Book review: A comprehensive foundation for the application of biogeography to conservation

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ISSN 1948‐6596 news and update Woodroffe, C.D. (1992). Mangrove sediments and geo‐ morphology. In: Tropical mangrove ecosystems (ed. by A.I. Robertson and D.M. Alongi), pp.7– 41. American Geophysical Union, Washington. Edited by Markus Eichhorn book review A comprehensive foundation for the application of biogeogra‐ phy to conservation Conservation biogeography, by Richard J. Ladle and Robert J. Whittaker (editors) 2011, Blackwell Publishing, 301 pp. ISBN: 9781444335033 Price: £95 (Hardback) / £34.95 (Paperback); http://eu.wiley.com/ It is becoming increasingly clear that the diversity of plant and animal species in the world is con‐ tinuing to decline in spite of ambitious targets set by governments to prevent this (Butchart et al. 2010). It is also becoming evident that the contin‐ ued functioning of ecosystems depends on this diversity (Isbell et al. 2011). In order to conserve what is left of biodiversity, it is crucial that we un‐ derstand the diversity of life and how it is distrib‐ uted across the biomes and ecosystems of the world. Since understanding the distribution of bio‐ diversity is a central tenet of biogeography, it seems obvious that the field of biogeography should be of central importance in conservation. In this volume, Richard Ladle and Robert Whittaker bring together chapters by a number of biogeographers to summarise progress to date in applying the principles of biogeography to conser‐ vation and to identify areas where there is still work to be done. The book is a comprehensive but digestible summary of the field of conservation biogeography and should make essential reading, not only for the students at whom it is primarily aimed, but also for more experienced scientists. The editors profess at the outset that the aim was to achieve a degree of coherence among the chapters, an aim that is achieved remarkably well to give a very coherent text. The first section of the book provides a brief but interesting history of the conservation move‐ ment and the contrasting values held by different sectors of this movement (Chapters 2 and 3), as well as some background to the field of conserva‐ tion biogeography (Chapter 1). A distinction is made between approaches that focus on the com‐ position of biological communities and those that focus on ecosystem function through an under‐ standing of ecosystem processes such as nutrient cycling (p. 31). An interesting and growing field in ecology, which receives little attention in the book, uses the functional traits of species to ex‐ plain the link between the composition of biologi‐ cal communities and the function of the ecosys‐ tems that contain them. Functional traits – such as body mass, diet, habitat affinity and development mode of animals, and height and photosynthetic pathway of plants – can help explain how species contribute to the processes underlying the func‐ tioning of ecosystems and can also help in predict‐ ing how ecosystems will respond to environ‐ mental change (McGill et al. 2006). The second section reviews our current un‐ derstanding of the distribution of biodiversity, summarises the history of the global protected areas network and describes the methods avail‐ able for more systematically representing biodi‐ versity in future extensions to this network. There is a strong terrestrial focus here, indeed through‐ out the entirety of the book, which the authors acknowledge and which is owing to a less com‐ plete understanding of the distribution of diversity in the oceans and in freshwater habitats. It is worth noting, though, that the Census of Marine Life, an ambitious $650 million project that fin‐ ished recently, has made huge progress towards understanding the biogeography of the oceans frontiers of biogeography 3.3, 2011 — © 2011 the authors; journal compilation © 2011 The International Biogeography Society