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The importance of conservation

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Conservation of the natural environment is an important issue in our world today. Not only is the integrity of the environment and its natural processes important in and of itself, but it also holds instrumental value to humans by providing ecosystem services which we are reliant upon to survive. These services allow humans to flourish by providing clean water, a regulated climate, natural crop pollination, timber, and food, among many others. The environment also has a social value, providing for spiritual, educational, aesthetic and recreational needs of the community. Tourism and recreation also have a lot of economic power associated with them, and therefore is important to many economies around the world that thrive on this industry (for example: Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia, etc).

While we know that conservation is an important issue, globally it is failing. Even with the numerous efforts that have been made to promote conservation, we are still losing species on what some think is a daily basis. Out of the projected 5-15 million species that are present on this earth, there are only about 1.5 million that have been categorized. Despite research that has been conducted or is currently in the process, we know very little about the natural environment and the importance of the interactions of species that we may be pushing to extinction everyday. Changes in land use and climate, invasive species, pollution, human population size, and unsustainable development are all contributors to the losses that we are seeing in the amount of biodiversity on this planet. It is now our responsibility to come up with ideas that more accurately and successfully re-establish the populations that we are losing to globalization and development.

A problem that we are facing with conservation strategies is that we are not entirely sure if the effects they are having on the ecosystem are positive or negative. While the implementation of one strategy may seem to be presently successful, we are not sure of the long-term effects that it will have on the ecosystem in the future. Also, if one strategy is successful in one part of the world, it may not work in another region where the climate and interactions may be different. While much work is being done to assess these strategies, it is hard to predict how nature will respond to a system that is restored (therefore, human-influenced). Just because we think that we understand all the relationships and interactions that are occurring we cannot necessarily reproduce what originally was present. With more research and monitoring of areas that have been restored, hopefully we will be able to better understand how natural systems are responding and therefore come up with more successful conservation strategies.

Despite there being many uncertainties, there is evidence that what we are coming up with is working. A conservation strategy that has proven to be effective is implementing biodiversity corridors in areas where a disturbance has made the natural environment uninhabitable or has severely limited the range and distribution of certain species. Biodiversity corridors are areas of vegetation that allow animals to travel between two plots of native land. This facilitates repopulation and redistribution of species that may have been affected by development or other disturbances, human-influenced or otherwise. It also allows for better pollination of plants, which rely both on wind-distribution and animals as vectors for seed dispersal. Corridors provide shelter, food, and protection from natural predators, all of which aid in the long-term survival of the species. The uses of these corridors have been studied in numerous experiments and have been found to be very effective. Data has shown that corridors do, indeed, increase the biodiversity richness of a region and therefore are a practical tool for preservation and restoration.

Biodiversity conservation is important for many reasons. As outlined in the Ecological Society of America’s publication on Issues in Ecology, biodiversity is imperative to the successful functioning of an ecosystem. Some of the critical processes at the ecosystem level are plant productivity, soil fertility, water quality and atmospheric chemistry. While most of these are abiotic components of the environment, they are directly affected by the biotic interactions. For example, plants produce the vast majority of the oxygen that animals breathe, as well as reduce the amount of carbon dioxide that is in the air. Bacteria fix nitrogen which is essential to the life of most organic beings. The interactions that occur between wetlands affect water quality. The list can go on and on. These processes are controlled by the diversity and identity of species which are part of an integrated ecosystem. Currently, human impact has been detrimental to biodiversity on the whole, and therefore has negatively impacted these processes as well. With a decrease in the biota comes a decline in plant production, ecosystem resistance to environmental perturbations, such as drought, is lessened, and processes such as soil nitrogen levels, water use, and pest and disease cycles are much more variable, causing further harm to a system. A number of studies have supported this hypothesis that a reduction in biodiversity leads to a reduction in ecosystem processes.

We, as humans, should care about this because of our inseparable ties to the environment for survival. We rely on numerous ecosystem services that are provided by nature, such as climate regulation, primary production, the filtering of air, food production, production of timber, nutrient cycling, and many others. For these to successfully occur in nature, we need to be sure that our impacts are not negatively affecting these cycles and processes. Clearly, we have not done a very good job of realizing our dependence on nature, and therefore we are now stuck in a situation where we may be losing exactly what it is that allows us to flourish. With a better understanding of the importance of biodiversity on these processes, we will be better able to assess how exactly we are affecting the land and what changes need to be made to allow for the preservation of what we have left and the restoration and conservation of areas that we have already impacted.

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