Managing landscapes

In a recent review, David Lindenmayer and a long list of distinguished conservation biologists review two decades of research on landscape management [3]. They identify a set of 13 factors that anyone managing a landscape for conservation should consider, and they group those factors under four boad themes: setting goals, spatial issues, temporal issues, and management approaches.

• Setting goals
  • Develop long-term shared visions and quantifiable objectives.

• Spatial issues
  • Manage the entire mosaic, not just the pieces.

  • Consider both the amount and configuration of habitat and particular land cover types.

  • Identify disproportionately important species, processes, and landscape elements.

  • Integrate aquatic and terrestrial environments.

  • Use a landscape classification and conceptual models appropriate to objectives.

• Temporal issues
  • Maintain the capability of landscapes to recover from disturbances.

  • Manage for change.

  • Time lags between events and consequences are inevitable.

• Management approaches
  • Manage in an experimental framework.

  • Manage both species and ecosystems.

  • Manage at multiple scales.

  • Allow for contingency.

That set of factors pretty well covers the issues conservation managers have to consider, but there's one task for conservation managers that neither this list nor our discussion so far has dealt with explicitly--designing a conservation reserve system.