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Unit 3: Conservation

  • Page ID
    37808
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    Conservation biology is the management of Earth's ecosystems with the aim of protecting species, their communities, and ecosystems from escalated extinction rates and the destruction and degradation of their habitats. This field focuses on both evaluating past, current, and future trends and creating conservation action plans to reverse trends leading to extinction and destroyed habitats. More specifically, procedures have been put in place to protect threatened species, design habitat preserves, creating breeding programs, and reconciling conservation concerns with practical human needs.

    As conservation biology needs to pull from so many fields, it is an interdisciplinary subject drawing on physical, life, and social sciences, as well as natural resource management procedures. The field seeks to integrate social science policy with theories from the fields of ecology, demography, taxonomy, and genetics. The principles underlying each of these disciplines have direct implications for the management of species and ecosystems, captive breeding and reintroduction, genetic analyses, and habitat restoration. Social science disciplines not only help with putting policies in place to legally protect species and habitats but also help fund conservation actions. Conservation action plans help direct research, monitoring, and education programs that engage concerns at both local and global scales.

    The goal of this unit is to overview the essential conservation biology topics as we head into an uncertain future.

    question-mark-road-away-forward-uncertain-uncertainty-problems-development-doubt.jpg

    Figure \(\PageIndex{a}\): A road heading into our uncertain future. Image by Pikist (Public domain)

    Attributions

    Rachel Schleiger (CC-BY-NC)

    Thumbnail image - "Environmental protection" is in the Public Domain


    This page titled Unit 3: Conservation is shared under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Melissa Ha and Rachel Schleiger (ASCCC Open Educational Resources Initiative) .

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