Atlantic Forest

Exercise 16: Prioritizing Areas for Conservation
Module 16: Conservation Biology: Mediation, Restoration, and Preservation

Your Questions

1. What factors represent the greatest threat to species?
2. How do we decide what areas to conserve?
3. How and why is GIS a useful tool in conservation biology?

Background and Lecture Outline

Conservation Biology

The current mass extinction of species all over the Earth, possibly larger than any of the previous five extinctions in geological history, is caused by us. (A page with many links discussing mass extinctions and biodiversity is available here.) Conservation biology would not be necessary if human populations were not so large and still increasing and if all humans valued the natural environment to other ends than there own needs. Unfortunately for biodiversity, most people value the forest for the commodities and benefits to humans. Most people do not think in terms of conserving and maximizing renewable natural resources. So conservation activists are left with the task of walking a thin line between maximizing what is good for endangered species and still enabling human demands, which daily become greaters.

An ideal way to conserve natural lands is to put together all available information to help politicians and land managers make quality, informed decisions. Conservation biologists gather this information in much of the same way that we have in this course. They need to understand what is required to sustain individuals and populations of a species. They need to understand where each species fits within a community and how disparate individuals, populations, and communities function on spatial and temporal scales. They need to know about the abiotic conditions that affect the species and their habitat. Finally, they need to consider other pressures on survival of species such as exotics, pollution, disturbance, and habitat fragmentation.

GIS and Conservation Biology

GIS (or Geographic Information Systems) provides a display, database and spatial analysis tool for combining all of this information, extracting the desired information, and providing analysis and maps so that actions can be taken. We can integrate the needs of one or many species with the demands of human populations to determine the most viable solution to a given conservation concern. GIS is often used for its simplest function, that of creating and displaying maps after querying a database - this is also what we will do today. However, GIS is more powerful when combined with other tools (e.g., PVA) resulting in complex models. An excellent example of the complex use of GIS in conservation biology is found here

Your Assignment

Your assignment involves the following tasks: