Class ppt of a presentation

1. Conservation Biology
a brief history of the discipline in
western context

2. 1960s
• . when large-scale anthropogenic conversion of
neotropical habitats
• species were being driven to extinction before
they were scientifically described and studied.
• tradition of designating national parks for nature
conservation, a not unexpected response to this
problem of habitat destruction was to pursue the
creation of nature reserve networks throughout
the world.
• The problem of reserve network design became
the first theoretical problem that conservation
biology could uniquely claim at its own

3. 1970s
• ecologists tried to solve this problem by
applying island biogeography theory

4. 1980s
• In December 1985, Soulé published a long
manifesto, “What is Conservation Biology?” in
BioScience, the journal most visible to the
academic and, especially, the non-academic
biological community in the United States.
• conservation biology emerged in the United
States as an organized academic discipline. Its
focus became “biodiversity,” a term that entered
the everyday and scientific lexicons around
1988.

5. 1990s
• The first journal with “biodiversity” in its
title, Canadian Biodiversity, appeared in
1991, changing its name to Global
Biodiversity in 1993; a second, Tropical
Biodiversity, began appearing in 1992;
Biodiversity Letters and Global Biodiversity
followed in 1993.

6. Conservation as practice
In another sense, a science of biological
conservation is centuries old, going back to the
traditions of forest and game management
developed in many countries, particularly
Germany and India, in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. There is as yet no
systematic historical or philosophical analysis of
the question whether modern conservation
biology should be viewed as an enterprise
distinct from these earlier disciplines rather than
as a development from them.

7. Reference
Encyclopedia of Biodiversity, Ecology, and
Evolution. Niles, Elridge, ed. Vol. I.