Goals of a conservation reserve

By now you're probably tired of hearing me say harp on this them, but the first task in designing a reserve must be to decide what that reserve is for--an example of my ``If you don't know where you're going you'll probably end up somewhere else'' principle. So what are the goals of a conservation reserve? Soulé and Simberloff [12] identified three:

1. Conservation of large, intact, functioning ecosystems,

2. Conservation of areas with high biological diversity, and

3. Conservation of species or groups of species of special interest.

To these three reasons, I would add two more:

4.

Conservation of significant natural communities.

5.

Conservation of important ecosystem services.¹