim product (an evidence-base) to underpin their current decision-making. The health services have been using the objective and transparent methodology of systematic review to summarise the evidence-base relating to the effectiveness of interventions. Environmental management has, up until now, had no formal shared evidence-base of this kind. Reviewing recent developments in evidence-based practice, this paper introduces a ‘systematic review’ section for this journal and argues that constructing an evidence-based framework for environment management is possible, the challenge is scaling it up to engage the global scientific community. We draw on the history of evidence-based healthcare, but also on the differences between healthcare and conservation, to set out the challenges in creating a Collaboration for Environmental Evidence that develops a library of systematic reviews on the effectiveness of conservation and environmental interventions. 相似文献
5.
Issues related to the cost-effectiveness of biodiversity conservation policies have not yet been prominent in European conservation research and policy-making. Nevertheless, there is a small but growing literature which analyses such issues. The article reviews this literature, and focuses on reserves and compensation payments for conservation measures as the two most relevant conservation policy instruments in Europe. Understanding of the cost-effective allocation of conservation measures and reserve sites has improved, and further light will be shed by integrating knowledge from ecology and the economic analysis of policy instruments. Although research on cost-effective monitoring, enforcement and decision-making has addressed certain issues, others very relevant to conservation policy such as implementation problems related to NATURA 2000 have been neglected. 相似文献
6.
中国的农业生物多样性保护及持续利用 总被引：16，自引：0，他引：16
中国农区内分布有丰富的野生珍稀濒危物种、生境和遗传基因资源,是农业生物多样性保护的重点。中国农业栽培、繁殖及野生生物物种种类繁多,其物种和生境类型都具特有性,由于农业土地的过度开发和不合理利用,以及农业生态环境污染、过量采集等因素,造成我国农业生物多样性品种和分布面积缩小或消失。我国从５０ 年代开始保护生态系统的工作,特别是在改革开放以来,我国政府在就地保护、迁地保护、保护规划、法制建设、机构建设、宣传培训等方面,采取了一系列的保护措施,农业生物多样性保护和持续利用取得了显著成效。 相似文献
7.
We developed an index, called average optimacity, that can be used to guide site prioritization for biodiversity conservation. Our index has three desirable properties: (1) it indicates a site’s potential contribution to an efficient representative reserve system; (2) it equals zero if and only if a site contains no elements of biodiversity; and (3) it accommodates multiple sets of representation targets. The index is calculated with an optimization algorithm - simulated annealing as implemented in the computer program Marxan. We ran Marxan with 10 different representation target sets and averaged the results. The 10 target sets approximated equal increments in conservation value. Data from the Willamette Valley-Puget Sound-Georgia Basin Ecoregion were used to evaluate the index. To help conservation planners understand average optimacity we: (1) compared it to an average of irreplaceability, a well-known index of conservation value, and (2) used logistic regression models to relate average optimacity to other measures of conservation value (e.g., rarity, richness). Average optimacity and average irreplaceability were highly correlated (Spearman rank correlation = 0.90), suggesting substantial agreement in site prioritization. However, there were clear differences in the rankings of highly valued sites, demonstrating that these two indices provide different perspectives on priorities. Simple regression models showed that average optimacity was strongly associated with maximum representation and maximum rarity. Two of the top multiple regression models for average optimacity exhibited a moderate increase in explanatory power relative to the best simple regression model and had three independent variables, which reflects the multi-dimensional nature of this index. The average optimacity index may be preferable to an irreplaceability index when efficiency is considered an important dimension for site prioritization. 相似文献
8.
Ascelin Gordon William T. Langford Matt D. White James A. Todd Lucy Bastin 《Biological conservation》2011,(1):558-566
To reduce global biodiversity loss, there is an urgent need to determine the most efficient allocation of conservation resources. Recently, there has been a growing trend for many governments to supplement public ownership and management of reserves with incentive programs for conservation on private land. At the same time, policies to promote conservation on private land are rarely evaluated in terms of their ecological consequences. This raises important questions, such as the extent to which private land conservation can improve conservation outcomes, and how it should be mixed with more traditional public land conservation. We address these questions, using a general framework for modelling environmental policies and a case study examining the conservation of endangered native grasslands to the west of Melbourne, Australia. Specifically, we examine three policies that involve: (i) spending all resources on creating public conservation areas; (ii) spending all resources on an ongoing incentive program where private landholders are paid to manage vegetation on their property with 5-year contracts; and (iii) splitting resources between these two approaches. The performance of each strategy is quantified with a vegetation condition change model that predicts future changes in grassland quality. Of the policies tested, no one policy was always best and policy performance depended on the objectives of those enacting the policy. This work demonstrates a general method for evaluating environmental policies and highlights the utility of a model which combines ecological and socioeconomic processes. 相似文献
9.
The identification of priority sites that ensure the achievement of conservation goals is key to direct conservation efforts. An estimation of the level of vulnerability of each priority area allows the identification of sites that need urgent conservation action. We present a systematic reserve selection for 1654 African mammals and amphibians that uses habitat suitability models as estimates of the area occupied by each species. These are based on the geographic range and habitat preferences for each species, which we collected in the framework of the World Conservation Union (IUCN) Global Amphibian Assessment and IUCN Global Mammal Assessment. Our results showed that in addition to existing protected areas, approximately 2.8 million km2 of land is irreplaceable to achieve the protection of 10% of the area occupied by all amphibians and mammals. This figure is higher than previous estimates from other studies. Most irreplaceable sites are located in the sub-Saharan region. More than half (55%) of the irreplaceable sites have high human population density; for only 17% the human population density is low. African amphibians and mammals have therefore to be conserved in densely populated areas where innovative management policies will be required to accommodate conservation successfully. 相似文献
10.
Comparison of rural and urban attitudes to the conservation of Asian elephants in Sri Lanka: empirical evidence 总被引：7，自引：0，他引：7
There has been little study of economic and general attitudes towards the conservation of the Asian elephant. This paper reports and analyses results from surveys conducted in Sri Lanka of attitudes of urban dwellers and farmers towards nature conservation in general and the elephant conservation in particular. The analyses are based on urban and a rural sample. Contingent valuation techniques are used as survey instruments. Multivariate logit regression analysis is used to analyse the respondents’ attitudes towards conservation of elephants. It is found that, although some variations occurred between the samples, the majority of the respondents (both rural and urban) have positive attitudes towards nature conservation in general. However, marked differences in attitudes toward elephant conservation are evident between these two samples: the majority of urban respondents were in favour of elephant conservation; rural respondents expressed a mixture of positive and negative attitudes. Overall, considerable unrecorded and as yet unutilised economic support for conservation of wild elephants exists in Sri Lanka. 相似文献
11.
Scheduling conservation action is necessary when the available resources for conservation are insufficient to adequately protect all of the natural features (e.g. species, vegetation types, ecosystems) in a region, at least in the short-term. We propose an approach to scheduling conservation action in production landscapes. It is based on two characteristics of potential conservation areas. The first is vulnerability — the likelihood or imminence of destruction or alteration of native vegetation. The second is irreplaceability — the likelihood that an area will be needed to contribute to a set of conservation targets nominated for the region's features. We argue that highest priority for conservation action should go to those areas with both high vulnerability (urgent protection needed to avoid destruction) and high irreplaceability (few or no alternatives if destroyed). To establish the context and rationale for our approach, we review some previous methods for scheduling nature conservation. We then apply our approach to the Western Division of New South Wales, a region of about 325,000 km2, by deriving information on the vulnerability of 248 land systems to two threatening processes (clearing and cropping) and measuring the irreplaceability of potential conservation areas. Our results are maps of areas where conservation action is most urgently needed if regional conservation targets are not to be compromised. 相似文献
12.
保护耕作研究进展及前景展望 总被引：25，自引：2，他引：25
阐述了国内外保护耕作技术的研究进展,分析了保护耕作对作物产量、土壤性状、土壤水分利用的效应以及对作物病虫草害的影响和控制水土流失的作用,提出我国推行保护耕作应注意的关键问题。 相似文献
13.
The integration of freshwater and terrestrial biodiversity priorities in systematic conservation planning is a major challenge to conservation planners. Maintaining upstream–downstream connectivity and the influence of catchments on freshwater ecological integrity are some of the issues that make it difficult to reconcile terrestrial and freshwater conservation planning. As a result most conservation assessments are often biased towards terrestrial systems without adequate incorporation of freshwater biodiversity in determining priority areas for conservation. In this paper, we propose a protocol for integrating the assessment of freshwater and terrestrial priorities in conservation planning, based on a case study from Mpumalanga Province in South Africa. The approach involves the separate assessment of freshwater priority areas, and using the outcome to influence the selection of terrestrial priority areas. This allowed both freshwater and terrestrial biodiversity to be incorporated in conservation planning without compromising their unique requirements. To test the effectiveness of this approach, we assessed percentage overlap between freshwater and terrestrial priority areas, target achievement, and the area required to achieve targets. We then compared the outcome from the proposed approach with the separate assessments of freshwater and terrestrial biodiversity priorities, and when both systems are given an equal weighting in a single assessment. The results showed that there was a noticeable improvement in the overlap of priority areas for freshwater and terrestrial biodiversity from 23% to 47%. Target achievement for freshwater biodiversity improved by 10% when terrestrial assessment was based on freshwater priority areas as opposed to terrestrial systems being assessed alone. There was negligible increase in area required, whether there was integration of freshwater and terrestrial biodiversity or no integration. We conclude that the most efficient way to achieve integration in conservation planning is to preferentially select areas where freshwater and terrestrial biodiversity priorities overlap. 相似文献
14.
The main role of conservation planning is to design reserve networks to protect biodiversity in situ. Research within the field of conservation planning has focused on the development of theories and tools to design reserve networks that protect biodiversity in an efficient and representative manner. Whilst much progress has been made in this regard, there has been limited assessment of the sensitivity of conservation planning outcomes to uncertainty associated with the datasets used for conservation planning. Predicted species distribution data are commonly used for conservation planning because the alternatives (e.g. survey data) are incomplete or biased spatially. However, there may be considerable uncertainty associated with the use of predicted species distribution data, particularly given the variety of approaches available to generate a dataset from such predictions for use in conservation planning. These approaches range from using the probabilistic data directly to using a threshold identified a priori or a posteriori to convert the probabilistic data to presence/absence data. We assess the sensitivity of conservation planning outcomes to different uses of predicted species distribution data. The resulting reserve networks differed, and had different expected species representation. The choice of approach will depend on how much risk a conservation planner is willing to tolerate and how much efficiency can be sacrificed. 相似文献
15.
Neil D Burgess Carsten RahbekFrank Wugt Larsen Paul WilliamsAndrew Balmford 《Biological conservation》2002,107(3):327-339
A database documenting the distribution of birds, mammals, amphibians and snakes across 1° latitude and longitude squares of mainland sub-Saharan Africa provides an opportunity to quantify how many of these vertebrates are potentially catered for by recent large-scale conservation proposals. Sets of priority areas proposed by BirdLife International, the World Wildlife Fund (USA), the World Conservation Union and the World Wide Fund for Nature, Conservation International, and the World Resources Institute contain between 45 and 93% of 3752 species of birds, mammals, snakes and amphibians breeding in this area. Gaps in the coverage of vertebrates were found in all large-scale proposals, and these are mapped. Most of the conservation proposals perform better than random selection of similar sized areas of Africa, with the proposals focused on species performing more efficiently than schemes based on large areas of intact habitat or process-related criteria. Four of the schemes approach the performance of a complementarity-based algorithm that aims to maximise the number of species captured within a given area of land, and which has been widely advocated as a tool for conservation planning. The reasons for this are discussed and the relevance of the results for conservation planning at coarse and fine scales are explained. 相似文献
16.
Malin C. Rivers Lin Taylor Neil A. Brummitt Thomas R. Meagher David L. Roberts Eimear Nic Lughadha 《Biological conservation》2011,(10):2541-2547
The distribution, ecology and conservation status of the majority of plant species are poorly known. One of the challenges ahead is to address this knowledge gap and give more emphasis to this important group of species that represents a critical component of earth’s biodiversity. Full conservation assessments require expert knowledge of the group concerned, but for the majority of plant species, especially those from the tropics, the best source of knowledge is specimens housed within herbaria. Digitisation projects are underway to render information from this important global biodiversity resource more accessible; the next step is to assemble and utilise these data to make better informed conservation decisions. One crucial question is: how many herbarium specimens are needed to detect threatened species? Such information would inform and help to prioritise digitisation efforts. Using 11,461 herbarium records we assessed species geographic range to determine a preliminary conservation status of 661 endemic species of Leguminosae and Orchidaceae from Madagascar, following the IUCN criteria. By capturing 15 georeferenced specimens per species we produced range estimates for use in conservation assessments consistent with estimates based on all known specimens, for more than 95% of species. None of the threatened species were misclassified as not threatened, and less than 3% of species would receive conservation support as a result of being falsely identified as threatened. This approach can therefore help progress towards the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation target of a conservation assessment for each plant species, while reducing digitisation effort by up to half. 相似文献
17.
Formal training in conservation biology education is an important component of the suite of solutions to current environmental problems. As conservation biology textbooks underpin many conservation education programs at both undergraduate and graduate levels, the portrayal of conservation issues and coverage of specific biotic groups plays a potentially important role in guiding the training of the next generation of conservation professionals. Parasites represent the majority of species diversity on earth, play critical roles in ecology and evolution, and are often at higher risk of decline and extinction than their free-living counterparts. Yet parasites continue to receive scant attention from conservation scientists and educators. We searched the index of 77 English language conservation biology textbooks for parasite or pathogen related content, published between 1970 and 2009. When present, we categorized a textbook’s parasite content as positive, neutral or negative with respect to the author’s portrayal of parasite biodiversity. The vast majority (72%) of conservation textbooks either portray parasites uniquely as threats to conservation goals established for free-living species or do not mention parasites at all. While no single textbook can be expected to provide extensive treatment of conservation-related topics across all biological groups, we outline three reasons why parasites should feature more prominently in formal conservation education, and suggest several ways in which greater incorporation of these parasite topics could strengthen the teaching and practice of conservation biology. 相似文献
18.
Trends in the use of conservation tillage in US agriculture 总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1
N. D. Uri 《Soil Use and Management》1998,14(2):111-116
Abstract. In 1996 conservation tillage was used on nearly 36% of the cropped area of the USA. This level has remained relatively unchanged over the past few years. The use of conservation tillage varied by crop and was dependent on site-specific factors including soil type, topsoil depth, and local climatic conditions. A number of economic, demographic, geographic, and policy factors have affected the adoption of conservation tillage. While it was not possible to quantify exactly the impact of these factors, it was clear that management complexities and profitability are key factors impeding an increase. 相似文献
19.
To examine factors that might influence how people subscribe to different reasons for conserving biological diversity, we modified Ehrenfeld's [American Scientist 64 (1976) 660] classic reasons for conserving species and habitats into consumption, tourism, medicine, science, education, environmental baselines, ecosystem services, intrinsic value, and added another, human cultural heritage. We then explored the opinions of undergraduates enrolled in a classic conservation biology course, or a people and conservation course, about these nine arguments, using a 27-statement questionnaire. By matching responses made before and after each course, we found that students, in general, became more committed to using most of Ehrenfeld's arguments but that this was highly contingent on which conservation course that they had taken. None became committed to the argument that linked wildlife conservation to human culture, however. Course and grade that students attained influenced the extent to which students were sympathetic to different arguments but gender had no effect. These findings show that the type of conservation knowledge imparted to students makes them differentially sympathetic to many of the arguments used to advocate wildlife conservation. 相似文献
20.
George R. Hess Frank H. Koch Katherine A. Eschelbach Jorie M. Favreau 《Biological conservation》2006,128(3):358-368
We compared four approaches to conservation site selection to protect forest biodiversity in the Triangle Region of North Carolina, USA. Using biological inventory data and an inventory-based conservation plan as benchmarks, we evaluated the potential effectiveness of a focal species plan and three “simple” plans (large forested patches, close to wetlands and riparian areas, diverse forest types). Effectiveness was measured in three ways: the number of inventory elements captured at least once by the plan (representation), the total number of inventory elements captured (completeness), and the proportion of land in the inventory-based plan included (overlap). We further examined the potential effectiveness of the simple plans by calculating their overlap with land identified by the focal species approach. The simple and focal species plans did not differ markedly in terms of representation, but diverged when completeness and overlap were considered. Although representation rates for all four plans were relatively high, lower rates for completeness and overlap raise concerns about long-term viability. The simple plans did not identify the same lands as the focal species plan, and are thus unlikely to provide appropriate habitat for the focal species. Each approach we tested failed to capture some subset of species and communities, highlighting the importance of explicit conservation targets and consideration of ecological processes. Forced to act quickly and with little data, our findings suggest using initially a set of complementary simple plans, each focused on a different habitat type. This should be considered a stopgap measure, however, while more sophisticated plans are constructed, defining explicit conservation targets and considering ecological processes. 相似文献