The Contribution of Population and Community Biology to Conservation Science

We often think of conservation science as a product of this decade, especially of the last three or four years . The incorporation two years ago of the Society for Conservation Biology and the appearance last year of its journal, Con­ servation Biology, are a response not only to the sense of urgency in dealing with an imminent catastrophic loss of biological diversity but also to the perception that various scientific developments have quickly crystallized a full-fledged science, as opposed to a loosely allied group of partially relevant sciences and technologies (43 , 1 78). However, conservation science did not really spring fully armed from genetics and ecology as Athena did from the head of Zeus. It has developed gradually, though it has accelerated and shifted focus in the last decade, and it is still in its infancy. Why, then, the widespread view that the entire field is a very recent development? It is because most older literature in conservation science rests on the study of habitats and autecology, a distinctly secondary aspect of the new science. The primary focus of the new conservation science was originally equilibrium island biogeography; and it has now evolved to the study of minimum viable population analysis and metapopulations . There are older antecedents of these topics , but these are not clearly connected in our minds with the current fervor, which dates from papers in 1 974 and 1975 (34, 63, 1 9 1 , 1 92, 2 14) based on ideas of disputed provenance (2 1 2) deriving from the dynamic equilibrium theory of island biogeography ( 1 1 3, 1 14) . Earlier

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