Articles
www.biosciencemag.org January 2011 / Vol. 61 No. 1•BioScience39
What Does It Mean to Successfully
Conserve a (Vertebrate) Species?
KENT H. REDFORD, GEORGE AMATO, JONATHAN BAILLIE, PABLO BELDOMENICO, ELIZABETH L. BENNETT, NANCY
CLUM, ROBERT COOK, GUSTAVO FONSECA, SIMON HEDGES, FREDERIC LAUNAY, SUSAN LIEBERMAN, GEOR-
GINA M. MACE, AKIRA MURAYAMA, ANDREA PUTNAM, JOHN G. ROBINSON, HOWARD ROSENBAUM, ERIC W.
SANDERSON, SIMON N. STUART, PATRICK THOMAS, AND JOHN THORBJARNARSON
The conservation of species is one of the foundations of conservation biology. Successful species conservation has often been defined as simply the
avoidance of extinction. We argue that this focus, although important, amounts to practicing conservation at the “emergency room door,” and will
never be a sufficient approach to conserving species. Instead, we elaborate a positive definition of species conservation on the basis of six attributes
and propose a categorization of different states of species conservation using the extent of human management and the degree to which each of
the attributes is conserved. These states can be used to develop a taxonomy of species “recovery” that acknowledges there are multiple stable points
defined by ecological and social factors. With this approach, we hope to contribute to a new, optimistic conservation biology that is not based on
underambitious goals and that seeks to create the conditions under which Earth’s biological systems can thrive.
Keywords: species conservation, extinction, successful conservation, recovery
Conservation biology as a discipline was not, and is not,
the only approach to species conservation. It was grafted
to a strong rootstock of species conservation that in some
approaches differed from and was overwritten by this
emerging discipline. Wildlife management, with its goal of
maintaining species in numbers sufficient for significant
harvest by humans, has remained largely true to its course
and defines successful conservation in terms of harvestable
populations. In other approaches, many local and national
efforts at species conservation have focused on species with
strong human constituencies, irrespective of their conser-
vation status. In this article we focus on the interaction
between species conservation and conservation biology
while recognizing that this framing does not capture the
depth or breadth of all species conservation efforts.
The conservation biology–based definition of extinction
avoidance has become codified in science and policy and
has directed conservation largely toward rare and threat-
ened species. Extinction avoidance spawned variations of
endangered species legislation that focus on what Soulé and
colleagues (2003) called “manifest demographic or numeri-
cal minimalism.” This perspective is reflected in a statement
that attempted to summarize the field of population man-
agement: “In conservation, we aim to minimize the chance
that a population declines to extinction” (Shea et al. 1998,
p. 371).
From its origins in population biology and community
ecology, conservation biology focused on minimum viable
populations and minimum areas necessary to conserve
C
onservation biology was born as a crisis-oriented and
crisis-driven discipline (Meine et al. 2006). Conserva-
tion was a natural result of the growing global concern about
the loss of tropical forests, coral reefs, and endangered spe-
cies, as well as the increasing realization of the truly global
impacts of human activities. To gain the attention of the
public, decisionmakers, and students, early pioneers of con-
servation biology wrote of the sixth extinction, the popu-
lation bomb, and the end of nature. Their concerns were
contagious, and found fertile soil in a younger generation’s
worries about pollution and the decline of iconic species
such as whales and giant pandas. Extinction was the middle
name of conservation biology, and preventing extinctions
was seen as the new discipline’s major aim.
The science of modern species conservation came of age
with the founding of conservation biology in the 1980s. This
foundation was laid in the interplay between genetics and
captive breeding (Meine et al. 2006). Among other changes,
conservation biology marked a shift in the management
of living collections away from displays only and toward
population management designed to sustain genetically
diverse, demographically stable, and viable captive popula-
tions (Hutchins and Smith 2003) that were to serve as assur-
ance colonies should wild populations go extinct (Rabb and
Saunders 2005). Combined with the crisis discipline per-
spective, the three strands of genetics, captive propagation,
and crisis were woven into a conservation biology approach
to in situ and ex situ species conservation that defined spe-
cies conservation as preventing extinction.
BioScience 61: 39–48. ISSN 0006-3568, electronic ISSN 1525-3244. © 2011 by American Institute of Biological Sciences. All rights reserved. Request permis-
sion to photocopy or reproduce article content at the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions Web site at www.ucpressjournals.com/reprint-
info.asp. doi:10.1525/bio.2011.61.1.9
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