Protecting species
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For species that are hunted or collected, direct protection may be an essential conservation tool. National laws, such as the Endangered Species Act in the United States, make collecting or killing an endangered species or threatened species illegal. An example of such a protected species in the United States is the country’s national bird, the bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus). International laws protect whales of various species, and such agreements as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species prohibit commercial trade in designated species. Enforcing these laws and conventions is another matter, however.
The problems of implementing protection are illustrated by the conservation of the two African species of rhinoceros. The population of the black rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis) fell to about 2,400 individuals in 1995, down from a likely number of several hundred thousand at the start of the 20th century, when it ranged over most of southern Africa. The white rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum) historically had a smaller geographic range. Today its northern subspecies occurs only in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where it is very rare. The southern subspecies lives almost entirely in South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and Kenya. Together, they numbered under 12,000 in 2001, again likely a small fraction of their original numbers.
Although conversion of habitat land to agricultural use and sport hunting caused the earlier rhino declines, the major threat is now poaching—entering reserves where the animals are protected and killing them for their horns, which are in high demand in parts of the world for dagger handles and, in powdered form, as an ingredient of traditional medicines. The costs of protecting rhinos are considerable. WWF has estimated that it costs $1,400 per square km ($3,600 per square mile) per year to detect and deter poaching. Reserves that hold rhinos often cover tens of thousands of square kilometres; the multimillion-dollar budgets required are beyond the means of many African governments.
Removing invasive species
Many conservation programs have tackled invasive species, and, once again, the message from the two case studies that follow is that, although these programs can be successful, they are often expensive.
As previously described, introduced domestic cats have caused the extinction of many island species. In the 1970s scientists estimated that the cat population on Marion Island, one of the two Prince Edward Islands in the subantarctic Indian Ocean, was killing 450,000 seabirds each year, jeopardizing the birds’ survival. The cats, which were estimated to number at least 2,000, were descended from five animals brought to the island in 1949 to deal with a mouse problem at a meteorological station there. Islands are small and isolated, and because cats are predators, they tend to have much smaller populations than their prey. Nonetheless, it took 19 years of an intensive eradication program to remove the last cats.
The second case study is the purple loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria), a plant that has overrun thousands of square kilometres of North American wetlands, replacing the naturally diverse vegetation of grasses, sedges, and other wetland plants. It is native to Europe and was introduced into North America in the early 1800s. It now occurs across most of the continental United States and is most prevalent in the northeastern and north-central part of the country and in Canada.
Like other exotic weeds, purple loosestrife can spread rapidly. Control measures have included the use of herbicides and the release of herbivorous insects, including different species of beetles that eat the leaves, roots, and seeds of the plant. The latter strategy, an instance of biological control, is not risk-free. It involves introducing a second nonnative species to control a nonnative species introduced earlier. The effects of the insect introductions have not always been clear, and, as with other examples of biological control, there is a danger that the introduced herbivorous insects will harm native plant species.
Introducing species
The introductions of Texas pumas into the Florida panther population and of captive-reared condors back into parts of their original habitat were successful, as discussed above. So were the introductions to North America of the starling, also discussed above, and the house sparrow (Passer domesticus), which was introduced to New York City from Europe in the 1850s. What is often overlooked, however, is that many other attempts have failed. This in fact is the typical result.
For example, after extensive efforts in the 19th and early 20th centuries to introduce nonnative game birds to the United States, it was found that, even with releases of large numbers of birds, most of the attempts failed. An exception has been the common, or ring-necked, pheasant (Phasianus colchicus), native to China and introduced to the United States in the 1890s. This low rate of success has an important implication—even when it is known from hindsight that an individual introduction can succeed, as did the pheasant, most such introductions still will fail. When returning species to the wild that have already gone extinct there, the prognosis is even bleaker. One reason in some cases is that the cause of the extinctions—for instance, the brown tree snake responsible for bird extinctions on Guam—is still present.
Habitat protection
Because the loss of habitat is the primary reason that species are lost both locally and globally, protecting more habitat emerges as the most important priority for conservation. This simple idea raises difficult questions. Which habitats should be protected? And because it seems unlikely that all habitats can be protected, which ones should receive priority?
If reserves were judiciously placed over the identified hot spots of biodiversity, the special places where vulnerable species are concentrated, a large fraction of species might be saved. Presently, the allocation of reserves around the world is poor. Reserves larger than 100,000 square km (40,000 square miles) are generally in high mountains, tundras, and the driest deserts, areas that are not particularly species-rich. On the other hand, hot spots such as Madagascar and the Philippines protect less than 2 percent of their land.
The same kinds of questions hold on smaller scales, as illustrated by a study reported in the late 1990s. The Agulhas Plain at the southern tip of Africa is one of the world’s “hottest” spots for concentrations of vulnerable plant species. An area only some 1,500 square km (600 square miles) in size was found to house 1,751 plant species, 99 of them endemic. Whereas most of the state forests and private nature reserves in the area are coastal, most of the hot spot’s endemic plants live inland. Given that new reserves must be created if these plants are to survive, where should they be situated to encompass the maximum number of species at minimum cost?
Fortunately, the data available to make these decisions included a knowledge of the distribution of plant species over the Agulhas Plain in fairly good detail—the kind of information not likely to be available in most hot spots. This allowed the plain’s plant-species composition to be divided into a grid of cells, each 3 × 3 km on a side. Computer algorithms (systematic problem-solving methods) were then used to select sets of cells from the grid according to their complementary species composition—that is, the aim was to encompass as many species or as many endemics as possible in as small an area (as few grid cells) as possible.
Naively applied, these algorithms will not give useful results. For example, the sites they select may not be available for reserves. Also, the choice of too small a cell size can lead to the selection of protected areas containing populations so small and widely scattered that they would be unlikely to persist. This is fittingly dubbed the “Noah’s Ark effect,” because the ark held only two individuals of each species for a short time. Reserves need to be large enough to support species indefinitely. The choice of a cell size of 3 × 3 km is politically feasible because reserves of this size already have been established in the region and are probably ecologically sensible for many plant species. Other factors had to be included in the final selection of cells. Some areas are unsuitable for various reasons—for instance, some are overrun by invasive plants, while others are mostly in urban areas or croplands. In contrast, other areas are particularly desirable—for example, they may be adjacent to existing reserves, and it is easier to expand such reserves than to create new ones. The results of this study thus provided advice for establishing reserves that combined ecological information on species distribution with practical and political considerations.
Saving the most species for the least money likewise was the consideration that motivated another study published in the late 1990s, of which counties in the United States should be conservation priorities. An earlier study that attempted to locate sites for new reserves in the United States had equated efficiency with the minimum number of counties needed to achieve a given coverage of endangered species. That approach would have been sensible if land were much the same price everywhere. Unfortunately, the study’s targets had included counties encompassing San Diego, Santa Cruz, and San Francisco in California, Honolulu in Hawaii, and certain counties in Florida, all of which are among the highest-priced land in the country. The later study asked how many species could be protected for a given total cost. It found that considerable savings in cost per species accrue from selecting larger, more-complementary areas and lower total costs and that, as a consequence of this approach, the places identified for protection were often quite different from those recommended in the earlier study.
Habitat connections
Habitats that are not completely destroyed may be fragmented to the degree that individual fragments are too small to hold viable populations of many species—they may suffer from inbreeding or the increased demographic risks previously discussed. Yet in total the fragments may actually be of sufficient area to support these species. An obvious conservation intervention is to find ways of connecting fragments by wildlife corridors. These corridors can be created from currently unprotected land between existing reserves or by restoring land between existing habitat fragments.
Many contemporary efforts to create corridors are small-scale; they can be as simple as hedgerows that connect woodlots, a strategy that likely works for some small species. Other efforts are far more ambitious. One of the earliest large efforts involved a plan to connect various parks and other protected areas in Florida by corridors of land that would have to be purchased or otherwise protected from development. From this initial effort, a conservation group, the Wildlands Project, has developed an extensive set of plans for many areas in North America intended to set priorities for the acquisition of land for a mosaic of corridors that would eventually link together large parts of the continent.
A regional example of corridor creation is in Costa Rica. Situated in the Caribbean lowlands, La Selva Biological Station is one of the major centres for research on tropical forests. Occupying an area of about 16 square km (6 square miles), the station is bordered on the south by Braulio Carrillo National Park, a much larger area of forest covering 460 square km (180 square miles). The national park extends to La Selva through a forest corridor that descends in elevation from nearly 3,000 metres (nearly 10,000 feet) at Barva Volcano down to 35 metres (115 feet) above sea level at La Selva. The corridor had been threatened by agricultural development until conservation groups, realizing that La Selva would become an isolated forest “island,” purchased the corridor to protect it.