Conservation ecologists face a conundrum, as many have pointed out before. As scientists we do not make policy. Most conservation problems are essentially a moral issue of dealing with conflicts in goals and allowable actions. Both the United States and Canada have endangered species legislation in which action plans are written for species of concern. In the USA species of concern are allotted some funding and more legal protection than in Canada, where much good material is written but funding for action or research is typically absent. What is interesting from an ecological perspective is the list of species that are designated as endangered or threatened. Most of them can be described colloquially as the “charismatic megafauna”, species that are either large or beautiful or both. There are exceptions of course for some amphibians and rare plants, but by and large the list of species of concern is a completely non-random collection of organisms that people see in their environment. Birds and butterflies and large mammals are at the head of the list.
All of this is fine and useful because it is largely political ecology, but it raises the question of what will happen should these rescue plans for threatened or endangered species fail. This question lands ecologists in a rather murky area of ecosystem function, which leads to the key question: how is ecosystem function affected by the loss of species X? The answer to this question depends very much on how you define ecosystem function. If species X is a plant and the ecosystem function measured is the uptake of CO2 by the plant community, the answer could be a loss of function, no change, or indeed an increase in CO2 uptake if species X for example is replaced by a weed that is more productive that species X. The answer to this simple question is thus very complicated and requires much research. For a hypothetical example, plant X may be replaced by a weed that fixes more CO2, and thus ecosystem function is improved as measured by carbon uptake from the atmosphere. But the weed may deplete soil nitrogen which could adversely affect other plants and soil quality. Again more data are needed to decide this. If the effect size is small, much research could provide an ambiguous answer to the original question, since all measurement involves errors.
So now we are in a box, a biodiversity conundrum. The simplest escape is to say that all species loss is undesirable in any ecosystem, a pontification that is more political than scientific. And, for a contrary view, if the species lost is a disease organism, or an insect that spreads human diseases, we will not mourn its passing. In practice we seem to agree with the public that the species under concern are not all of equal value for conservation. The most serious outcome of this consideration is that where the money goes for conservation is highly idiosyncratic. There are two major calls for funding that perhaps should not be questioned: first, for land (and water) acquisition and protection, and second, for providing compensation for the people whose livelihoods are affected by protected areas with jobs and skills that improve their lives. The remaining funds need to be used for scientific research that will further the cause of conservation in the broad sense. The most useful principle at this stage is that all research has a clear objective and a clear list of what outcomes can be used to judge its success. For conservation outcomes this judgement should be clear cut. Currently they are not.
When Caughley (1994) described the declining population paradigm and the small population paradigm he clearly felt that the small population paradigm, while theoretically interesting, had little to contribute to most of the real world problems of biodiversity conservation. He could not have imagined at the time how genetics would develop into a powerful set of methods of analysis of genomes. But with a few exceptions the small population paradigm and all the elegant genetic work that has sprung from it has delivered a mountain of descriptive information with only a molehill of useful management options for real world problems. Many will disagree with my conclusion, and it is clear that conservation genetics is a major growth industry. That is all well and good but my question remains as to its influence on the solution of current conservation problems (Caro 2008; Hutchings 2015; Mattsson et al. 2008). Conservation genetic papers predicting extinctions in 100 years or more based on low levels of genetic variation are not scientifically testable and rely on a law of conservation genetics that is riddled with exceptions (Nathan et al. 2015; Robinson et al. 2016). Do we need more untestable hypotheses in conservation biology?
Caro, T. 2008. Decline of large mammals in the Katavi-Rukwa ecosystem of western Tanzania. African Zoology 43(1): 99-116. doi:10.3377/1562-7020(2008)43[99:dolmit]2.0.co;2.
Caughley, G. 1994. Directions in conservation biology. Journal of Animal Ecology 63: 215-244. doi: 10.2307/5542
Hutchings, J.A. 2015. Thresholds for impaired species recovery. Proceedings of the Royal Society. B, Biological sciences 282(1809): 20150654. doi:10.1098/rspb.2015.0654.
Mattsson, B.J., Mordecai, R.S., Conroy, M.J., Peterson, J.T., Cooper, R.J., and Christensen, H. 2008. Evaluating the small population paradigm for rare large-bodied woodpeckers, with Implications for the Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Avian Conservation and Ecology 3(2): 5. http://www.ace-eco.org/vol3/iss2/art5/
Nathan, H.W., Clout, M.N., MacKay, J.W.B., Murphy, E.C., and Russell, J.C. 2015. Experimental island invasion of house mice. Population Ecology 57(2): 363-371. doi:10.1007/s10144-015-0477-2.
Robinson, J.A., Ortega-Del Vecchyo, D., Fan, Z., Kim, B.Y., and vonHoldt, B.M. 2016. Genomic flatlining in the endangered Island Fox. Current Biology 26(9): 1183-1189. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2016.02.062.
One of the often overlooked implications of a focus on ecosystem services is that rare species — those close to extinction — are rendered almost irrelevant. Most ecosystem services are provided by the dominant, abundant species. Local extirpation of rare species seldom causes noticeable change in ecosystem-level processes, apart from unusual cases of keystone mutualists.
Markus raises an interesting point that’s often discussed informally but not often directly addressed in the literature. My usual response is that in the main we lack the data to know whether or not species that are common now have always been, and will always be, common. And conversely, whether currently rare species will always remain rare. If it’s not already been done there must be scope for a systematic review of this question.