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Conserving the World's Biological Diversity
TLDR
The 1990s may be the last decade during which constructive and creative decisions, activities, and investments can be made to ensure that many of the world's species and ecosystems are maintained, examined for their material and ecological value, and promoted for sustainable use to support new and innovative approaches to development as mentioned in this paper.Abstract:
The 1990s may be the last decade during which constructive and creative decisions, activities, and investments can be made to ensure that many of the world's species and ecosystems are maintained, examined for their material and ecological value, and promoted for sustainable use to support new and innovative approaches to development. The combination of maintaining the maximum possible biological and cultural diversity, and the greatest possible scientific endeavor seems the most sensible approach toward dealing with the dynamic future facing humanity. The elements now exist that will reverse the trend toward the biotic impoverishment of the world. New partners in conservation need to be found, involving all ministries, departments, and private institutions that are directly dependent on biological resources. For example, national parks departments should be joined in habitat management by a wide range of other institutions to represent all interests. Furthermore, other line agencies need to develop the capacity to manage biodiversity of particular relevance to their respective missions. Actions taken in the next few years will determine whether we take a road toward a chaotic future characterized by overexploitation and abuse of our biological resources, or take the road toward maintaining greater biological diversity and resource sustainability.read more
Citations
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Conservation evaluation and phylogenetic diversity
TL;DR: Calculation of PD for different population subsets shows that protection of populations at either of two extremes of the geographic range of the group can significantly increase the phylogenetic diversity that is protected.
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Correlation between Fitness and Genetic Diversity
David H. Reed,Richard Frankham +1 more
TL;DR: Concerns that the loss of heterozygosity has a deleterious effect on population fitness are strengthened and the IUCN designation of genetic diversity as worthy of conservation is supported.
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Genetics and extinction
TL;DR: There is now sufficient evidence to regard the controversies regarding the contribution of genetic factors to extinction risk as resolved, and if genetic factors are ignored, extinction risk will be underestimated and inappropriate recovery strategies may be used.
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Relationship of genetic variation to population size in wildlife
TL;DR: There can be no doubt that genetic variation is related to population size, as Sould proposed, and vertebrates should have less genetic variation than invertebrates or plants.
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The fungal dimension of biodiversity: magnitude, significance, and conservation
TL;DR: The number of known species in the world is conservatively estimated at 1·5 million; six-times higher than hitherto suggested; this realization has major implications for systematic manpower, resources, and classification.
References
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Gene flow and the geographic structure of natural populations
TL;DR: Of particular interest are those species for which direct methods indicate little current gene flow but indirect methods indicate much higher levels of gene flow in the recent past, and whose species probably have undergone large-scale demographic changes relatively frequently.
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The Role of Disturbance in Natural Communities
TL;DR: For many communities, a self-reproducing climax state may only exist as an average condition on a relatively large spatial scale, and even that has yet to be rigorously demonstrated.
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Genetics and demography in biological conservation
TL;DR: The practical need in biological conservation for understanding the interaction of demographic and genetic factors in extinction may provide a focus for fundamental advances at the interface of ecology and evolution.
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The Measurement of Species Diversity
TL;DR: The present contribution attempts to define in a precise, but still generalized, what is or should be meant by the many terms sur rounding the concept-cluster diversity.
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The island dilemma: lessons of modern biogeographic studies for the design of natural reserves
TL;DR: The main conclusions are as follows: the number of species that a reserve can hold at equilibrium is a function of its area and its isolation, and larger reserves, and reserves located close to other reserves, can hold more species.