Berger, Joel

Redford, Kent H.

Zack, Steve

English

University of Montana

University of Montana ScholarWorks at University of Montana Biological Sciences Faculty Publications Biological Sciences 4-2013 Abundance as a Conservation Value Kent H. Redford Joel Berger University of Montana - Missoula, joel.berger@mso.umt.edu Steve Zack Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umt.edu/biosci_pubs  Part of the Biology Commons Let us know how access to this document benefits you. Recommended Citation Redford, Kent H.; Berger, Joel; and Zack, Steve, "Abundance as a Conservation Value" (2013). Biological Sciences Faculty Publications. 44. https://scholarworks.umt.edu/biosci_pubs/44 This Editorial is brought to you for free and open access by the Biological Sciences at ScholarWorks at University of Montana. It has been accepted for inclusion in Biological Sciences Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks at University of Montana. For more information, please contact scholarworks@mso.umt.edu. Abundance as a conservation valueK E N T H . R E D F O R D , J O E L B E R G E R and S T E V E Z A C KEuropean colonists described an abundance of spawningriver herring Alosa pseudoharengus in north-eastern UScoastal waterways ‘in such multitudes as is almostincredible, pressing up such shallow waters as will scarcepermit them to swime [sic]’ (Wood [1634] 1977, in Hall et al.,2012).A curious thing has happened to conservation biology.Many of us were inspired by our experiences withlarge groups of wild animals—be they in flocks, herds, orschools—and in many case drawn to conservation as aprofession because of such experiences. And we havebeen increasingly educated through the work of historicalecologists on sliding baselines about how the abundance weencountered in our youth was nothing compared to theabundance of decades or centuries ago. Yet the discipline weembrace rarely considers abundance but instead has focusedmuch of its attention and passion on loss, rarity, endanger-ment, minimum viable population sizes, and minimumviable conservation areas.Lost in this focus on the rare and endangered is attentionto that phenomenon that inspired many of us—abundance.Abundance of species was a part of the experience ofEuropeans in many of the lands they settled. Not only havewe had ample experience with abundance but also with thespeed at which it can be lost: the collapse of Americanchestnut Castanea dentata that went from one of the mostabundant trees in the north-eastern USA to extinct in amatter of decades. Or the passenger pigeon Ectopistesmigratorius and North American bison Bison bison both ofwhich collapsed from populations of tens of millions toeither extinct or a few hundred animals. More recently wehave come to understand the nature of the collapse of onceincredibly abundant marine species, from oysters to seaturtles to cod and river herring (Jackson et al., 2011).These collapses are not just historical but have beenoccurring recently all around the world. The Madagascarradiated tortoise Astrochelys radiata was considered one ofthe world’s most abundant tortoises and but is now almostextinct (Hudson, 2011). A similar pattern has been seen inrecent collapses of once abundant Asian vultures, caribou,forest elephants, sharks and the European horse chestnutAesculapius hippocastanum. But despite evidence both fromhistory and contemporary experience the conservationcommunity has concentrated on species that are alreadyendangered and has not seriously considered still abundantspecies to have a value for conservation.When we refer to abundance wemean not just the overallnumber of individuals but also the diversity of individualswithin a group. Evidence shows that there is a great deal ofvariation between individuals within large populations andthat this variation can be of significant behavioural andecological import (Hutchinson, 2008; Redford & Feinsinger,2001). Abundance is not only lots of the same but lots ofdifferences as well.We suggest there are four major reasons for conserva-tionists to care about the phenomenon of abundance.Firstly, wildlife in abundance, sometimes referred to aswildlife spectacles, helps inspire us and builds connectionswith the natural world. Numerous travel agencies andmediaorganizations advertise the chance to experience or seewildlife in abundance, be it flamingos, coral reef fish, baldeagles, monarch butterflies or wildebeest. Many of thesescenes are the ones that inspire conservationists and theirsupporters.Secondly, abundance is itself an ecological feature thatmaintains other species— including humans—and ecosys-tems (Gaston, 2011). Examples are numerous and reasonablywell-documented, including forest elephants as seeddispersers, mound-building termites structuring commu-nities, bees as pollinators, fish as sources of human food andconveyors of marine nutrients inland, and wolves indirectlyas ecosystem engineers through trophic-level interactions.Thirdly, and increasingly well understood, abundantspecies provide many vital ecosystem services on whichnature and we rely. These include water filtration by oysters(Ermgassen et al., 2013), nutrient transport by salmon andriver herring (Gende et al., 2002; Hall et al., 2012), nutrientcycling and herbivory by wildebeest (Holdo et al., 2006) andocean mixing by a variety of organisms from krill to fish(Kerr, 2006).Finally, it seems likely that it is easier in cost, and inmanagement effort, to maintain abundance in wildlifepopulations than it is to keep once abundant and now rarespecies from extinction. Abundance is a buffer fromperturbation whereas rarity is perpetual vulnerability.In the face of these strong reasons why has abundancenot become an explicit conservation value? Strong argu-ments have been made in a set of important papers byKENT H. REDFORD Archipelago Consulting, Irvington NY 10533 USA. E-mailredfordkh@gmail.comJOEL BERGER Department of Organismic Biology and Ecology, University ofMontana, Missoula, Montana, USASTEVE ZACK Wildlife Conservation Society, Portland, Oregon, USA© 2013 Fauna & Flora International, Oryx, 47(2), 157–158 doi:10.1017/S0030605313000331Gaston (2010, 2011) and Gaston & Fuller (2007), presenting aset of arguments similar to ours for ‘common’ species. Yet,these papers have not achieved the influence they should.Instead, we in the conservation community continue withbusiness as usual, illustrated by a recent paper by McCarthyet al. (2012), who measured achieving global biodiversityconservation targets as the conservation actions needed toachieve the minimum improvement in status necessary toreclassify (‘downlist’) each species to the next lowestcategory of extinction risk on the IUCN Red List. Ratherthan measuring our success as the decreased extinction riskof one category shouldn’t we act to return large numbers ofthese species? We know this would cost more in the shortterm but should we ask for what we really want, or what wethink will be supported?We have created a global system, the IUCN Red List,which locks us into a focus on rarity and endangerment.This then informs the prioritization of those ecosystems(e.g. Hot Spots) or sites (e.g. Alliance for Zero Extinctionsites) that contain these species. And all the while abundantspecies and the ecosystems containing them are becomingless abundant (Gaston, 2011; Lindenmayer et al., 2011). Thisis an approach that has been described as practisingmedicine only at the door of the emergency room of thehospital and wondering why the number of patients keepsgrowing.Wemust broaden our focus on threatened species by alsocreating priority programmes to keep still abundant speciesabundant. Species such as the guanaco Lama guanicoe ofsouthern South America, the Mongolian gazelle Procapragutturosa, the white-eared kob Kobus kob lucotis ofSouthern Sudan, the migratory catfish of the Amazon, andthe greater flamingo Phoenicopterus roseus. And we mustexpand the definition of ‘recovery’ so that success is not justdemographic recovery but the recovery of abundance(Redford et al., 2011). Efforts directed at the Americanbison are a good example of this (Sanderson et al., 2008).A good start in this direction was made at the Jeju WorldConservation Congress, where IUCN decided to work ondeveloping a Green List for species that will classify ‘fullyconserved’ species—those that exist in ecologically signifi-cant numbers and interact fully with other species in theirecosystem. This begins the important process of broadeningconservation away from a single focus on extinction andloss—an approach that may be an ineffective way to changepublic perception and engagement (Ladle & Jenson, 2010)—and adding abundance, a focus that will motivate andinspire the public towards conservation action.ReferencesERMAGASSEN, P.S.E., SPALDING, M.D., GRIZZLE, R.E. &GRUMBAUCH, R.D. (2013) Quantifying the loss of a marineecosystem service: filtration by the eastern oyster in US estuaries.Estuaries and Coasts, 36, 36–43.GASTON, K.J. (2010) Valuing common species. Science, 327, 154–155.GASTON, K.J. (2011) Common ecology. BioScience, 61, 354–362.GASTON, K.J. & FULLER, R.A. (2007) Commonness, populationdepletion and conservation biology. Trends in Ecology andEvolution, 23, 14–19.GENDE, S.M., EDWARDS, R.T., WILLSON, M.F. & WIPFLI , M.S. (2002)Pacific salmon in aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. BioScience, 52,917–928.HALL, C.J., JORDAAN, A. & FRISK, M.G. (2012) Centuries ofanadromous forage fish loss: consequences for ecosystemconnectivity and productivity. BioScience, 62, 723–731.HOLDO, R.M., HOLT, R.D., COUGHENOUR, M.B. & RITCHIE, M.E.(2006) Plant productivity and soil nitrogen as a function of grazing,migration and fire in an African savanna. Journal of Ecology, 95,115–128.HUDSON, R. (2011) Madagascar’s tortoises under siege.Connect Magazine. March 2011, 18–21.HUTCHINSON, W.F. (2008) The dangers of ignoring stock complexityin fishery management: the case of the North Sea cod.Biology Letters, 4, 693–695.Jackson, J.B.C., Alexander, K.E. & Sala, E. (2011) (eds) ShiftingBaselines. The Past and the Future of Ocean Fisheries. Island Press,Washington, DC, USA.KERR, R.A. (2006) Creatures great and small are stirring the ocean.Science, 313, 1717.LADLE, R.J. & JEPSON, P. (2010) Origins, uses, and transformationof extinction rhetoric. Environment and Society: Advances inResearch, 1, 96–115.LINDENMAYER, D.B., WOOD, J.T., MCBURNEY, L., MACGREGOR, C.,YOUNGENTOB, K. & BANKS, S.X. (2011) How to make a commonspecies rare: a case against conservation complacency.Biological Conservation, 144, 1663–1672.MCCARTHY, D.P., DONALD, P.F., SCHARLEMANN, J.P.W.,BUCHANAN, G.M., BALMFORD, A., GREEN, J.M.H. et al. (2012)Financial costs of meeting global biodiversity conservation targets:current spending and unmet needs. Science, 338, 946–949.REDFORD, K.H., AMATO, G., BAILLIE, J., BELDONENICO, P.,BENNETT, E.L. & CLUM, N. et al. (2011) What does it mean tosuccessfully conserve a (vertebrate) species? BioScience, 61, 39–48.REDFORD, K.H. & FEINSINGER, P. (2001) The half-empty forest:sustainable use and the ecology of interactions. In Conservationof Exploited Species (eds J.D. Reynolds, G.M. Mace, K.H. Redford& J.G. Robinson) pp. 370–399. Cambridge University Press,Cambridge, UK.SANDERSON, E.W., REDFORD, K.H.,WEBER, B., AUNE, K., BALDES, D.,BERGER, J. et al. (2008) The ecological future of the North Americanbison: conceiving long-term, large-scale conservation of wildlife.Conservation Biology, 22, 256–266.Wood, W. (1977) New England’s Prospect. Ed. A.T. Vaughan.University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, USA. [originallypublished 1634].158 K. H. Redford et al.© 2013 Fauna & Flora International, Oryx, 47(2), 157–158

Abundance as a Conservation Value

https://scholarworks.umt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1059&amp;context=biosci_pubs

Abundance as a Conservation Value

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

University of Montana