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    Landscape Linkages and Biodiversity
    Landscape Linkages and Biodiversity
    Landscape Linkages and Biodiversity
    Ebook355 pages3 hours

    Landscape Linkages and Biodiversity

    By Wendy E. Hudson, J. Michael Scott, Michael E. Soulé and

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    About this ebook

    In Landscape Linkages and Biodiversity experts explain biological diversity conservation, focusing on the need for protecting large areas of the most diverse ecosystems, and connecting those ecosystems with land corridors to allow species to move among them more easily.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIsland Press
    Release dateApr 10, 2013
    ISBN9781597268684
    Landscape Linkages and Biodiversity

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      Landscape Linkages and Biodiversity - Wendy E. Hudson

      York

      Introduction

      SINCE THE SETTLEMENT of North America began, more than 500 species and subspecies of native plants and animals have become extinct. Seven listed species have vanished since Congress enacted the Endangered Species Act in 1973. Several others, among them the California condor and the black-footed ferret, have become extinct in the wild but survive in captivity. The threatened and endangered lists have grown to include 565 species. Nearly half of them lack any recovery plan. Meanwhile, close to 4,000 additional United States species are considered candidates for listing. Two or three hundred may already be extinct, and that is probably a bare minimum. Some say the true number of candidates is closer to 6,000. A recent study suggests that California alone may have 220 animal and 600 plant species threatened with serious reduction, if not outright oblivion.

      Clearly, the number of lifeforms at risk on this continent is continuing to increase and is doing so at an accelerating rate. Chart the upward curve of that rate and it becomes clearer still that we are on the verge of massive biological impoverishment, nearly on a par with that forecast for developing nations in the tropics. The truly frightening thing—and the reason we need to reexamine our whole conservation agenda in this country—is that we ended up here on the brink so quickly despite the Endangered Species Act and despite having what many would consider exemplary nationwide systems of parks, wilderness areas, wildlife refuges, and other preserves. What are we doing wrong?

      To begin with, in the view of several of the workshop panelists, we have been too preoccupied with trying to save species, one at a time, after they are already in trouble. Conservation biologists liken this strategy to doling out emergency-room treatment on a case-by-case basis in a sort of popularity contest. Most of our attention has gone to a relative handful of charismatic creatures, mostly birds and mammals with qualities of majesty, intelligence, or cuddliness that we can easily relate to.

      Save the grizzly! Save the sea otter! Save the whooping crane! But what about the small, the slithery, and the leafy—the less conspicuous species that make up the vast majority of our biota and the majority of its candidates for the endangered list? These species get little publicity or support. Yet they are equally vital to the stability of ecosystems, and their promise as potential sources of food, fiber, or pharmaceutical products matches that of large or showy forms.

      Even if our emergency-ward efforts become less arbitrary, and even if time, money, and personnel were not in such short supply, we could not hope to get ahead of the curve as long as we are only reacting to crises. The way out is to begin practicing more preventive care. That means doing a better job of safeguarding healthy flora and fauna at the biological-community level. In particular, it means tending to those communities with the greatest variety or richness of native species. Focusing on such areas of high biological diversity—biodiversity for short—gives us the best chance of keeping the most species from becoming endangered.

      In the opinion of Michael Scott, a research biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Idaho, "The bottom line in conservation biology is not how many species we save from extinction in the next decade but how many species will survive the next hundred years or more.

      If we could identify all the natural communities present in this country at the time of European settlement and keep examples of each intact, we would have about 85 percent of all our native species conserved, estimated panelist Ben Brown, Colorado program director for The Nature Conservancy. Perhaps what is needed, offered Felice Pace of the Klamath Forest Alliance, a California citizens’ group, is not an Endangered Species Act but an Endangered Ecosystems Act.

      Perhaps so. The primary reason so many creatures are in trouble is that much of their habitat has been lost and what remains is being badly fragmented. For many species, even the largest fragments are proving too small and isolated to sustain them over the long run. To understand why, we need to turn to the realm of ecological theory known as island biogeography. If nothing else, it explains why it is becoming difficult to talk with conservationists these days without hearing about islands and bridges.

      It only makes sense that large geographical areas should hold more animals than small ones. But why will the larger areas also hold more kinds of animals? Scientists first recognized a correlation between species richness and area early in this century. Then, during the 1960s, ecologists studying the biota of islands developed a set of principles relating the size and isolation of areas to the number of species the areas can support over a period of time. The findings most relevant to conservation as a whole come from the study of what are called land-bridge islands that used to be attached to the mainland before being cut off by the sea.

      The longer an island has been isolated, the less its flora and fauna will have in common with the communities on the mainland. Many of the island’s original species will have gone extinct, while many of the survivors will have evolved into uniquely adapted forms. Over time, the biota of the smaller islands becomes especially skewed with a marked drop in overall biodiversity. Such areas simply cannot hold enough members of certain species, especially the larger animals, to maintain a stable gene pool. Small, insular populations lack the genetic flexibility to cope with changes in the environment, and their vulnerability worsens as undesirable traits accumulate through inbreeding. Sooner or later the result is extinction. The loss of each species ripples through the community, further destabilizing the balance among survivors and often triggering more extinctions.

      If you compare a particular island to one that is generally similar but only a tenth as large, the smaller island may be expected to hold only about half as many species—and often far fewer. Now turn to a habitat slated for development on the mainland. Suppose a tenth of the original area is to be set aside in a preserve. That may be a fairly generous percentage in many people’s minds, especially considering that just 5 percent of the lower forty-eight states as a whole lies within protected areas. They might assume that this preserve—this island within a sea of disturbance—ought to be more than enough to maintain a representative sample of all the community’s original inhabitants. They might be right for a few years. Then every year afterward they would be more and more wrong.

      Not surprisingly, the state with the highest percentage of imperiled species is Hawaii, our one island state. The implications of island biogeography for fragmented habitats and ecosystems in the other forty-nine states are obvious. This is not to say that the parallels are exact. After all, habitat islands on the mainland are surrounded by other types of landscape—not by water—and so there is a greater chance that a declining population with a shrinking gene pool can be recharged by a few individuals making their way into the area. By the same token, however, predators or competitors from nearby habitats may invade the island, where certain small populations are held hostage, and bring about local extinctions even faster than might be expected.

      A remnant of pristine forest harboring rare plant species, for example, may be overgrazed and irrevocably altered by the deer thriving in nearby logged forests and farm country. Similarly, a number of refuges with perfectly good wetland habitat have nevertheless become poor producers of waterfowl and other aquatic birds because so many eggs and young are taken by skunks and raccoons. Like deer, these adaptable, omnivorous predators prosper in many habitats altered by human activities. Their populations can reach unusually high levels, since humans have also eliminated the larger predators that once held skunks and raccoons in check.

      The main lesson of island biogeography is this: We cannot tuck species away in little preserves, as if we were storing pieces in a museum, and then come back a century later and expect to find them all still there. The essence of life is change. Organisms are constantly growing, interacting, adapting, evolving. Their numbers and distribution across the landscape fluctuate in cycles linked to climatic patterns and to other, less understood rhythms. They are defined as much by their place in food webs and nutrient flows as by their own physical traits or any current geographic location. Many alter their range and behavior under different conditions. Some assume entirely new behavior through learning. In short, an ecosystem is not a collection of plants and animals. It is a seamless swirl of communities and processes. If you don’t save the processes, you won’t save the parts. So if you’re going to create a preserve, you had better make it a big

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