Geographic approaches to biodiversity conservation: implications of scale and error to landscape planning

Abstract

Conservation science is concerned with understanding why distribution and abundance patterns of species vary in time and space. Although these patterns have strong signatures tied to the availability of energy and nutrients, variation in climate, physiographic heterogeneity, and differences in the structural complexity of natural vegetation, it is becoming more difficult to ignore the role that humans play in shaping the composition of species assemblages across landscapes (Gaston 2006). The amount of net primary productivity that goes directly to support humans has become a common, if not contentious, measure of the human footprint on ecosystems. Mean estimates of the proportion of total terrestrial net primary productivity that is appropriated by humans range from 25-40% (Vitousek et al. 1986, Rojstaczer et al. 2001, Imhoff et al. 2004), and the more that is co-opted by humans, the less there is available to support other species (Haberl et al. 2002, Gaston et al. 2003). Although these estimates have low precision (Haberl et al. 2002), there is widespread agreement that human impacts on ecosystems are substantial and growing (Laurance 2001,Wackernagel et al. 2002, Palmer et al. 2004).

Citation

Flather, Curtis H.; Wilson, Kenneth R.; Shriner, Susan A. 2009. Geographic approaches to biodiversity conservation: implications of scale and error to landscape planning. In: Millspaugh, J.J.; Thompson, F.R., III, eds. Models for planning wildlife conservation in large landscapes. Burlington, MA: Elsevier Inc.: 85-121.