What Is Natural? The Need for a Long-Term Perspective in Biodiversity Conservation

By K. Willis, Harry John Betteley Birks. Science, 2006

660 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Ecosystems change in response to factors such as climate variability, invasions, and wildfires. Most records used to assess such change are based on short-term ecological data or satellite imagery spanning only a few decades. In many instances it is impossible to disentangle natural variability from other, potentially significant trends in these records, partly because of their short time scale. We summarize recent studies that show how paleoecological records can be used to provide a longer temporal perspective to address specific conservation issues relating to biological invasions, wildfires, climate change, and determination of natural variability. The use of such records can reduce much of the uncertainty surrounding the question of what is “natural” and thereby start to provide important guidance for long-term management and conservation.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/68ffd7bad9e6d2bcd384b3e1813554fe31eb40e1

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Citations in the corpus

Invasion of Norway spruce (Picea abies) and the rise of the boreal ecosystem in Fennoscandia (2009, background): “2003; Willis & Birks 2006; Gillson et al .”
Predicting the future of species diversity: macroecological theory, climate change, and direct tests of alternative forecasting methods (2009, background): “First, historically calibrated models, whose performance can be evaluated through time before projecting into the future, are more likely to provide accurate predictions of global change (White and Kerr 2006, Willis and Birks 2006, Kerr et al. 2007, Nogués-Bravo et al. 2008).”
Past and future range shifts and loss of diversity in dwarf willow (Salix herbacea L.) inferred from genetics, fossils and modelling (2009, background): “There is now an increased awareness of the importance of assessing the impact of ongoing and future climate change on genetic diversity as well as on geographic ranges of species (Hampe & Petit, 2005; Petit et al ., 2005; Willis & Birks, 2006).”
Population decline assessment, historical baselines, and conservation (2010, background): “Population declines are often studied on a short-term ecological time scale, but it can also be informative to examine population trends on long-term evolutionary time scales through fossils and genetics (Willis & Birks 2006).”
EcoVeg: a new approach to vegetation description and classification (2014, background): “…and dynamic nature of vegetation, modelers of both climate and land-cover changes also recognize the merits of describing the dynamics of vegetation types (Leemans 1997, Williams et al. 2000, Mitchell 2005, Willis and Birks 2006, Beckage et al. 2008, Chiarucci et al. 2010, Williams and Baker 2011).”
BA3‐SNPs: Contemporary migration reconfigured in BayesAss for next‐generation sequence data (2019, background): “Both approaches effectively promote biodiversity management by facilitating the integration of conservation policies at the regional level (Willis & Birks, 2006).”