Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Introduction

2015; Wiley; Volume: 29; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/cobi.12511

1523-1739

Paul Beier, Malcolm L. Hunter, Mark Anderson,

Wildlife Ecology and Conservation

Life is a gloss on geography. And if you dig your fists into the earth and crumble geography, you strike geology. Climate is the wind of mineral earth's rondure, tilt, and orbit modified by local geological conditions. The Pacific Ocean, the Negev Desert, and the rain forest in Brazil are local geological conditions. So are the slow carp pools and splashing trout riffles of any backyard creek. It is all, God help us, a matter of rocks. The rocks shape life like hands around swelling dough. In Virginia, the salamanders vary from mountain ridge to mountain ridge, so do the fiddle tunes the old men play. All this because it is hard to move from mountain to mountain. These are not merely anomalous details. This is what life is all about: salamanders, fiddle tunes, you and me and things, the split and burr of it all, the fizz into particulars. No mountains and one salamander, one fiddle tune, would be a lesser world. No continents, no fiddlers. No possum, no soup, no taters. The earth without form is void… Annie Dillard (1982) The papers in this special section address the use of geodiversity as a coarse filter strategy for conserving biodiversity. A coarse filter strategy conserves representative samples of broadly defined environments as a way to conserve most species. However, geodiversity first entered conservation planning for its own sake, not for its ability to support biodiversity. For example, the first national park in the world (Yellowstone [established 1872]), the second national park in the US (Yosemite [1890]), Canada's first national park (Banff [1885]), and New Zealand's first national park (Tongariro [1887]) were each set aside primarily to protect spectacular geophysical features and their associated recreational and cultural values. This history helps explain why some protected area networks do a better job of protecting rocks than biodiversity (Scott et al. 2001). Although ecologists have long recognized geodiversity as a key driver of biodiversity and species distribution patterns (Lawler et al. 2015), conservation biologists were slow to consider using geodiversity to prioritize areas for biological conservation. In 1982, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) launched the first coarse-filter approach to conservation (TNC 1982; Noss 1987). The TNC approach aimed to conserve examples of each vegetation community, under the assumption that most species would be protected using this filter. Six years later Hunter et al. (1988) summarized paleoecological evidence that vegetation communities are merely the ephemeral results of recent (often 90% of their effort focuses on impact assessment and <10% on adaptation strategies such as CNS, climate envelope modeling, assisted colonization, mobile reserves, and enhancement of connectivity. We advocate a shift of emphasis away from impact assessment and toward development and evaluation of adaptation strategies—including but certainly not limited to CNS. Unfortunately, the most rigorous evaluation of adaptation strategies would be to try various strategies (with replicates and controls) and observe the response of biodiversity over the next 50–100 years. But of course that course of action is too slow and too risky. As an alternative, we advocate a rigorous comparative evaluation of the theoretical foundations, risks, costs, practicality, and likely outcomes of each strategy. In such comparative evaluations, CNS would probably fare well in terms of practicality and cost. Because it does not depend on a particular future climate (indeed it is hypothesized to work even if climate does not change), it is more likely to be perceived as practical by managers who are skeptical of climate models, or even the very fact of climate change. Because CNS relies heavily on existing protected areas to allow species to shift to new climate space (Beier 2012), it is less expensive than some alternatives. Because it focuses on real places on the landscape, it avoids the open-ended uncertainty of movable reserves or assisted colonization. Because it uses existing, freely available data, CNS avoids delaying conservation action to improve knowledge; priority lands often become unavailable or more expensive during such delays (Grantham et al. 2009). On nature's stage, the next act has already begun: massive changes to human and natural systems caused by human alteration of the atmosphere. The degree to which the next act is tragic or triumphant depends primarily on how quickly humans reduce concentrations of greenhouse gasses. We hope our modest contributions will help produce adaptation actions that will complement these crucial mitigation actions. We thank Doris Duke Charitable Foundation for supporting a 2013 workshop on conserving the stage and for defraying publication charges for this special section. We thank S. Nichol and an anonymous reviewer for reviewing all papers in the special section. Workshop participants included D. Ackerly, C. Albano, F. Albuquerque, B. Benito, A. Bowman, T. Brooks, C. Burns, S. Buttrick, P. Comer, M. Cross, D. Diamond, S. Dobrowski, K. Elowe, D. Faith, J. Forrest, J. Gill, N. Heller, J. Hjort, A. Keeley, J. Lawler, H. Possingham, B. Pressey, E. Sanderson, C. Schloss, M. Shaffer, P. Sutcliffe, J. Tirpak, J. Watson, and ourselves.