Author:
Cowling R. M.,Pressey R. L.
Abstract
Systematic conservation planning is a branch of conservation
biology that seeks to identify spatially explicit options for the
preservation of biodiversity. Alternative systems of conservation areas
are predictions about effective ways of promoting the persistence of
biodiversity; therefore, they should consider not only biodiversity
pattern but also the ecological and evolutionary processes that
maintain and generate species. Most research and application, however,
has focused on pattern representation only. This paper outlines the
development of a conservation system designed to preserve biodiversity
pattern and process in the context of a rapidly changing environment.
The study area is the Cape Floristic Region (CFR), a biodiversity
hotspot of global significance, located in southwestern Africa. This
region has experienced rapid (post-Pliocene) ecological diversification
of many plant lineages; there are numerous genera with large clusters
of closely related species (flocks) that have subdivided habitats at a
very fine scale. The challenge is to design conservation systems that
will preserve both the pattern of large numbers of species and various
natural processes, including the potential for lineage turnover. We
outline an approach for designing a system of conservation areas to
incorporate the spatial components of the evolutionary processes that
maintain and generate biodiversity in the CFR. We discuss the
difficulty of assessing the requirements for pattern versus process
representation in the face of ongoing threats to biodiversity, the
difficulty of testing the predictions of alternative conservation
systems, and the widespread need in conservation planning to
incorporate and set targets for the spatial components (or surrogates)
of processes.
Publisher
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Cited by
127 articles.
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