Wildlife Conservation and Restoration Ecology

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Abstract

work together. A human populations continue to increase in size and distribution over the landscape, there will be fewer opportunities to preserve existing areas in a relatively natural condition. Wildlife conservation will thus depend more and more on the modification of existing reserves and the restoration of degraded environments. Although countless papers have been published on various species of wildlife and their habitats, neither wildlife ecologists nor restorationists have made much effort to apply this information to the work of restoration. Furthermore, the continual splitting off of subdivisions within the biological sciences, with a corresponding proliferation of journals and meetings, makes it increasingly difficult for scientists and resource managers to stay abreast of recent scientific advances. Too often the result is a retreat into a kind of protective insularity. Indeed, few people now refer to themselves simply as "biologists," and in recent years most "ecologists" have also begun attaching modifiers to their job titles. Because of these subdivisions, there have been attempts to create more-comprehensive, mission-oriented disciplines. Of particular interest here are three of these--wildlife biology, conservation biology, and restoration ecology--and the relationship between them. The first of these has a fairly long history, having taken shape as an academic discipline during the 1930s. The latter are much younger, having appeared in the last decade or so as part of a new generation of management-oriented disciplines that have emerged in an effort to bring various traditional disciplines together and focus them on solving environmental problems. These disciplines have broadly overlapping objectives, but each is now represented by a separate national society (The Wildlife Society, the Society for Conservation Biology, and the Society for Ecological Restoration, respectively). This proliferation of mission-oriented initiatives and organizatiofis raises questions about the relationships between them. Although wildlife biologists can correctly argue that they have been practicing restoration for decades, much of their early research focused on management of game species and control of pest species under the framework of the agricultural sciences. Today, most wildlife research is still oriented toward single species, though the interests of wildlife biologists have expanded to include many nongame species. Much of this change has been driven by changes in environmental laws--especially those mandating environmental impact documents, and, of course, the Endangered Species Act (1973, as amended) and related state laws. Collectively, these have resuited in an enormous increase in funding for research on nongame species. Unfortunately, the traditional emphasis of most academic wildlife programs and--especially-state game departments on game species or control of a handful of "pest" species fostered the perception that wildlife biologists were ill-equipped to carry out research on nongame species. This perception was at least one of the factors responsible for the formation of the Society for Conservation Biology (SCB) in 1985, and its rapid acceptance by the conservation community. The emergence of the SCB,