From wiephy@PRAXIS.deepsprings.edu Mon Jun 1 06:48:24 1998 Received: from mxu1.u.washington.edu (mxu1.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.8]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.8.4+UW97.07/8.8.4+UW97.05) with ESMTP id GAA55960 for ; Mon, 1 Jun 1998 06:48:23 -0700 Received: from praxis.deepsprings.edu (praxis.deepsprings.edu [192.100.16.225]) by mxu1.u.washington.edu (8.8.4+UW97.07/8.8.4+UW97.09) with ESMTP id GAA28196 for ; Mon, 1 Jun 1998 06:48:19 -0700 Received: from praxis.deepsprings.edu.deepsprings.edu (192.100.16.233) by praxis.deepsprings.edu with SMTP (Apple Internet Mail Server 1.0); Mon, 1 Jun 1998 06:50:55 -0800 Message-Id: <3.0.5.32.19980601064940.007a3df0@deepsprings.edu> X-Sender: wiephy@deepsprings.edu X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Light Version 3.0.5 (32) Date: Mon, 01 Jun 1998 06:49:40 -0700 To: consbio@u.washington.edu From: Jack Murphy and Caroline Wiecking Subject: re: Pattern versus process in conservation Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Dear fellow conservation biologists; It was great reading a post to this newsgroup that invites true discussion - thanks, Russell. Your arguments in favor of weighting geographic pattern over ecologic process in conservation may have merit if one restricts one's focus to single-species management, or maybe even to multiple species management if all the species considered have the same pattern of geographic distribution. However, I have a problem with single-species approaches. Since communities are usually composed of many, poorly understood species, I'm afraid single-species approaches are politically inefficient and, often, ineffective at conserving community structure. On the other hand, weighting processes is a reasonable approach to providing the greatest good to the greatest number of species. You might invoke the umbrella or keystone concept to support a geographic distribution approach, but I suspect most single-species approaches do little to protect non-charismatic groups such as fungi and invertebrates (which might ultimately contribute more to ecosystem stability anyway). Ecological processes act as "umbrellas", too. Even if you take a geographic distribution approach, you're stuck with the problem of unequal distribution patterns among species. While there are many classic examples of similar patterns (based on common biogeographic history), there are also examples of dissimilar patterns - the changing distributions of plant species in eastern North America after the last ice age is one. Again, I stress that we have almost no information about the vast majority of species and that focussing on single species neglects most of the biota. Because of the emphasis placed on single-species by lawmakers here in the USA, a single-species approach is often the best we can do within our existing legal framework; however, we should also look at the big picture and consider ways to adopt new legislative approaches to better reflect paradigm shifts in conservation. cheers, Jack ****************************** Jack Murphy Assistant Professor of Biology & Dean of Faculty Deep Springs College HC 72 Box 45001 Deep Springs, California via Dyer, NV 89010 Note: Our Internet connection fails frequently; if your message to me is returned, please try sending it again. phone: (760) 872-4473 x 38 fax: (760) 872-4466 .