Functional Ecosystems and Biodiversity Buzzwords

Abstract: Several increasingly popular paradigms in conservation remove organismal information and life-history requirements from management planning with claims that species-specific information is not necessary to the understanding and management of "ecosystem function" and may therefore be discarded. Although several authors have called attention to the fact that ecosystem management has not yet been articulated sufficiently to comprise an adequate paradigm for wildlife protection, there has been a series of suggestions paralleling ecosystem management's popularity that the perceived or imagined emergent properties of communities should be at the root of conservation planning. Such reductions most commonly take the form of abstracted species diversity measures that may be irrelevant or misleading with respect to site-specific planning and to the monitoring of specific management treatments. Following earlier examinations of ecosystem management, I emphasize that several of its apparent outgrowths may be too vague to inform specific recommendations, that the historical mechanics of "ecosystem processes" are essentially unknowable, and that anecdotal definitions of ecosystems allow one to justify virtually any protocol as management. The primacy of process-dependent, landscape-functional considerations in conservation planning is specious in the absence of species- and population-specific information, which should form the foundation for understanding such processes in the first place. Only by viewing nature in terms of the relationships between processes and organisms, rather than in terms of emergent properties of organismal assemblages or abiotic factors divorced from organismal data, can conservation plans claim to protect biological elements.