This essay was an interesting piece of reading, although it did not quite deliver what the title promised: We were hoping for an “abc for dummies” kind of a paper, literally explaining what every conservation biologist should know about economic theory. Instead, the essay largely focused on criticizing the Walrasian model of economics that underlies much of  modern econimical thinking. It very well described all its flaws and inconsistencies with the real world, but it did not seem so specifically targeted to conservaion biologists.

The paper had a strong focus on critique, with little about alternatives, such as ecological or biophysical economics, that are mentioned, but nothing else. This essay would have been an excellend opportunity to give a brief introduction to what those relatively modern branches of economics actully are.

The authors emphasized how strongly current economic theory is based on the Walrasian foundation, even though it is so clearly flawed in many ways. Most of the flaws appear to have been recognized already a long time ago, but with little influence to the practice. It would have been nice to be able to discuss the paper with an economist to get an idea of how well these problems are recognized among researchers in economic theory, people applying theory to practice in one way or another, and among politics. We at least would guess the last group to be the most ignorant about these issues, but sadly also a very powerful group, imposing these dysfunctional principles in their everyday decision making.

In general, I at least was nevertheless happy to read this paper and agreed with its contents. It very nicely complements and deepens the discussion on what we were trying to say withour own essay just published in Cons Biol (DOI: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2010.01539.x). Gowdy et al. provide a wealth of convincing evidence indicating the flaws of the free market, which in our layman version we tried to explain with help of the cebus monkey Mr. Monk. So it would have been nice to see this published together with ours, which unfortunately did not happen.

A memorable quote from the paper: “Since the scientific revolution began, scientists have made simplifying assumptions to make analysis tractable. But natural scienctists generally make sure their assumptions do not contradict reality”. 😀

DOI: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2010.01563.x

Horribly late with this post – we read the paper already in the spring. I hope I can still remember what we actually discussed.

The paper provides a very comprehensive framework for biodiversity conservation assessment. It consists of three components: (1) Modelling future habitat state, (2) Modelling persistence of individual surrogate entities, and (3) Integrating persistence across multiple entities. Each of these components can be implemented at various levels of refinement and sophistication, ranging from e.g. considering persistence as a siple binary function of area protected to complex metapopulation modelling accounting for landscape dynamics.The application of the framework is then discussed in the context of major forms of higher-leve assessment, calssified into five classes: (1) Optimal plan generation, (2) Priority mapping, (3) Interactive scenario evaluation, (4) Site-based assessment and (5) Monitoring and reporting whole-landscape conservation status.

Probably almost all published applications of systematic conservation assessment could be placed into one of the categories within the framework. But many of the proposed combinations of components and levels of complexity have not been implemented yet. Therefore the paper also provides guidelines for future research. Another obvious contribution of such a paper is that it summarizes what has been achieved so far, and has perhaps also a unifying function regarding the concepts and terminology in the field. Often people are talking about rocks as alternatives to stones, but meaning exactly the same thing (sorry for the lame metaphor!).

The paper is incredibly comprehesive, correct and accurate in every detail. The writers take no shortcuts to simplify at the cost of losing information. On the other hand, the extreme accuracy in technical detail and terminology also makes the paper rather laborious reading. At times also the high conceptual level at which the framework is described (to cover as much as possible!) can be rather demanding for the reader. Perhaps even more of practical examples accompanying the conceptual text would have made the reading more effortless.

In sum, not an easy piece of reading, but definitely worth the trouble for anyone seriously interested in conservation assessement methodology.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1472-4642.2010.00657.x

Wiens & Bachelet: Matching the multiple scales of conservation with the multiple scales of climate change

DOI: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2009.01409.x

This was an extensive article on scale issues in conservation and climate change. It seemed to be targeted at a rather general public, and was therefore very refreshing reading for us. It had a strong NGO perspective due to the authors’ backgrounds, which showed for example in that the issues with conservation scales were largely dealt with through practical examples. This was slightly disappointing for us as conservation scientists. The CC section had a stronger scientific focus, and was more informative for us, for example, we realized we know very little about the Regional Climate Models and “dynamic downscaling” discussed in the paper.  But we felt that this distinction in approaches to conservation vs. CC also reflects the real world situation – conservation planning is still done in practice with weak scientific basis, but no one is  trying to guess how the climate will change based on a feeling.

The key message was that despite all the uncertainties (especially in downscaling the very coarse climate predictions to a level useful for conservation), CC must be accounted for in conservation planning, because it is already clear that the changes will be dramatic. I suppose we agreed on this in general, but would like to emphasize even more strongly that one shouldn’t put too much weight on uncertain future in decision making, because e.g. allocating resources to areas potentially important in the future means having less for those certainly important at present, and risking losing the supposed sources of range shifts already before the shifts take place.