Geoscience Reference
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The Conservation Paradox
In the past few centuries, our own species has arguably initiated a new geological epoch, the
Anthropocene, defined by changes in climate, land cover, and biodiversity abundance and
distribution in response to anthropogenic land-use, resource consumption, industrializa-
tion, and intensive production (Figure 1.1) (Steffen et  al. 2007, Zalasiewicz et  al. 2010, Ellis
2011, Steffen et  al. 2011, Braje and Erlandson 2013, Barnosky et  al. 2014). Urgent action is
needed to counter the climate disruption, extinctions, loss of diverse ecosystems, pollution,
and consumption patterns that are driving the Earth's life support systems towards a danger-
ous tipping point where biodiversity and ecosystem services are lost (Brook et al. 2013, Bar-
nosky et  al. 2014). Already, we are in the midst of the planet's sixth great extinction, and
climate is changing at rates that are unprecedented in the past 65 million years (Barnosky
et al. 2011, Diffenbaugh and Field 2013).
While the environment is changing rapidly, socio-ecological systems and conservation
itself are fast adapting and responding to emerging ecological and societal challenges. Con-
servation science is working alongside other disciplines to find ways of managing ecosystems
that maintain not only biodiversity, but also the processes that support resilience and allow
adaptation to ongoing climate change and the new pressures inherent to the Anthropocene
(Zalasiewicz et al. 2010).
The paradox of new conservation is that we seek to preserve systems that are incessantly
in flux, and conservation goals are moving targets (Pickett and White 1985, du Toit et  al.
2003, Lindenmayer et  al. 2008). The need for an understanding of change and over time-
scales of decades, centuries, and millennia has emerged as conservation moves towards the
maintenance of processes, functions, and resilience, rather than particular ecosystem states
or population sizes. This process-based approach gives a greater capacity to adapt to future
environmental change, but at the same time we need to understand the limits to ecological
resilience and the thresholds or tipping points at which dramatic ecosystem reorganization
may occur (Gillson and Marchant 2014).
he aim of this topic is to explore the role of long-term data from palaeoecology, historical
ecology, and other disciplines to the emerging science of ecosystem management. This intro-
ductory chapter will take a brief tour through conservation history, contrasting previous
approaches to conservation with our present dilemma of preserving what must change. It
will introduce the major theme of the topic, which is how to use a long-term perspective on
ecosystem variability and flux to inform a diverse range of conservation and management
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