The Conservation Paradox - Biodiversity Conservation and Environmental Change - page 9

and Kinzig 2003, Costanza et al. 2007, Chapin III et al. 2010). The post-normal approach to
science acknowledges that facts are uncertain, systems are complex and unpredictable, val-
ues are diverse, and decisions are urgent (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1994, Ravetz and Funtowicz
1999, Rogers 2008). Post-normal science offers narrative descriptions of different possible
scenarios and perspectives, enabling multiple stakeholder perspectives to be understood
and accommodated (Bode et al. 2010, Hirsch et al. 2011, Sandbrook et al. 2011, Adams and
Sandbrook 2013). Scientific narratives can help in understanding the history, variability and
functioning of ecosystems, addressing issues of scale, resilience, thresholds, and alternate
stable states, as well as feedbacks and interactions between multiple drivers. In David Fos-
ter's words, 'To accomplish anything, conservationists must tell a coherent and compelling
story: one that places our situation today in the midst of an ongoing history of engagement
with the land, not outside it' (Foster et al. 2008: p. 54). Narratives from natural science, social
science and local, traditional knowledge systems can be effectively combined to understand
landscape change from multiple perspectives, as a first step in developing landscape visions
that meet a multitude of stakeholder needs (Rogers 2003, Wolfe et al. 2007, Rogers et al. 2013).
he role of long-term data in ecosystem management
The focus on flux, variation, and process has raised interesting questions that affect how con-
servation goals are set and how conservation is practised. Observations of change within the
timeframes of human or even societal memory can lead to biased and unrealistic perceptions
of ecosystem 'baselines, that are more based on nostalgia than ecological realism (Pauly 1995,
Papworth et al. 2009). To circumvent the 'shifting baselines syndrome' (Pauly 1995), we need
to understand the normal range of variability over long time-scales, so that we can distin-
guish natural fluctuations from the early warnings of ecosystem instability that may be a pre-
cursor to unprecedented change or ecosystem collapse (Landres et al. 1999, Jackson 2006,
Jackson and Hobbs 2009, Dearing et al. 2010, Wolfe et al. 2012). While personal experience
and local context are vital to understanding landscape change and its impacts on societies,
personal narratives need to be contextualized with evidence from longer-term data that is
matched to the timeframe of ecological processes, which may take place on timescales of
centuries to millennia.
In these days of anthropogenic climate change, we need to know the critical thresholds of
temperature and rainfall that might cause radical changes in ecosystem composition, and
how other factors like fire and land-use interact with climate to determine ecosystem
persistence or transformation (Dawson et al. 2011, Thomas et al. 2011, Bernazzani et al. 2012,
O'Connor et al. 2012). Since disturbance is normal in most ecosystems, we need to under-
stand the impacts, and how this affects community composition and functioning, as well as
how to manipulate disturbance like fire and herbivory to the benefit of biodiversity and other
ecosystem services (Frelich and Reich 1999, Turner et al. 2003, Roxburgh et al. 2004, Midgley
et al. 2010). Many ecosystems bear the legacy of past extreme, but infrequent disturbances,
and though severe hurricanes, floods, and droughts might appear rare in human timescales,
they have shaped the evolution and current structure of landscapes, and studying their past