Understanding the role and value of experience for environment conservation

Abstract

This thesis is an exploration of the nature of environmental conservation and how more effective conservation practice can be achieved. Much of the context of the thesis stems from a desire to develop a personal understanding of the relative contributions of science and experience for informing conservation management. This desire grew from my own previous experience of conservation work where there were always difficulties obtaining relevant information and translating it into a form in which it could be applied effectively. In many cases, significant gaps in information meant that relying on experience and good judgement was often the only possible way forward. While the thesis concentrates on developing understanding about the nature, role and value of experience, an additional personal aim was to broaden my understanding about conservation issues generally, and of other disciplines and research methods. To represent the personal development of understanding about conservation and experience, chapters are presented in the order in which they were written or data collected. The thesis is therefore not intended to be a linear progression through theory, data collection, analysis and interpretation of results. Instead, chapters have been written as stand-alone pieces of work, and were generally completed before beginning the next chapter. Later chapters would not have been conducted without insights from previous ones, and diagrams in some of the sections are used to clarify interconnections between chapters. Because the thesis relies on insights from a wide range of disciplines, it does not conform to the traditional biological scientific study. All of the main chapters, including the synthesis, have been written with publication in mind: Chapters 2-3 are in press; Chapters 5 and 7 have been submitted to journals; and Chapters 4, 6 and 8 are in preparation and will be submitted by April 2005. In addition, Appendices I-III are publications that have been written during the course of the PhD. These papers do not relate directly to the central theme of the thesis, but they have contributed to my understanding about environmental conservation and the development of appropriate conservation theory. Becanse the main chapters are intended to be stand-alone pieces of work which were written with particular journals in mind, the chapters have minor stylistic differences. For example, some chapters nse U.K. spelling and others American, and chapters may use either the tenn "environmental conservation" or "conservation biology". Because the chapters stand-alone, some repetition between chapters was unavoidable