CHAPTER 7
Planning for Persistence
in a Changing World
Richard A. Fuller
1,2
, Richard J. Ladle
3,4
, Robert J. Whittaker
3 and Hugh P. Possingham
1
1 School of Biological Sciences, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
2 CSIRO Climate Adaptation Flagship and CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, Brisbane, Australia
3 School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
4
Department of Agricultural Engineering, Federal University of Vi ç osa, Brazil
7.1 INTRODUCTION
There are millions of different species on Earth, each
responding uniquely to the environment and to other
species, and each with a distinct geographical distribution. This results in enormously complex spatial patterns in nature, from latitudinal gradients in global
species richness to the patchy distribution of plants
across a meadow. Documenting and understanding
these patterns has occupied biogeographers and
macroecologists for decades (Chapter 4 ). There has
been considerable progress toward a general understanding (Gaston & Blackburn, 2000 ; Lomolino et al. ,
2004 ), but how should we go about trying to conserve
biodiversity in the face of such complex spatial
patterns?
So far, the conservation community has focused
overwhelmingly on elements of the pattern of biodiversity, features that can be mapped spatially and thus
‘ captured ’ by conservation management activity
(Chapters 4 – 6 ). For example, a conservation plan
might attempt to represent a certain proportion of
each vegetation type in a region, or to ensure that
places where threatened species occur are designated
as protected areas.
This approach would be suffi cient if simply capturing elements of the natural world ensured their long
term persistence. Unfortunately, there are at least three
reasons why this is not the case:
1 Processes generate and maintain biodiversity, so
these processes must themselves be conserved.
2 Conservation efforts must track continuously
changing patterns of biodiversity.
3 Threats are dynamic, so mitigation efforts must be
similarly dynamic for conservation to be effi cient.
We now expand on each of these points in turn.
First, biodiversity is generated and maintained by
processes. It is these processes that need conservation,
along with the patterns that emerge from them, to
ensure that biodiversity persists in the long term.
Ecosystems are shaped by myriad physical and biological processes, including climate regimes, oceanic currents, hydrological fl ows, plate tectonics, demography,
migration, dispersal, extinctions, colonizations, predation, competition and distributional shifts, to name but
a few. Given the apparent primacy of climate in determining the distributions of species, there has been an
intense effort to predict the impacts of climate change
on biodiversity and how we might go about responding
to the challenges this poses (Section 4.4 ; Peters &
Conservation Biogeography
Edited by Richard J. Ladle and Robert J. Whittaker
© 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-444-33503-3
Planning for Persistence
in a Changing World
Richard A. Fuller
1,2
, Richard J. Ladle
3,4
, Robert J. Whittaker
3 and Hugh P. Possingham
1
1 School of Biological Sciences, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
2 CSIRO Climate Adaptation Flagship and CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, Brisbane, Australia
3 School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
4
Department of Agricultural Engineering, Federal University of Vi ç osa, Brazil
7.1 INTRODUCTION
There are millions of different species on Earth, each
responding uniquely to the environment and to other
species, and each with a distinct geographical distribution. This results in enormously complex spatial patterns in nature, from latitudinal gradients in global
species richness to the patchy distribution of plants
across a meadow. Documenting and understanding
these patterns has occupied biogeographers and
macroecologists for decades (Chapter 4 ). There has
been considerable progress toward a general understanding (Gaston & Blackburn, 2000 ; Lomolino et al. ,
2004 ), but how should we go about trying to conserve
biodiversity in the face of such complex spatial
patterns?
So far, the conservation community has focused
overwhelmingly on elements of the pattern of biodiversity, features that can be mapped spatially and thus
‘ captured ’ by conservation management activity
(Chapters 4 – 6 ). For example, a conservation plan
might attempt to represent a certain proportion of
each vegetation type in a region, or to ensure that
places where threatened species occur are designated
as protected areas.
This approach would be suffi cient if simply capturing elements of the natural world ensured their long
term persistence. Unfortunately, there are at least three
reasons why this is not the case:
1 Processes generate and maintain biodiversity, so
these processes must themselves be conserved.
2 Conservation efforts must track continuously
changing patterns of biodiversity.
3 Threats are dynamic, so mitigation efforts must be
similarly dynamic for conservation to be effi cient.
We now expand on each of these points in turn.
First, biodiversity is generated and maintained by
processes. It is these processes that need conservation,
along with the patterns that emerge from them, to
ensure that biodiversity persists in the long term.
Ecosystems are shaped by myriad physical and biological processes, including climate regimes, oceanic currents, hydrological fl ows, plate tectonics, demography,
migration, dispersal, extinctions, colonizations, predation, competition and distributional shifts, to name but
a few. Given the apparent primacy of climate in determining the distributions of species, there has been an
intense effort to predict the impacts of climate change
on biodiversity and how we might go about responding
to the challenges this poses (Section 4.4 ; Peters &
Conservation Biogeography
Edited by Richard J. Ladle and Robert J. Whittaker
© 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-444-33503-3