How can a knowledge of the past help to conserve the future? Biodiversity conservation and the relevance of long-term ecological studies

Abstract

This paper evaluates how long-term records could and should be utilized in conservation policy and practice. Traditionally, there has been an extremely limited use of long-term ecological records (greater than 50 years) in biodiversity conservation. There are a number of reasons why such records tend to be discounted, including a perception of poor scale of resolution in both time and space, and the lack of accessibility of long temporal records to non-specialists. Probably more important, however, is the perception that even if suitable temporal records are available, their roles are purely descriptive, simply demonstrating what has occurred before in Earth's history, and are of little use in the actual practice of conservation. This paper asks why this is the case and whether there is a place for the temporal record in conservation management. Key conservation initiatives related to extinctions, identification of regions of greatest diversity/threat, climate change and biological invasions are addressed. Examples of how a temporal record can add information that is of direct practicable applicability to these issues are highlighted. These include (i) the identification of species at the end of their evolutionary lifespan and therefore most at risk from extinction, (ii) the setting of realistic goals and targets for conservation 'hotspots', and (iii) the identification of various management tools for the maintenance/restoration of a desired biological state. For climate change conservation strategies, the use of long-term ecological records in testing the predictive power of species envelope models is highlighted, along with the potential of fossil records to examine the impact of sea-level rise. It is also argued that a long-term perspective is essential for the management of biological invasions, not least in determining when an invasive is not an invasive. The paper concludes that often inclusion of a long-term ecological perspective can provide a more scientifically defensible basis for conservation decisions than the one based only on contemporary records. The pivotal issue of this paper is not whether long-term records are of interest to conservation biologists, but how they can actually be utilized in conservation practice and policy.

Engaging with geodiversity—why it matters

“…Palaeoenvironmental data can provide a detailed understanding of these changes and inform the range of potential options for management and/or restoration, in effect "learning from the past" (Anderson et al, 2006;Dearing, 2006;Dearing et al, 2006;McCarroll, 2010;Newman et al, 2010). While there are unlikely to be any exact analogues for a future warmer world, Quaternary palaeoenvironmental records, in particular, are important in understanding how climate, physical processes, sea level and habitats have changed in the past and enabling informed evaluation of scenarios of future change over different temporal and spatial scales (Willis and Birks, 2006;Willis et al, 2007Willis et al, , 2010Froyd and Willis, 2008;Davies and Bunting, 2010). For example, comparison of UKCP09 relative sea-level rise rates with those for the mid-and late-Holocene allows a means of scaling potential future coastline changes (Gehrels, 2010;Rennie and Hansom, 2011), and changes in slope stability, sediment production, landform distributions and floodplain and wetland histories can provide pointers for future catchment responses (Higgitt and Lee, 2001;Lane et al, 2007;Macklin et al, 2010).…”

Biogeography and conservation in Southeast Asia: how 2.7 million years of repeated environmental fluctuations affect today’s patterns and the future of the remaining refugial-phase biodiversity

“…Biogeographic regionalism: history as a guide to the future Understanding of the history of hotspots, refugia and biogeographic transitions is important for making projections about the future evolution and distribution of the biota and its conservation (Willis et al 2007). The transitions between Sundaland and Wallacea (discussed above), between Sundaland and the Philippines (see Heaney 2004), and between Indochina and the Palearctic (Corlett 2009a) are reasonably well known and will not be discussed further here.…”

Vegetation changes in the Neotropical Gran Sabana (Venezuela) around the Younger Dryas chron

“…Recently, emphasis has been placed on vegetation changes linked to rapid climate shifts, which has been useful in proposing future scenarios of climate change (Solomon et al, 2007;Willis et al, 2007). The Younger Dryas (YD) was an abrupt cooling recorded between about 12.85 and 11.65 k cal a BP, between the Bølling/Allerød (B/A) interstadial and the period of early Holocene warming (EHW) in the Northern Hemisphere (Rasmussen et al, 2006).…”