What is Conservation Biology

1
What is Conservation Biology?

• A recent response to the wave of global
  environmental change thats threatening to
  extinguish a tremendous portion of the worlds
  biological diversity

2
Conservation Biologists view their main task as
providing the intellectual and technological
tools that will anticipate, prevent, minimize,
and repair ecological damage
3
Conservation Biology differs from other
biological sciences in one important way

• Its often a crisis discipline
• i.e., one often has to act before knowing all the
  facts thus, a mixture of science and art

4
Conservation Biology is also multidisciplinary in
structure

• Many of the ideas, techniques and methods come
  from a broad range of biological fields including
  ecology, biogeography, systematics, genetics,
  evolution, epidemiology, forestry, fisheries,
  wildlife biology, agronomy, and veterinary
  science
• Also incorporates social science disciplines such
  as resource economics and policy, ethnobiology,
  and environmental ethics

5
Great deal of overlap between Conservation
Biology and the Natural Resource fields,
nonetheless, there are two characteristics that
distinguish them

• Dominance of utilitarian, economic objectives in
  the resource fields
• Nature of these resources small number of
  valuable target species a tiny fraction of the
  biota

6
Another distinguishing feature of Conservation
Biology is its time scale

• Practitioners attach more weight to the
  long-range viability of whole systems and
  species, including their evolutionary potential

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Lastly, Conservation Biology tends to be holistic

• Reductionism alone cannot lead to explanations of
  community and ecosystem processes
• Multidisciplinary approaches will ultimately be
  the most fruitful

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Conservation versus preservation