Although in some ways the SLOSS debate may seem like a dead end, there are several important points to remember:
- The suggestion that a single large reserve was preferable emerged from a respectable, legitimate body of ecological understanding. Just as ecologists and evolutionists have often followed blind alleys, conservationists can be expected to. In fact, you could argue that if we don't occasionally make mistakes we are avoiding difficult problems.
- Reserve designs must serve a purpose. Reserves designed to protect plant diversity may be entirely different in character from those designed to protect vertebrate diversity. Reserves designed to protect exemplary natural communities will have a focus different from those designed to protect an endangered species.
- Reserve designs are more frequently guided by where elements of concern occur than by a priori theories about the best configuration of preserves. A little common sense, some basic biological and ecological awareness, and a little information about an area allow you to make an informed judgement about where to draw preserve boundaries.13 Just as importantly, however, we must remember how little information our initial decisions are based on and jump at the chance to change them as new information becomes available.
- Nodes, networks, and MUMs
- An approach to designing systems of reserves to enhance the effectiveness of the ensemble [7]
- Node - An area with an unusually high conservation value.
- Network - A system of corridors to allow movement among nodes, since nodes will rarely be large enough to allow persistence of low-density organisms.
- MUMs (Multiple Use Modules) - A central, well-protected core surrounded by areas of increasingly greater human impact.
Let's return to the five-step process I outlined earlier:
- What are the elements of concern?
- Where are the elements of concern found?
- How large must the preserve be to serve its purpose?
- What features of the preserve must be protected/managed to allow the elements to persist in the area?
- How large a buffer zone is required to prevent/reverse degradation of the primary habitat?
You'll notice that the abstract ideas I talked about a few minutes ago acutally play very little role in this list. What that suggests to me, however, isn't that the abstract concepts are useless. If they were, I wouldn't have troubled you with them. What it suggests is that problems are often site-specific (and taxon-specific) and that concrete applications of the abstract concepts will depend on those site-specific features. Furthermore, most of the questions that must be answered during the course of putting together a reserve design must be answered with very little information available. Still, there are several important things to realize:
- The reserve design is never fixed - or at least is should never be fixed. It should always be open for amendment and improvement as new information becomes available. New threats to the primary habitat may require larger or more stringently enforced buffer zones. Unexpectedly vigorous population recoveries in target species may lessen the need for interventionist management and monitoring.
- Even though decisions about reserve boundaries often seem arbitrary and ill-founded - Should we draw the line up this ridge or that ridge? - the results are based on such fundamental properties - soil types and distribution, geological and hydrological features, the geographical location of known populations of species of concern - that even if we were to study an area in detail for fifteen or twenty years, the eventual boundaries that we drew would likely be almost identical to those that we draw based on our ``gut'' feelings. After all, those gut feelings integrate a lot of knowledge and understanding of the natural world - knowledge and understanding that we too often underestimate and undervalue.
Answers to all your Biology Questions
