Abandoning Holocene Dreams: Proactive Biodiversity Conservation in a Changing World

Abstract

Although species have always shifted their ranges, the rapid pace of current biophysical changes and the further complications imparted by human land use provide unprecedented challenges for biodiversity conservation. As a result, goals, methods, and strategies are being reconceptualized. For example, the terms conservation and wilderness protection, and their associated practices, seem to be static and simplistic compared to the challenges of managing novel species assemblages in unique climatic and disturbance regimes. A more proactive approach is developing that builds in the needed adaptations as biophysical change progressed; that would need to consider possible nonlinear ecosystem changes, with threshold effects and ecological surprises; that might force a reconsideration of the goals of ecological restoration; and that might require management of lands today for goals that could be quite different in 50 to 100 years. As examples, this could require such potentially controversial activities as planting trees outside their ranges so that they could serve as part of wildlife habitat in several decades, using prescribed burns, or bringing some species into captivity or botanical gardens until reintroduction becomes feasible. With the Anthropocene providing a potential new label for the current epoch and ongoing research providing new insights into disturbance regimes and successful conservation practices, it is appropriate to rethink implications for sustainability and human–nature relationships in general and for biodiversity in particular.