Your correspondent is all for scientific progress, but biologists have spent about 15 years trying to determine how best to set conservation priorities. Although the science has improved over the years, the continued emphasis on what to save, rather than how to do it, seems like cataloguing deck chairs on the Titanic. Biologists are still running modelling experiments to determine whether to save the Wedgwood or leaded crystal as the house smoulders and timbers fall from the roof.That's how Green.view (from The Economist) sees it.
I haven't spent a lot of time studying the reserve design litereature (I only have one lecture about it in my course, after all), but my experience in Connecticut tells me that's right. Over a decade ago I helped start a short-lived collaboration among scientists and consevation organizations called the Connecticut Biodiversity Forum. At one of these meetings I remember going over a list of priority habitats and sites for conservation protection. After the meeting Dick Goodwin came up to me and pointed out that the list we'd just developed was almost identical to one he, Bill Niering, and other early leaders of The Nature Conservancy had developed for the state in the early 1950s.
Of course if we start making decisions now we'll make some mistakes. Of course we could make better decisions if we had better data. But that's not the choice facing us. The more time we spend gathering data on what we ought to save, the less of it there is to save. It's not a question of doing a poor job now when we could do a better job later. It's a question of saving something while there's still something to save. It's past time to devote at least as much effort to figuring out how to save the places that remain as we spend oo deciding which places to save.
1Thanks to Luigi for the pointer.
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