When the job is managing for a single threatened or endangered species, the focus of planning is clear: Maintain the current population(s) or the meta-population by managing habitat condition and maintaining connectivity among subpopulations. Similarly, conserving a wetland community is straightforward: Maintain the current condition, prevent encroachment and limit sediment and pollutants from entering the system. However, when one is given the task of conserving the biodiversity on an installation, the challenges mount up fast. Experience has shown managers the importance of identifying a limited number of conservation targets on which to focus planning and management efforts; you cannot plan for everything in isolation. The key is to identify and focus management on a limited number of conservation targets. These targets should capture the ecological diversity of the installation, and the variability of seral states inherent in each system.
Biodiversity conservation targets are a limited number of species, natural communities, or entire ecological systems that natural resource managers select to represent the biodiversity of a conservation landscape or protected area, and that therefore serve as the foci of conservation investment and measures of conservation effectiveness. Thus, conservation targets are simply those ecosystems, communities, or species upon which to focus planning and management efforts.
Because only a handful of targets are used to plan for biodiversity conservation, selecting the appropriate suite of targets is crucial to successful conservation planning and adaptive management. The reasoning behind such use of limited elements of focal biodiversity is richly addressed in the literature (see for example Noss and Cooperrider 1994, Christensen et al. 1996, Schwartz 1999, Poiani et al. 2000, Carignan and Villard 2002, Sanderson et al. 2002).
Thus, structured planning requires a winnowing of a relatively few key components —a.k.a. conservation targets—from the universe of possible options within the installation. The integrity, or viability, of each of these targets is defined by identifying those attributes that contribute to the target’s persistence. Thus, a team that is planning for conservation at an installation could follow the following sequence to identify its targets for planning:
- Examine coarse and fine filter conservation elements and their nesting relationships.
- Aggregate the coarse filter targets, as appropriate vis-à-vis land management. For example, pocket wetlands (small constructed systems, usually designed to aid in stormwater control) may be most effectively managed as part of the larger upland matrix.
- Determine those species that are not captured and assess whether they require special attention, including wide-ranging species.
- Finalize the list of targets to be the minimum sufficient set to capture all required species, and important systems.
- Assess current integrity for each target, and if possible, how that integrity may have been changing over time.
- Based on the assessments, explicitly state the goals, management actions and desired outcomes for each of these conservation targets.
This last step can often lead to gridlock because it either feels overwhelming, or results in resource management plans that are so detailed and constrained that they can never be implemented. Managers from many agencies, and from many countries, have been experimenting with creating ways to make it more rigorous and less of an art. The successful adaptive manager can call on several tools to assist in his or her job. Three of these are the conceptual ecological models, ecological integrity assessment, and effective targeted monitoring, all three of which are described in more detail in Chapter 8.
Next Page: Assessing threats to biodiversity
Author
Bob Unnasch, Ph.D.
Sound Science LLC
Planning for biodiversity conservation
Planning for biodiversity conservation