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Between 1949 and 1955, the State Department pushed for an international fisheries policy grounded in maximum sustainable yield (MSY). The concept is based on a confidence that scientists can predict, theoretically, the largest catch that can be taken from a species’ stock over an indefinite period. And while it was modified in 1996 with passage of the Sustained Fisheries Act, MSY is still at the heart of modern American fisheries management. As fish populations continue to crash, however, it is clear that MSY is itself not sustainable. Indeed, the concept has been widely criticized by scientists for ignoring several key factors in fisheries management and has led to the devastating collapse of many fisheries. This book reveals that the fallibility of MSY lies at its very inception—as a tool of government rather than science. The foundational doctrine of the MSY emerged at a time when the US government was using science to promote and transfer Western knowledge and technology, and to ensure that American ships and planes would have free passage through the world’s seas and skies. The author charts the history of US fisheries science using MSY as her focus, and in particular its application to halibut, tuna, and salmon fisheries. Fish populations the world over are threatened, and this book will help sound warnings of the effect of any management policies divested from science itself.

Today, many zoos promote the preservation of biodiversity as a significant part of their mission. As “arks” for endangered species and, increasingly, as leaders in field conservation projects such as the reintroduction of zoo-born animals to the wild, they’re preparing to play an even more important role in attempts to save species in this century. The intensification of these efforts, however, presents a number of practical and strategic challenges for zoos and aquariums as they seek to balance an expanding conservation mission alongside their more traditional recreation and entertainment pursuits. It also raises important questions about the science, values, and historical traditions informing a growing zoo and aquarium conservation agenda in the coming decades. The Ark and Beyond is an authoritative, interdisciplinary volume focused on the past, present, and future of zoo and aquarium conservation, emphasizing the intersection of academic and practitioner perspectives. Its contributors, four-dozen in all, are among the most respected scholars and zoo professionals working today; all of whom have offered uniquely informed perspectives on the challenges and possibilities of zoo and aquarium conservation in an age of accelerating social and ecological change. Together, the chapters explore the meaning and significance of conservation practice in and by zoos and aquariums, and consider how a deeper understanding of the traditions feeding into this effort might be absorbed into key discussions in conservation history, life science ethics, zoo biology, animal studies, and related fields.

In recent decades, hundreds of millions of acres of militarized landscapes around the world have transitioned to new purposes of wildlife conservation. These land use changes offer valuable opportunities for new approaches to environmental protection, but also carry cautionary lessons about military impacts, historical erasure, and how to guide ecological restoration in landscapes with complex cultural and natural histories. This book examines a number of these sites, ranging from relatively unknown wildlife refuges in the United States to internationally-renowned areas such as the Iron Curtain borderlands of Europe and the Demilitarized Zone of the Korean Peninsula. These emerging sites of conservation must accomplish seemingly antithetical aims: rebuilding and protecting ecosystems, or restoring life, while also commemorating the historical and cultural legacies of warfare and militarization. The book examines how military activities, conservation goals, and ecological restoration efforts come together - at times disconcertingly - to create new kinds of places and foster new kinds of relationships between humans and the environment.

As our world becomes increasingly urbanized, an understanding of the context, mechanisms, and consequences of city and suburban environments becomes more critical. Without a sense of what open spaces such as parks and gardens contribute, it is difficult to argue for their creation and maintenance: in the face of schools needing resources, roads and sewers needing maintenance, and people suffering at the hands of others, why should cities and counties spend scarce dollars planting trees and preserving parks? This book demonstrates the value of urban green. Focusing specifically on the role of vegetation and trees, the book shows the costs and benefits reaped from urban open spaces, from cooler temperatures to better quality ground water—and why it all matters. While this book is a work of science, it does not ignore the social component. The book looks at low-income areas that have poor vegetation, and shows how enhancing these areas through the planting of community gardens and trees can alleviate social ills.

For far too long humans have been ignoring nature. As the most dominant, overproducing, overconsuming, big-brained, big-footed, arrogant, and invasive species ever known, we are wrecking the planet at an unprecedented rate. And while science is important to our understanding of the impact we have on our environment, it alone does not hold the answers to the current crisis, nor does it get people to act. This book argues that we need a new mind-set about nature, one that centers on empathy, compassion, and being proactive. This book centers on compassionate conservation, a growing global movement that translates discussions and concerns about the well-being of individuals, species, populations, and ecosystems into action. The chapters combine the most creative aspects of the current science of animal conservation with analyses of important psychological and sociocultural issues that encourage or vex stewardship. The chapters tackle topics including the costs and benefits of conservation, behavioral biology, media coverage of animal welfare, conservation psychology, and scales of conservation from the local to the global.

The New World has been connected to and separated from distant lands by five land bridges that during the late Cretaceous and Cenozoic periodically served as barriers and pathways for migration: the Bering Land Bridge, the North Atlantic Land Bridge, the Antillean Land Bridge, the Central American Land Bridge, and the Magellan Land Bridge. New World land bridges constitute an important means whereby organisms interchanged and separated from those of adjacent lands explaining some widespread similarities and disjunct distributions (e.g., between eastern Asia and eastern North America). Other factors in addition to physiographic and climatic conditions through time include former (early) positions of continents, edaphic features of the target and source areas, pathogens, pollinators, and the distribution potential of the propagules allowing for dispersal over, around, and through the connections (e.g., by birds, migrating land animals, wind, and marine currents). Understanding the complexity of past and present distributions (e.g., of plants) requires a comprehensive array of methods with results interpreted within the broadest context of geological, climatological, and biological (faunal) information for adequate explanation.

This book examines the problem of living sustainably with large carnivores (wolves, grizzly bears and mountain lions). The book includes case studies of practical experiences with large carnivore conservation in settings ranging from Arizona through Greater Yellowstone to Yukon, featuring several highly innovative and successful local initiatives. We use the interdisciplinary tools of the policy sciences to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of governance in each case and make practical recommendations for improvement. We draw lessons from the cases about how to reform governance and conservation so that people and large carnivores can survive on the landscape together for the long term. The case studies are followed by chapters that identify common themes, synthesize lessons, and analyze the problems of large carnivore conservation from a broader perspective.

The average kilometer of tropical rainforest is teeming with life; it contains thousands of species of plants and animals. As this book reveals, many of the most colorful and eye-catching rainforest inhabitants—toucans, monkeys, leaf-nosed bats, and hummingbirds to name a few—are an important component of the infrastructure that supports life in the forest. These fruit-and-nectar eating birds and mammals pollinate the flowers and disperse the seeds of hundreds of tropical plants, and unlike temperate communities, much of this greenery relies exclusively on animals for reproduction. Synthesizing recent research by ecologists and evolutionary biologists, this book demonstrates the tremendous functional and evolutionary importance of these tropical pollinators and frugivores. It sheds light on how these mutually symbiotic relationships evolved and lay out the current conservation status of these essential species.

This book is about the identification and interpretation of nature’s large-scale patterns of species co-occurrence and what we can deduce from them about how nature works. We present Diamond’s assembly rules. He suggested that similar species avoid each other, choosing different islands or, on large islands, different elevations within an island, for no better explanation than to avoid each other. Diamond concentrated on birds in two island groups off New Guinea—the Solomons and the Bismarcks. Diamond’s ideaswere vigorously challenged by those who suggested the patterns were simply chance occurrences. In a series of papers, some argued that Diamond’s assembly rules were poorly constructed and that, moreover, his observations did not support them. Certainly, critics made an important contribution to the study of ecological patterns by requiring observed distributions to be compared to carefully constructed null hypotheses. Developing appropriate statistical methods to analyze these patterns in nature is difficult, though it is now a solved problem. We confirm patterns of mutual exclusivity in some island groups, though not all. Finally, we extend these ideas to species along elevational gradients and to applications involving food webs.

This book brings tropical regenerating forests into clear focus, synthesizing information from hundreds of studies of forest regeneration following different types and intensities of disturbance across different regions and forest types. Chapter 1 illustrates different perceptions of tropical forests, and discusses the extent of regenerating forests across tropical regions. Chapters 2 and 3 explore the legacies of ancient human occupation and land uses in the tropics. Forest dynamics (Chapter 4) reflect responses to disturbances at a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. Chapter 5 provides a broad conceptual overview of successional patterns and phases in tropical forests. Four chapters review forest regeneration following different types of disturbances, including newly created substrates (Chapter 6), agricultural land use (Chapter 7), hurricanes and fires (Chapter 8), and logging (Chapter 9). The functional traits that influence vegetation dynamics during succession are described in Chapter 10. Chapter 11 focuses on the recovery of ecosystem processes, such as carbon and nutrient accumulation in soils and vegetation. Regenerating forests provide habitats for a large proportion of forest-dwelling animal species that disperse seeds, pollinate flowers, and drive trophic interactions (Chapter 12). Chapter 13 describes approaches to active reforestation to overcome barriers to natural regeneration. Chapter 14 examines the socio-ecology of regenerating forests from a landscape perspective. Chapter 15 concludes with an overall synthesis and emphasizes the value of tropical regenerating and restored forests. The book's major message is that understanding, promoting, and managing forest regeneration are key to sustaining tropical forests worldwide.

Serengeti National Park is one of the world's most diverse ecosystems, a natural laboratory for ecology, evolution, and conservation, with a history that dates back at least four million years to the beginnings of human evolution. The third of a series, this book is the result of a long-term integrated research project that documents changes to this unique ecosystem every ten years. Bringing together researchers from a wide range of disciplines—ecologists, paleontologists, economists, social scientists, mathematicians, and disease specialists—this volume focuses on the interactions between the natural system and the human-dominated agricultural system. By examining how changes in rainfall, wildebeest numbers, commodity prices, and human populations have impacted the Serengeti ecosystem, the book concludes that changes in the natural system have affected human welfare just as changes in the human system have impacted the natural world. To promote both the conservation of biota and the sustainability of human welfare, the book recommends community-based conservation and protected-area conservation. The book presents a look at the conservation status of one of earth's most renowned ecosystems.

Deforestation was one of the defining features of the late 20th century, but forest recovery is one of the surprising dynamics of the 21st. New research in ecology, geography, anthropology, archaeology and history are recasting received ideas about the pasts of forests, how people used and shaped them, and the implications of this complex environmental history for understanding how forested landscapes unfold today. This innovative collection draws together distinguished analysts from all over the world, and from the natural and social sciences to reflect on forests past, present and future. The authors illuminate the interactions between humans and landscapes in the creation of forests as both human artifact and habitat -- and emphasize that forest landscapes incarnate social as well as biotic processes. They clarify the importance of ideologies and iconography of forests, imagined and actual histories, institutional arrangements, competing knowledge systems and economic structures in shaping how we understand the “natures” of forests and how these now inform our woodland practices and politics. Current trends reveal surprising new forest frontiers in urban and agricultural contexts, in deforested “sacrifice” zones like the Sahel and El Salvador. The forest landscapes we think of today as empty, wild, and “natural” often have humanized “pre-histories” that are often less far in the past than we imagine with political, institutional and violence shaping the transitions that underpin them. This collection provides an overview of the complexities, trajectories and surprising socio-natures of forested ecosystems.

Contradictory land management policies dating to the mid-19^th century resulted in today’s patchwork of public, private, and tribal land ownership and land use in the American West. Such boundaries create challenges for maintaining undeveloped, ecologically healthy working landscapes such as forests and ranchlands. Resource agencies, people who make their living off the land, environmentalists, developers, and recreationists frequently find themselves at odds over land-management decisions. However a movement toward collaborative conservation has resulted in communities working together to find solutions that respect all the parties involved. Policies and programs such as conservation easements and estate taxes can help or hurt efforts to conserve and maintain working landscapes and their biodiversity, and developing concepts, such as payments for ecosystem services, show promise as the basis for new policies. Numerous case histories illustrate how individual communities have approached their particular challenges of protecting forest lands and ranches to sustain their ability to support the local economy while also protecting the environmental resources. Implementing a variety of approaches for land conservation and economic sustainability, with flexibility to modify them, improves the likelihood of success. As well, local involvement, inclusion of all parties in decision-making, long-term commitments by agency personnel, and willingness to innovate and adapt to changing circumstances contribute to the movement that is stitching the West back together.

Straddling temperate forests and grassland biomes and stretching along the coastline of two Great Lakes, Wisconsin contains tallgrass prairie and oak savanna, broadleaf and coniferous forests, wetlands, natural lakes, and rivers. But, like the rest of the world, the Badger State has been transformed by urbanization and sprawl, population growth, and land-use change. For decades, industry and environment have attempted to coexist in Wisconsin—and the dynamic tensions between economic progress and environmental protection make the state a fascinating microcosm for studying global environmental change. This book brings together scientists, naturalists, and policy experts to examine how human pressures on Wisconsin's changing lands, waters, and wildlife have redefined the state's ecology. Though the chapters here focus on just one state, the text draws conclusions about changes in temperate habitats that can be applied elsewhere, and offer insights into the future of the ecology, conservation, and sustainability of Wisconsin and beyond.

In the life sciences, there is wide-ranging debate about biodiversity. While nearly everyone is in favor of biodiversity and its conservation, methods for its assessment vary enormously. So what exactly is biodiversity? Most theoretical work on the subject assumes that it has something to do with species richness—with the number of species in a particular region—but in reality, it is much more than that. Arguing that we cannot make rational decisions about what it is to be protected without knowing what biodiversity is, this book offers a theoretical and conceptual exploration of the biological world and how diversity is valued. The authors explore not only the origins of the concept of biodiversity, but also how that concept has been shaped by ecology and more recently by conservation biology. They explain the different types of biodiversity important in evolutionary theory, developmental biology, ecology, morphology, and taxonomy, and conclude that biological heritage is rich in not just one biodiversity but many. The authors also explore the case for the conservation of these biodiversities using option value theory, a tool borrowed from economics.