Pragmatic population viability targets in a rapidly changing world
By Lochran W. Traill, Barry W. Brook, R. Frankham, Corey J. A. Bradshaw. 2010
286 citations recorded by the source corpus.
To ensure both long-term persistence and evolutionary potential, the required number of individuals in a population often greatly exceeds the targets proposed by conservation management. We critically review minimum population size requirements for species based on empirical and theoretical estimates made over the past few decades. This literature collectively shows that thousands (not hundreds) of individuals are required for a population to have an acceptable probability of riding-out environmental fluctuation and catastrophic events, and ensuring the continuation of evolutionary processes. The evidence is clear, yet conservation policy does not appear to reflect these findings, with pragmatic concerns on feasibility over-riding biological risk assessment. As such, we argue that conservation biology faces a dilemma akin to those working on the physical basis of climate change, where scientific recommendations on carbon emission reductions are compromised by policy makers. There is no obvious resolution other than a more explicit acceptance of the trade-offs implied when population viability requirements are ignored. We recommend that conservation planners include demographic and genetic thresholds in their assessments, and recognise implicit triage where these are not met.
Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b083c8c0668d5f604e82a55303057e35d8141149
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In Ecological Modeling
In Nature and Landscape Conservation
Citations in the corpus
- Genetic and demographic population management in zoos and aquariums: recent developments, future challenges and opportunities for scientific research (2011, background): “…has often been overlooked in international conservation policy implementation (Laikre, 2010), for the setting of population viability targets (Traill et al., 2010) and in more commercially orientated captive-breeding operations [e.g. stock enhancement programmes for fish (Taniguchi, 2003;…”