Biodiversity, ecosystem function, and resilience: ten guiding principles for commodity production landscapes

www.frontiersinecology.org © The Ecological Society of America O about 12% of Earth’s land is located in protected areas, and less than half of this is managed primarily for biodiversity conservation (Hoekstra et al. 2005). Although protected areas are an essential part of any credible conservation strategy (Margules and Pressey 2000), it is becoming increasingly clear that reserves alone will not protect biodiversity because they are too few, too isolated, too static, and not always safe from over-exploitation (Liu et al. 2001; Bengtsson et al. 2003; Rodrigues et al. 2004). For these reasons, it is now widely recognized that conservation within protected areas needs to be complemented by conservation outside protected areas (Daily 2001; Lindenmayer and Franklin 2002). Production industries like agriculture and forestry dominate human land use (Morris 1995). These industries directly depend on a range of vital ecosystem services, such as healthy soils, nutrient cycling, and waste decomposition (Daily 1997). The diversity of genes, species, and ecological processes makes a vital contribution to ecosystem services. For example, biodiversity provides important pollinators, seed dispersers, and pest control agents on which agriculture and forestry depend (Daily 1999). More generally, by providing multiple species that fulfill similar functions but have different responses to human landscape modification, biodiversity enhances the resilience of ecosystems (Walker 1995). Such response diversity “insures the system against the failure of management actions and policies based on incomplete understanding” (Elmqvist et al. 2003). Maintaining biodiversity in production landscapes therefore often constitutes an economically profitable synergy between conservation and production (Daily 1997; Ricketts et al. 2004). Guiding principles for the conservation of biodiversity exist within protected areas (Diamond 1975; Margules and Pressey 2000). To date, however, general but widely applicable guiding principles for conservation management in production landscapes have not been summarized (Lindenmayer and Franklin 2002). In this paper, we suggest ten strategies to enhance biodiversity and ecosystem resilience in a wide range of terrestrial production landscapes; complementary suggestions for the sustainable management of marine production landscapes are outlined elsewhere (eg Pauly et al. 2002). Strategies 1–5 target landscape patterns; their implemention is likely to maintain many species and important ecological processes in production landscapes. However, some species or processes may not be fully captured by managing landscape patterns alone. For this reason, strategies REVIEWS REVIEWS REVIEWS