Conservation Biology

Genetic Diversity The process by which sequences of four simple chemicals – adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine – shape a molecule of DNA and, ultimately, all the organisms that comprise the earth’s biota is an extraordinary story. It is a story about the foundations of biological diversity. It can be …

The Importance of Genetic Diversity To assess the importance of genetic diversity, it is useful to think of genes as units of information rather than tangible things. As tiny amounts of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and some other common elements, genes have little value in and of themselves. As sources …

Ecosystems and Landscapes The mosaic of ecosystems we see from a plane is not just a random array. There are patterns to the spatial configurations of ecosystems. Lakes are drained by rivers and bordered by marshes, woodlots are patches embedded in a matrix of agricultural ecosystems, clear cuts are patches …

Ecosystem Diversity and Species Diversity The coarse-filter–fine-filter metaphor captures the strategic value of protecting ecosystems as a vehicle for maintaining species diversity, but the relationship between ecosystem-level conservation and species level conservation is more complex than this. Some of this complexity is captured in two related questions that have long …

Instrumental Values Economic Values If we think of the economic values of ecosystems in terms of goods and services, the material goods provided by ecosystems can generally be accounted for by summing the goods provided by various species such as the lumber from tree species, the food from fish species, …

The Values of Ecosystems Species cannot survive in isolation from other species; they are all part of some ecosystem. Therefore all ecosystems have value because the species they support have value. In other words, at a minimum the value of an ecosystem is the summation of the value of all …

The Instrumental Values of Species When we think about the instrumental value of a species, we are likely to go straight to the basics. Materialistic uses of a species may be the core of instrumental values, but this is not the whole story. People also value species for purely aesthetic …

Ecosystem Diversity Flying over the countryside in an airplane you see patterns: blue patches and ribbons that are lakes and rivers, dark green patches that are forests, brown patches that are tilled fields, and so on. These are the coarse manifestations of an enormously complicated web of ecological interactions, a …

How Many Species Are There? Carolus Linnaeus, the Swedish biologist who founded modern taxonomy, described about 13,000 species in his 1758 opus Systema Naturae, but must have been well aware that this list was incomplete because in the eighteenth century much of the world remained unexplored by scientists. It is …

Categories of the IUCN Red List The following categories are used by the World Conservation Union to classify species for the IUCN Red List,1 a global compilation of species of concern to conservationists. Extinct (EX) A taxon is Extinct when there is no reasonable doubt that the last individual has …