The view you have shared above is typical of the general perception of conservation biology. In politics, this is called the conservative view, i.e. keep things as they are. As you rightly point out, conservation should be dynamic. The challenge we face is, why conserve, what should be conserved and where should it be conserved. The current perception is to conserve as much natural landscape as possible. The layman understands the landscape as something fixed, the ecologist understands it as something dynamic. 

To my mind, we should allow natural systems to evolve. I understand that 'forest management' all over the world is, in principle, opposed to this idea for economic reasons. In the US, I believe only 5% or the forest area is natural, the rest has been replaced; in India, government is spending a vast amount to plant forests, which is an entirely erroneous concept. However, the fact that it is erroneous is swamped by economic concerns. I have been told that Western Europe has largely destroyed its natural landscape, with only a few natural forests left in Poland and the Pyrenees.

In a word, conservation should think in terms of 'leave it alone, unless direct intervention is unavoidable', rather than, 'maintain a static system' as the public often believes. To restore a native ecosystem does not mean going back to a point in time in the past without justification, but means putting something back which was there and allowing it to evolve from then onward, without interference.

The view you have shared above is typical of the general perception of conservation biology. In politics, this is called the conservative view, i.e. keep things as they are. As you rightly point out, conservation should be dynamic. The challenge we face is, why conserve, what should be conserved and where should it be conserved. The current perception is to conserve as much natural landscape as possible. The layman understands the landscape as something fixed, the ecologist understands it as something dynamic. 

To my mind, we should allow natural systems to evolve. I understand that 'forest management' all over the world is, in principle, opposed to this idea for economic reasons. In the US, I believe only 5% or the forest area is natural, the rest has been replaced; in India, government is spending a vast amount to plant forests, which is an entirely erroneous concept. However, the fact that it is erroneous is swamped by economic concerns. I have been told that Western Europe has largely destroyed its natural landscape, with only a few natural forests left in Poland and the Pyrenees.

In a word, conservation should think in terms of 'leave it alone, unless direct intervention is unavoidable', rather than, 'maintain a static system' as the public often believes. To restore a native ecosystem does not mean going back to a point in time in the past without justification, but means putting something back which was there and allowing it to evolve from then onward, without interference.

Dear Didier, just stumbling over your question I can add only one aspect to this discussion but maybe it is an interesting one. A concept for dynamic conservation was introduced (and controversely discussed) in Germany in the early 1990s. It is called "Prozesschutz", which (directly translated) means "process conservation". The basic idea is to allow/support natural dynamics of/in forests instead of excluding it (like in traditional forestry) which means making use of natural processes and dynamics (at all levels of biodiversity) for sustainable forest management and nature conservation. There is vast literature on this topic; however, since English language is widely irrelevant in nature conservation and forestry in German speaking countries, I am not sure if this has ever been communicated to the English speaking audience.

Hi all

Thanks a lot for sharing these interesting views.

I agree with the difference of point of view between scientists and laypersons / politicians. This is quite frequently the case with scientific issues that resound in society. I guess it is symptomatic of the fact that many of us scientists are poor communicants to a general audience, because we use words that we think should be easily understood by the general public but have a very different meaning in everyday's life compared to our own definitions as used in scientific papers. 'Conservation' is obviously one of them, as is 'preservaation' - which for most everyone suggests a 'change nothing' or 'keep it as it is now' attituide. 'Restoration' is even worse in this case, as for the general public means 'getting back to a former (and better ) state'.

I'm less at ease with the idea of letting ecosystems evolve 'without interfering'. I really don't think this is at all possible, because all ecosystems are somehow interdependent ( the famous 'butterfly effect'). Furthermore, this would mean that man is not part of these ecosystems, which is absolutely wrong in my eyes. The 'let alone' attitude is therefore neither possible nor desirable, I think. I'm much more in favour of the 'working with nature' kind of attitude that is promoted in agroecology, which leaves a place to man in the driving of the system ( we have to accept that we're the dominant driver of most ecosystmes right now) but relies on sustainability of these systems and on exploiting ecological processes to achieve it.

And Sean - I do not agree either with your point that human selection only weakens the species that we breed. If we measure success in terms of numbers of offspring at the next generation (the basic definition of fitness in ecology),cows and pigs and dogs and wheat and apple are incredibly fitter since they have been domesticated by man than they would ever have been without human breeding, so it's hard to say that man has been detrimental to them! True, this has come at the cost of a narrowing of the genetic basis of the successful genotypes ( i.e., the frequency distribution of genes and alleles involved in the traits we desire is skewed), but that's the law of selection. Remember that Darwin showed that human-made selection is only an extreme, fast-forward version of natural selection, and that Wilson (and later on Dawkins) described many human activities and behaviours as driven by the same evolutionary principles that underpin the modern theory of evolution. I made also a parallel between natural and man-driven changes in plant protection systems in a paper published in 2012 in Sustainability.

So, the basic question to me is : how do we scientists in evolution/agriculture/ecology convey the theory of evolution ( and its consequences) more efficiently to the general publkic and decision makers? This is a vast debate...

Best,

Didier

I do not agree that conservation biologists have a fixed view of preservation. There is abundant literature to suggest otherwise. Preserving large areas where natural processes are running "free", as in disturbance, necessarily is a dynamic view of conservation.

In our 2002 book, The Nature of Diversity (U Chicago Press), Deborah McLennan and I devoted the final chapter to the question of evolution and biodiversity. We concluded that we should focus on conserving not species or areas or ecosystems, but rather the evolutionary process itself. This led to a number of practical applications, including 100% support for the notion that what is important about conservation areas is not their size or their number but their connectivity. The ubiquity of support for taxon pulse radiations tells us that the ability to expand geographic ranges is associated with long-term lineage survival and diversification. Alycia Stigall has provided beautiful evidence of this form the fossil record in her brilliant work. Attempts to conserve standing diversity in ways that do not allow it to evolve (and thus supersede/replace itself) risk increasing extinction rates. 

Hi Didier, the problem is that we are dealing with processes at different temporal scales. Conservation biologists try to minimize change at our short term temporal scales in a world that is rapidly changing. Even in an ideal case of successful minimization, the accumulation of small changes may have profound impacts on biodiversity at macroevolutionary scales. But the reality is that change is widespread, rampant, and accelerating in some cases. So we urgently need to slow down the pace of change. Nobody is stopping evolutionary processes. Adaptation can be fast. But the important issue in conservation is that the accumulation of biodiversity occurs at scales of millions of years. The biodiversity crisis is not a crisis of the processes (we may be actually accelerating adaptation and speciation through fragmentation and climate change); it is a crisis of losing biodiversity that has accumulated over millions of years.

Most conservation biologists and protected area managers/scientists are very cognisant of the role of environmental change as well as the role of people in ecosystems. The loss and degradation of habitat and the extirpation/extinction of species and ecosystems is occurring at a rate and magnitude that is outpacing many species ability to adapt. Most of the world is not protected and humanity is certainly part of most ecosystems, and although I completely agree that a better understanding of the role of evolution, as well as protection through the storage of genetic material such as seed banks is important; I will advocate for the PRESERVATION of land, oceans, species and ecosystems any day. When these places and species are protected, many of them may have the chance to “evolve with us”.

Pantha rei - everything moves. Evolution is dynamics, speciation is dynamics, vegetation succession leads to climax vegetation, all dynamics, and think of plate tectonics, natural climatic change, hardly anything is stable and if it looks stable it usually is a matter of time scale. It is mainly general public and politicians (any difference?) that thinks in terms of stable situations or to be stabelized by human effort. I stress the dynamic view in every lecture (to non-scientists) I present and I see people wake up then and start understanding the importance of change. Nature conservation is setting the possibilities and boundaries for dynamic processes.

I don't think I am telling anything new here. Sorry.

Like Rob Baldwin (above) I disagree with the premise that conservation biologists advocate "preservation"--that simply isn't the case in most cases.  Managing for dynamic change is at the core of most strategies I'm familiar with, and most conservation biologists I know assiduously and intentionally avoid using the verb "preserve."

I think it's important to observe that while change is inherent in a natural system, humans have the tendency to vastly increase the rate of change. So for example, the globalization of our society has lead to a vastly increased number of species introductions. It is now possible that we could completely homogenize biodiversity within similar climactic zones on a scale of several hundred years (which is no geologic time whatsoever). All that conservationists are trying to do is to maintain the genetic diversity. They may appear to be maintaining a static system, when in reality they are trying to increase the resilience of the system as a whole (greater biodiversity=greater resilience in the face of change). I would further like to point out that the World Wildlife Fund has found that we've lost 50% biodiversity globally since 1970, and at least some of that is due to humanly high rates of new species introductions (study biotic homogenization). So, yes conservationists are trying to preserve genetic diversity. But if you look at the big picture, most management is aimed at naturalizing new species rather than eradicating them, unless there are significant economic implications. I think there is significant value to managing the impact that humans have on ecological processes, including invasion. Yes, we should be trying to minimize our impact. Is that an anti-Darwinian idea? No, sure isn't.

Hi again all

I do concur with the point regarding scales - mainly temporal - and rates of change raised in several answers. Yes, evolution is going faster now, that's for sure. Does it mean that species are less able to adapt? That can be disputed.

As for the gloablisation of biodiversity by man, honestly, I don't think this is a real risk. Ecology is such that it is usually quite difficult for a species to displace another from a niche where it has been in place for extended periods. We focus on the cases of biological invasions, but I'm wondering if this is not simply due to the fact that the monitoring is tighter now than it ever was before ( an artifact of better observation systems, in a sense). The same question can be raised about estimates of biodiversity losses: now that molecular genetics allows a better discrimination between taxa, I guess that the estimates can be quite different from what they were when taxonomy was strictly morphological. But that's for another thread!

Not to say that efforts in conservation biology are useless, of course!

All the best

Didier

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264418661_Alternative_States_of_Saline_Lake_Ecosystems_and_Development_of_Salinology

 In our World of Change some changes are a natural result of the global climate system variability, but the responsibility for other changes falls squarely on humanity’s shoulders. We may try to prevent only second ones.

Article Alternative States of Saline Lake Ecosystems and Development...

Give me an argument or proof that evolution is going faster now.

Didier states that "As for the globalisation of biodiversity by man, honestly, I don't think this is a real risk. Ecology is such that it is usually quite difficult for a species to displace another from a niche where it has been in place for extended periods."  I would have to respectfully disagree, at least with regard to the situation on isolated tropical islands such as the Hawaiian Islands.  Invasive predators such as ants, rats, and the intentionally introduced predatory snail Euglandina rosea have had a devastating effect on the animals I study, the native land snails of Hawaii and other Polynesian islands.  Undoubtedly the best-documented case is the extinction of numerous species of the tree snail Partula in the Society Islands as the direct result of the intentional introduction of Euglandina in the 1980s in an ill-advised biological control program targeting the Giant African Snail Achatina fulica.  I'm sure local botanists and entomologists could come up with examples from their own areas of expertise.  Even the supposedly harmless European honeybee is believed to have displaced a number of Hawaiian native bees now facing extinction.  Getting out of the tropics, the ongoing displacement of British red squirrels by the invasive North American gray squirrel would seem to disprove your thesis as well. 

Hi Carl,

Thanks for these useful examples. I just would like to know how representative they are - that is, are they exceptions rather than rules? To assess that , it would be necessary to document not just the sucessful invasions (those we see!), but also those that failed - in other terms, the number of introduced species that failed to get established in their new habitat. I guess these are more numerous than those which invade - although it's hard to get the appropriate figures. If my guess is correct, then my hypothesis of better adaptation of local species than foreign ones is basically correct.

Didier Andrivon,

You stated that "Yes, evolution is going faster now, that's for sure." and I asked for an example or ptoof of this statement. Can you please react?

It probably is impossible to say anything about the number of species that fail to establish after having set foot in a foreign area. For certain taxonomic groups such as birds there are records of species that suddenly turn up somewhere. Large groups of ornithologists and bird spotters very quickly get to the site where it can be seen. 

For other groups, such as nearly all invertebrates, the establishment of a foreign species is noticed when the number of specimens has already risen to a higher frequency level. The single foriegn specimen will be hardly ever spotted before it dies because it is eaten or the required habitat is not available, no host-plant, no food. That part of dynamics remains largely obscure to us.

Hi Peter

'Evolution' might be a misleading word. Biologically, as Darwin stated, evolution by natural selection requires two things: generation of diversity and selection within this diversity. The generation of diversity ( locally) increases with human actions, notably through transportation of species. So processes that would have taken thousands or millions of years for the expansion of range of species (or may even never have occured) are now made within years. Regarding selection, I don't know whether selection intensity is stronger now or not than in the past. This probably depends on the environments.

Sorry, no references at hand. If anyone can provide any, thanks for this!

All the best

Didier

Great and insightful question.....my feeling that it is only quite recently that conservation biologists are moving away from the idea of conserving biodiversity in a state of stasis that equates to some arbitrary idea of what existed prior to excessive human impacts.  However, this approach is flawed since human impacts are grossly different from region to region and even between habitats in a given region.  For example, the human impact in Europe is centuries (even millennia) old, whereas it may only be decades or less in some tropical areas.  Instead, the more "in vogue" approach nowadays takes account of the processes that allow species to adapt to their environment (which includes adaptation to human impacts) and therefore is a more long-term solution to fostering co-existence between humans and biodiversity.

Didier--

I think anyone familiar with virtually any tropical Polynesian island would agree that the typical pattern is the massive displacement of native species by invasive aliens.  Again using land snails as my example, extinctions over the 1000 years or so these islands have been inhabited by humans have reduced the original fauna of some 1000 named taxa by at least half and perhaps by as much as 90%.  Outside the remaining areas of native forest one almost never encounters native snails except for a couple of hardy species, whereas alien snails and slugs are ubiquitous.  Birds and insects show a similar pattern.  The native snails were no doubt very well adapted to their environment, but the introduction of highly efficient predators where few existed before and the displacement of the native flora by aliens makes the adaptations of the native species essentially irrelevant because the environments to which they were adapted no longer exist.

Hi Carl,

You're certainly right in the case of tropical Polynesian islands. My point regarding your example is how typical these obviously quite fragile ecosystems are  among all terrestrial ecosystems. The fact that they missed a trophic level entirely (that of snail predators) makes them quite vulnerable indeed.

Furthermore, this example inspires me another comment: if the introduction of a few extra species suffices to reduce a very diverse community by half to 90 %, this questions the paradigm that higher biodiversity makes the ecosystems more resilient. This would only be true if all trophic levels/functions were present in the original ecosystem, right?

Best

Didier

I certainly don't claim that the great vulnerability of isolated tropical Polynesian island ecosystems is necessarily "typical" of ALL terrestrial ecosystems, but the same vulnerability in perhaps a lesser degree can be seen in isolated continental islands such as New Zealand and, to a lesser extent, in continental Australia.  I think this is a difference in degree, not in kind--even highly diverse continental biotas, or at least particular species within them, can be vulnerable to novel invasive threats, Dutch elm disease being a continental example that comes to mind.  Biodiversity in the sense of mere numbers of species is in itself no defense if the invasive element introduces an absent trophic level or poses some other novel threat.   Almost by definition, invasives succeed because they can more successfully exploit a vacant or under-utilized niche than can the members of the native biota, and a greater level of original biodiversity lessens but does not eliminate the likelihood that such exploitable situations will exist..  

A dynamic view of conservation has been present in the field of conservation biology pretty much since its inception.  There are many ways conservation has considered how communities change over time, for example in the context of Holocene range shifts, historical and current land uses and uses of wildlife by all kinds of cultures, wildfire and prescribed burning, wind disturbance, road building, agriculture, and so on. In fact it is difficult to have a serious conservation conversation without considering change. In some ways the field of conservation biology is all about detecting how change on different temporal and spatial scales influences distribution and abundance of organisms.

Here are a few:

Hunter Jr., M. L., G. L. Jacobson, and T. I. Webb. 1988. Paleoecology and the coarse-filter approach to maintaining biological diversity. Conservation Biology 2:375-385.

Delcourt, H. R., and P. A. Delcourt. 1997. Pre-Columbian Native American use of fire on southern Appalachian landscapes. Conservation Biology 11:1010-1014.

Delcourt, P. A., and H. R. Delcourt. 1998. Paleological insights into conservation of biodiversity: a focus on species, ecosystems, and landscapes. Ecological Applications 8:921-934

Foster, D. R., F. J. Swanson, J. D. Aber, I. Burke, N. Brokaw, D. Tilman, and A. Knapp. 2003. The importance of land-use legacies to ecology and conservation. BioScience 53:77-88.

Foster, D. R., G. Motzkin, D. Bernardos, and J. Cardoza. 2002. Wildlife dynamics in the changing New England landscape. Journal of Biogeography 29:1337-1357.

Vandermeer, J., and I. Perfecto. 2007. The agricultural matrix and a future paradigm for conservation. Conservation Biology 21:274-277.

Anderson, M. G., and C. E. Ferree. 2010. Conserving the stage: climate change and the geophysical underpinnings of species diversity. PloS One 5:e11554.

An earlier comment also suggested that diversity goes up when invasion happens. Sure, especially early in the land use change trajectory, but when tracked through time and space species turnover occurs, as can homogenization:

Hepinstall, J. A., M. Alberti, and J. M. Marzluff. 2008. Predicting land cover change and avian community responses in rapidly urbanizing environments. Landscape Ecology 23:1257-1276.

Scott, M. C. 2005. Winners and losers among stream fishes in relation to land use legacies and urban development. Biological Conservation 127:301-309.

I'd suggest this book by Falk et al. which addresses the challenges and opportunities in linking ecological theory with Restoration Ecology - it offers an overview of the approaches whereby human decisions and engagement with nature are required - and carefully links theory to help drive this hands-on approach.

http://www.ser.org/resources/resources-detail-view/foundations-of-restoration-ecology

— Most forecasts of how the biosphere will change, or evolve, in response to human activity are rooted in projecting trajectories. Such models don't anticipate critical transitions or tipping points (re: evolutionary shifts), although recent work indicates a high probability of those taking place. And, at a local scale, ecosystems are known to shift abruptly between states when critical thresholds are passed… the evidence from across ecology and palaeontology pretty much indicate that such a transition is being approached on the scale of the entire biosphere, as an obvious expression of human-driven 'natural' selection, and tend to suggest how biological forecasting might be improved to allow us to detect early warning signs of critical transitions on a global, as well as local, scale.

Human activity has had two obvious effects, apart of course from some economic consequences such as desertification or erosion. First, it has certainly speeded up the rate of extinctions to the point where some talk about a sixth mass extinction event. It would be impossible to quantify, but current and likely future rates of extinction must outstrip the evolution of new species by a wide margin. Second, it  has homogenised the fauna and flora. Like Carl, I also study land snails, and these are undoubtedly the worst affected in terms of extinction. But other organisms are affected too, and maybe the snails can be seen just as a foretaste of what will happen.

I find the arguments about evolution and change here very odd. The homogenisation caused by us reduces the independent evolution of forms suited to particular circumstances, and certainly reduces the number of independently evolving lineages.Preserving at least some of these is not "fixist", just the opposite: it maintains the base from which evolution proceeds.

I'm a conservation biologist living in Canada. From my perspective, the premise in the question is false. In Canada we aim to conserve naturally functioning and evolving ecosystems, and to restore health to those that are not. The preservationists seem to be on the other side of the fence: they want to keep building roads, preserving hard surfaces, and maintaining relatively life-less conditions. In Europe there are some conservationists who try to maintain intermediate successional conditions by regular intervention, but I think these are special cases rather than the norm.

When I teach conservation biology to my students I show a slide with Michelangelo's David and a nice picture of a coral reef ecosystem (see attached picture). Then I ask: "which is the difference between cultural heritage and biodiversity conservation?". The answer, of course, is that the former is "fixist" conservation, whereas the latter is dynamic. The positive and surprising thing is that each time at least one student can answer this question correctly. I conclude saying that a fixist nature conservation is just BAD conservation biology!

Dear all,

There is an opinion paper by  Erik Meijaard published today, that touch the subject in an interesting way (link below).

Have a good time reading it.

Cheers.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/269109620_Humanity_Is_Too_Selfish_to_Save_Each_Other_or_Our_Environment

Article Humanity Is Too Selfish to Save Each Other or Our Environment

I think we can divide the planet into the human-habitat and the natural habitat, which in generally is divided into a 90:10 split.  And until recently we believed that we could have it all, but we may be coming to the conclusion that we need more than 10% to remain, to maintain the other 90% for us--like providing the annual rainfall that we need to survive.  

My guess is that we need to set aside and restore at least 35% of the natural areas as Ecological Restoration Preserves, that is what I am asking at https://www.researchgate.net/post/Do_we_need_to_set_aside_35_of_the_planet_as_Ecological_Restoration_Preserves?

So biodiversity and conservation as independent considerations are not the issue, but how much of the natural world do we need to keep around us, so that we can maintain our human-portion of the planet?

Our article published in peer-reviewed Journal "Communicative & Integrative Biology". A few major points discussed in the paper:

(1) Brain is not the source of consciousness.

(2) Consciousness is ubiquitous in all living organisms, starting from bacteria to human beings.

(3) The individual cells in the multicellular organisms are also individually cognitive entities.

(4) Proposals like “artificial life”, “artificial intelligence”, “sentient machines” and so on are only fairytales because no designer can produce an artifact with the properties like internal teleology (Naturzweck) and formative force (bildende Kraft).

(5) The material origin of life and objective evolution are only misconceptions that biologists must overcome.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19420889.2015.1085138