conservation
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What is conservation in ecology?
Conservation ecology is a field that addresses how to protect species from extinction and what actions humans can take to prevent it. Conservation is largely about reducing factors that cause species to be vulnerable, particularly in areas where they are most at risk. This often involves protecting habitats that are large enough to sustain viable populations.
Effective conservation includes public policy, economic solutions, monitoring, and education. Governments, organizations, and scientists should create incentives to conserve habitats and protect species from overharvesting, while discouraging activities that degrade habitats. Preventing overhunting and overfishing and securing ecosystems from species invasions and land use conversion are also key.
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Why is conservation important for the environment?
Conservation is vital for the environment because it protects and maintains the health of ecosystems and biodiversity. Declining biodiversity reduces an ecosystem’s productivity and its ability to supply essential services, such as maintaining soil and purifying water. Conservation efforts, through public policy and economic solutions, can help prevent habitat loss and degradation, protect species from overharvesting, and promote sustainable development. By conserving natural habitats, we can preserve the complexity and distinctiveness of ecosystems, safeguard endangered species, and ensure the planet's capacity to support life.
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What are some common threats to ecosystems that make conservation necessary?
Several factors threaten ecosystems, highlighting the need for conservation efforts. Habitat loss, driven by agriculture, logging, and development, destroys the space species need to live and reproduce. Habitat fragmentation further exacerbates this by dividing habitats into smaller, disconnected patches, isolating populations. Pollution, including chemical destruction and nutrient runoff, contaminates ecosystems, leading to dead zones and harming aquatic life. The introduction of invasive species can outcompete native species and disrupt ecological balance. Global warming alters climate patterns, threatening species and ecosystems. Unsustainable hunting and disease also contribute to biodiversity loss. These threats emphasize the importance of conservation to protect species, preserve habitats, and maintain ecosystem health.
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How do humans help conserve natural habitats and species?
Humans help conserve natural habitats and species through habitat protection and restoration, reducing factors causing extinction for vulnerable species. Protecting habitats large enough to house viable species populations is vital. Habitat restoration involves dealing with the causes of destruction, like restoring water flow to the Everglades.
Local conservation groups remove introduced species by weeding invasive plants or trapping invasive animals, alongside preventing new threats. Laws such as the Endangered Species Act and international agreements protect endangered species, while governments, organizations, and scientists create incentives for conservation and discourage habitat loss.
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What are protected areas, and how do they contribute to conservation?
Protected areas are designated regions with specific regulations to conserve animals, plants, or both. They aim to protect ecosystems from destructive human activities, balancing biodiversity conservation with sustainable human use. Marine protected areas (MPAs) are easier to establish because they are in regions devoid of people, so their creation results in minimal disruption to people’s lives and livelihoods.
These areas contribute to conservation by creating safe zones for species, increasing biodiversity, helping to restore fish populations, and boosting areas for tourism and research. They can include nature reserves, biosphere reserves, and marine protected areas. Designating reserves in biodiversity hotspots can save a large fraction of species.
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How can individuals and communities participate in conservation efforts?
Individuals and communities can participate in conservation efforts in a variety of ways. Lifestyle changes like using public transportation, reducing meat consumption, and buying products that require fewer carbon emissions to produce can reduce your carbon footprint. Communities can recycle, construct efficient buildings, and encourage off-the-grid energy supplies. Purchasing carbon offsets can also compensate for your carbon footprint, making you effectively carbon neutral. Installing energy-efficient lighting, adding insulation, and using renewable energy sources are other effective measures.
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conservation, study of the loss of Earth’s biological diversity and the ways this loss can be prevented. Biological diversity, or biodiversity, is the variety of life either in a particular place or on the entire planet Earth, including its ecosystems, species, populations, and genes. Conservation thus seeks to protect life’s variety at all levels of biological organization.
(Read E.O. Wilson’s Britannica essay on mass extinction.)
Species extinction is the most obvious aspect of the loss of biodiversity. For example, species form the bulk of the examples in a comprehensive assessment of the state of the planet published in the early 21st century by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, an international effort coordinated by the United Nations Environment Programme. The subject of conservation is broader than this, however. Even a species that survives extinction can lose much of its genetic diversity as local, genetically distinct populations are lost from most of the species’ original range. Furthermore, ecosystems may shrink dramatically in area and lose many of their functions, even if their constituent species manage to survive. Conservation is involved with studying all these kinds of losses, understanding the factors responsible for them, developing techniques to prevent losses, and, whenever possible, restoring biodiversity.
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Conservation is a crisis discipline, one demanded by the unusual rates of loss; it is also a mission-driven one. By analogy, ecology and conservation have the same relationship as physiology and medicine. Human physiology studies the workings of the human body, whereas medicine is mission-oriented and aims to understand what goes wrong and how to treat it. The major parts of this article thus deal first with the “pathology” of extinction—why and how biodiversity is lost—and second with the “treatment” methods to prevent these losses.
Conservation is often considered a purely biological topic, as exemplified by major scientific journals with titles such as Conservation Biology and Animal Conservation as well as college textbooks with such titles as Principles of Conservation Biology and Essentials of Conservation Biology. However, because the underlying cause of the loss of biodiversity is increasing human activity, conservation must inevitably involve human interactions. Many of the techniques to prevent the loss of biodiversity involve issues of economics, law, social sciences, and religion—all of which are covered by the journals and textbooks cited above.
The “pathology” section of this article begins by documenting the losses of species. In doing so, it shows that a set of common factors are responsible; these are then individually identified and discussed. The final part of the section demonstrates that some species and ecosystems are much more likely to lose biodiversity than others. The other main division, the “treatment” section, considers a variety of “therapies” that address the problems identified in the first section.
The pathology of extinction
Rates of natural and present-day species extinction
According to the best estimates of the world’s environmental experts, human activities have driven species to extinction at rates perhaps 1,000 times the natural, or background, rate, and future rates of extinction will likely be higher. To show how the experts arrived at these conclusions, it is necessary to pose and attempt to answer a series of extremely difficult questions. How many species are there? How fast were species disappearing before human activity became pervasive? How fast are they becoming extinct at present? And finally, it is necessary to ask a further question: What does the future hold for extinctions if current trends continue?
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| group | number of living species | number of extinctions per indicated time period (in years) | extinctions per million species per year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recent extinctions | |||
| *Predictions of future extinctions for all species, as published by various authors since about 1980, range between 1,000 and 10,000 extinctions per million species per year. | |||
| Principal source: S.L. Pimm et al., "The Future of Biodiversity," Science 269:347–350 (1995). | |||
| birds (described 1800–99) | 7,079 | 39/100 | 55 |
| mammals | 4,300 | 60/200 | 70 |
| reptiles | 4,700 | 20/200 | 21 |
| frogs and toads | 4,000 | 5/25 | 50 |
| freshwater clams | 1,082 | 21/100 | 194 |
| Future extinctions* | |||
| birds | 10,000 | 1,200/100 | 1,200 |
| mammals | 4,300 | 650/100 | 1,512 |
| reptiles | 4,700 | 210/100 | 447 |
| frogs and toads | 4,000 | 89/100 | 223 |
| freshwater clams | 1,082 | 120/100 | 1,109 |
How many species are there?
Any absolute estimate of extinction rate, such as extinctions per year, requires knowledge of how many species there are. Unfortunately, this number is not known with any great degree of certainty, and the problems of estimating it are formidable. Taxonomists have described—that is, have given names to—about 1.9 million species. Only about 100,000 of them, comprising terrestrial vertebrates, some flowering plants, and attractive and collectible invertebrates such as butterflies and snails, are popular enough for taxonomists to know well. Birds are exceptionally well known; there are roughly 10,400 bird species, with only 1 or 2 new species being added each year.
Those who describe species cannot always be certain that the specimen in hand has not been given a name by someone else in a different country and sometimes even in a different century. Consequently, some taxonomic groups may have more names assigned to them than constituent species, which would result in erroneously high species estimates. Potentially much more serious as a source of error is the fact that some species groups have relatively few named members compared with the numbers that experts think exist in those groups. For example, taxonomists have only sparsely sampled some potentially rich communities, such as the bottom of the deep ocean and the canopies of rainforests.
One estimate of how many species might still be undescribed involves a comparison of fungi and flowering plants (angiosperms). In Great Britain, where both groups are well known, there are six times as many named species of fungi as of flowering plants. If this ratio applies worldwide, the world total of about 300,000 species of flowering plants, which are fairly well known globally, predicts a total of about 1.8 million species of fungi, which are not. Other mycologists estimate that there may be between 2.2 million and 3.8 million total species. Only about 144,000 species of fungi currently have names.
For insects, there are about 1 million described species, yet estimates of how many insect species exist are often around 5.5 million.
An obvious concern follows regarding the usefulness of such calculations as a basis for assessing the loss of species. Any absolute estimate of species extinctions must be extrapolated from the 100,000 well-known species of living plants and animals, to the roughly 1.5 million described species, to the likely grand total of very roughly 8.7 million. However, if the potential number of bacteria species are included, some estimates reach as high as 1 trillion species. Because of uncertainties about the total number of living species, published statements regarding the total number of species that become extinct per year or per day can vary a hundredfold.
Another approach to assessing species loss is to derive relative estimates—estimates of the proportion of well-known species that become extinct in a given interval. Estimating such proportions is the basis for the remainder of the discussion on rates of extinction, but it raises a critical concern of its own—namely, are these proportions actually typical of the great majority of species that are still undescribed? They are likely to be so if extinction rates in widely different species groups and regions turn out to be broadly similar.
There also is another way in which estimates of extinctions can be made relative. Extinctions have always been a part of Earth’s history. It is possible to make any estimates of massive future extinction relative to that history.