Conservation community should stop ignoring abundant wildlife, says WCS

A provocative new paper written by current and recent Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) scientists takes the international wildlife conservation community to task for ignoring abundant wildlife and their importance to ecosystems and humans worldwide.

The paper, “Abundance as a Conservation Value,” written by longtime WCS scientist Kent Redford, now head of Archipelago Consulting; WCS Senior Scientist Joel Berger, John J. Craighead Chair of Wildlife Biology at the University of Montana; and WCS Coordinator of Bird Conservation, Steve Zack, appears in the April issue of the international journal of conservation, Oryx.

Many once abundant species are currently in decline, yet conservationists and institutions often take notice and action only when they become rare

Kent Redford, lead author, Archipelago Consulting »

“It is like practicing medicine only in the emergency room and wondering why patients only increase in number.”

The consequence of not addressing and conserving abundance in wildlife populations put at risk the ecosystem services that abundant, not merely present, species provide, the authors stress. These include forest seed dispersal, nutrient movement from the marine to the terrestrial by salmon and other anadromous fishes, and the regulatory role that predators like wolves play with elk and other species. Humans in turn rely on such services delivered by abundance in nature, including eco-tourism fuelled by experiencing wildlife abundance as viewed in the Serengeti, Yellowstone, and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The authors say there are four major reasons for conservationists to care about the phenomenon of abundance:

First, it is eas­ier in cost and man­age­ment effort to main­tain abun­dance in wildlife pop­u­la­tions than it is to keep once abun­dant and now rare species from extinction.

Sec­ond, abun­dant species pro­vide many vital ecosys­tem ser­vices on which nature and humans rely includ­ing water fil­tra­tion by oys­ters, nutri­ent trans­port by salmon and river her­ring, and nutri­ent cycling by migrat­ing wildebeest.

Third, abun­dance main­tains other species — includ­ing humans — and ecosys­tems. Exam­ples include ele­phants as seed dis­persers, bees as pol­li­na­tors, and fish as sources of human food.

Lastly, wildlife in abun­dance, also called spec­ta­cles, helps inspire con­ser­va­tion­ists and their sup­port­ers and builds con­nec­tions with the nat­ural world.

“The saiga antelope in central Asia has plummeted from more than a million animals to only tens of thousands in recent years,” says Berger of one of the many ungulates he has studied throughout his conservation career. “If the conservation community had committed to maintain this species abundance rather than belatedly acting on averting its extinction, then this Asian icon would be conserved, and at much less cost.”

“Abundance is the dramatic feature of Arctic wildlife, particularly true in the worldwide aggregation of migratory birds that breed in coastal plain wetlands during the short summer,” says Zack of his recent studies and conservation efforts in Arctic Alaska. “Just focusing on the conservation of the currently few species warranting status as endangered would result in missing the essence and nature of this dramatic place”.

The authors note that it is encouraging that the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is now developing a “Green List” for species, a process that emphasises recovery and perhaps emphasis on returning species to abundance, and thus moving away from the sole emphasis on Red Lists of species that fixate on rarity and extinction.

(Source: WCS press release, 19.04.2013)