conservation
conservation, study of the loss of Earth’s biological diversity and the ways this loss can be prevented. Biological diversity, or biodiversity, is the variety of life either in a particular place or on the entire planet Earth, including its ecosystems, species, populations, and genes. Conservation thus seeks to protect life’s variety at all levels of biological organization.
(Read E.O. Wilson’s Britannica essay on mass extinction.)
Species extinction is the most obvious aspect of the loss of biodiversity. For example, species form the bulk of the examples in a comprehensive assessment of the state of the planet published in the early 21st century by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, an international effort coordinated by the United Nations Environment Programme. The subject of conservation is broader than this, however. Even a species that survives extinction can lose much of its genetic diversity as local, genetically distinct populations are lost from most of the species’ original range. Furthermore, ecosystems may shrink dramatically in area and lose many of their functions, even if their constituent species manage to survive. Conservation is involved with studying all these kinds of losses, understanding the factors responsible for them, developing techniques to prevent losses, and, whenever possible, restoring biodiversity.
Conservation is a crisis discipline, one demanded by the unusual rates of loss; it is also a mission-driven one. By analogy, ecology and conservation have the same relationship as physiology and medicine. Human physiology studies the workings of the human body, whereas medicine is mission-oriented and aims to understand what goes wrong and how to treat it. The major parts of this article thus deal first with the “pathology” of extinction—why and how biodiversity is lost—and second with the “treatment” methods to prevent these losses.
Conservation is often considered a purely biological topic, as exemplified by major scientific journals with titles such as Conservation Biology and Animal Conservation as well as college textbooks with such titles as Principles of Conservation Biology and Essentials of Conservation Biology. However, because the underlying cause of the loss of biodiversity is increasing human activity, conservation must inevitably involve human interactions. Many of the techniques to prevent the loss of biodiversity involve issues of economics, law, social sciences, and religion—all of which are covered by the journals and textbooks cited above.
The “pathology” section of this article begins by documenting the losses of species. In doing so, it shows that a set of common factors are responsible; these are then individually identified and discussed. The final part of the section demonstrates that some species and ecosystems are much more likely to lose biodiversity than others. The other main division, the “treatment” section, considers a variety of “therapies” that address the problems identified in the first section.
The pathology of extinction
Rates of natural and present-day species extinction
According to the best estimates of the world’s environmental experts, human activities have driven species to extinction at rates perhaps 1,000 times the natural, or background, rate, and future rates of extinction will likely be higher. To show how the experts arrived at these conclusions, it is necessary to pose and attempt to answer a series of extremely difficult questions. How many species are there? How fast were species disappearing before human activity became pervasive? How fast are they becoming extinct at present? And finally, it is necessary to ask a further question: What does the future hold for extinctions if current trends continue?
| group | number of living species | number of extinctions per indicated time period (in years) | extinctions per million species per year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recent extinctions | |||
| *Predictions of future extinctions for all species, as published by various authors since about 1980, range between 1,000 and 10,000 extinctions per million species per year. | |||
| Principal source: S.L. Pimm et al., "The Future of Biodiversity," Science 269:347–350 (1995). | |||
| birds (described 1800–99) | 7,079 | 39/100 | 55 |
| mammals | 4,300 | 60/200 | 70 |
| reptiles | 4,700 | 20/200 | 21 |
| frogs and toads | 4,000 | 5/25 | 50 |
| freshwater clams | 1,082 | 21/100 | 194 |
| Future extinctions* | |||
| birds | 10,000 | 1,200/100 | 1,200 |
| mammals | 4,300 | 650/100 | 1,512 |
| reptiles | 4,700 | 210/100 | 447 |
| frogs and toads | 4,000 | 89/100 | 223 |
| freshwater clams | 1,082 | 120/100 | 1,109 |
How many species are there?
Any absolute estimate of extinction rate, such as extinctions per year, requires knowledge of how many species there are. Unfortunately, this number is not known with any great degree of certainty, and the problems of estimating it are formidable. Taxonomists have described—that is, have given names to—about 1.9 million species. Only about 100,000 of them, comprising terrestrial vertebrates, some flowering plants, and attractive and collectible invertebrates such as butterflies and snails, are popular enough for taxonomists to know well. Birds are exceptionally well known; there are roughly 10,400 bird species, with only 1 or 2 new species being added each year.
Those who describe species cannot always be certain that the specimen in hand has not been given a name by someone else in a different country and sometimes even in a different century. Consequently, some taxonomic groups may have more names assigned to them than constituent species, which would result in erroneously high species estimates. Potentially much more serious as a source of error is the fact that some species groups have relatively few named members compared with the numbers that experts think exist in those groups. For example, taxonomists have only sparsely sampled some potentially rich communities, such as the bottom of the deep ocean and the canopies of rainforests.
One estimate of how many species might still be undescribed involves a comparison of fungi and flowering plants (angiosperms). In Great Britain, where both groups are well known, there are six times as many named species of fungi as of flowering plants. If this ratio applies worldwide, the world total of about 300,000 species of flowering plants, which are fairly well known globally, predicts a total of about 1.8 million species of fungi, which are not. Other mycologists estimate that there may be between 2.2 million and 3.8 million total species. Only about 144,000 species of fungi currently have names.
For insects, there are about 1 million described species, yet estimates of how many insect species exist are often around 5.5 million.
An obvious concern follows regarding the usefulness of such calculations as a basis for assessing the loss of species. Any absolute estimate of species extinctions must be extrapolated from the 100,000 well-known species of living plants and animals, to the roughly 1.5 million described species, to the likely grand total of very roughly 8.7 million. However, if the potential number of bacteria species are included, some estimates reach as high as 1 trillion species. Because of uncertainties about the total number of living species, published statements regarding the total number of species that become extinct per year or per day can vary a hundredfold.
Another approach to assessing species loss is to derive relative estimates—estimates of the proportion of well-known species that become extinct in a given interval. Estimating such proportions is the basis for the remainder of the discussion on rates of extinction, but it raises a critical concern of its own—namely, are these proportions actually typical of the great majority of species that are still undescribed? They are likely to be so if extinction rates in widely different species groups and regions turn out to be broadly similar.
There also is another way in which estimates of extinctions can be made relative. Extinctions have always been a part of Earth’s history. It is possible to make any estimates of massive future extinction relative to that history.