Making a Case for the Hobby-Decentralized Species Reseves

Read this article last weekend and thought about how hobbyists could help to create the species reserves he talks about in it.

Anthony D. Barnosky, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley wrote:

"For decades a "one-stop-shopping" approach to nature conservation worked: save enough wild land and you automatically save all the species within it, their interactions and the beauty we can find in nature. In the Age of Global Warming, that one-stop shopping approach will likely fail.

To save endangered species in a warming world we may be forced to move species trapped in places that are changing too quickly for them to survive. Already, conservation scientists are discussing plans for "assisted migrations," in a Noah's Ark approach.

Prevailing ecological wisdom says introduced species do more harm than good; yet, what is the right choice when moving a species would save it from extinction?

Perhaps an even bigger conundrum is that moving species around is exactly the opposite of what is required to save the "real thing" of nature -- places where the land, animals and plants evolve without a heavy human hand.

Resolving this conflict will require two separate-but-equal kinds of nature reserves. "Species reserves" will be the Noah's Arks that save certain species, even when the feeling of the wild has to be sacrificed. "Wildland reserves" will be places where we simply let nature take its course in this new age, even as we watch individual species within them disappear and other species find their way in.

Redefining our concept of nature reserves and moving species about to save them may seem odd and will no doubt be controversial, just as slowing global warming itself has been. But the other choice is to do nothing and watch the problem with pizzlies play out again and again, until nature as we know it disappears."

Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09256...#ixzz0SGgkOqCP