Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
(Forbes and Theberge 1996). Over a period of thirteen years, fully 56 per-
cent of all Algonquin Park wolves were killed by humans after they migrated
out of the park; and 70 percent of those killed were potentially reproduc-
tive individuals (Forbes and Theberge 1996).The wolves, (a species that re-
produce at a rate of 15 to 25 percent per year), do not have the reproductive
capacity to compensate for the high mortality and so could be at risk of ex-
tinction.
The human-wolf conflict arises for several reasons. Failure to consider
landscape dynamics means that the park is too small to contain a viable year-
round population that depends on a reliable prey base. In other words, the
park was established to protect a collection of species rather than to pro-
tect an ecosystem in which there are myriad lines of dependency among
species. Consequently, the park boundary does not contain the complete
range of critical habitats used by various species that depend on each other.
Also, regulations for wolf protection differ inside and outside the park. Pro-
tecting predators leaving the park is viewed as encroaching on the rights
and safety of surrounding residents. Clearly, the problem isn't the park by
itself, but what happens within the land matrix surrounding the park.A sim-
ilar plight occurs for large carnivores in and around the national parks
within the Rocky Mountain region of North America (Carroll et al. 2004)
and for lions in the Gir Forest of India (Saberwal et al. 1994).As we learned
in chapters 1 and 6, the loss of such apex predators from ecosystems can pre-
cipitate loss of species diversity in those systems. Thus, loss of just one
species—but one with a critical functional role in an ecosystem—can con-
found well-intentioned efforts to conserve concentrations of biodiversity
(Soulé et al. 2005).
Ecologists are increasingly realizing that they need to solve the extinction
debt problem not by establishing more parks but by recognizing that ecosys-
tems often extend beyond park boundaries.Thus, one must be strategic about
linking conservation efforts within parks to the land base outside of them.
One strategy, in particular, is to con-
sider enfranchising local peoples in
conservation and allowing different
forms of human land use both within
and around parks. Many different
strategies have been proposed in two
broad categories: indigenous reserves
and extraction reserves (Box 9.1).
An indigenous reserve strategy rec-
ognizes and respects this history
and thus protects a way of life as
well as the species diversity that is
part of that landscape.
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