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Glimpses of Conservation Biology, Act II

If there is a single lesson to be learned from the past two decades of conservation and conservation biology, it is that our science and its application grow ever more complex, ever more daunting. We must expect to be confronted by generically new kinds of problems. The recently noted acidification of the oceans caused by elevated levels of atmospheric CO2, together with the implications for calcifying organisms and in turn for marine ecosystems, is a most profound environmental development, and yet it was not on any radar screen 5 years ago. Physical oceanographers and climatologists may well have foreseen it, but without a biological background they would probably not have anticipated the import. We must, as a consequence, not allow the ever-growing scientific and conservation action challenges to distract us from actively trying to understand and anticipate new developments. Similarly the global amphibian crisis arrived unanticipated. Today, with about a third of all amphibian species threatened with extinction, it clearly is the first example of an entire taxon in trouble. Mysterious at the outset, it is undoubtedly multifactorial in origin. Even though far from completely understood, it has still been possible to develop the Amphibian Conservation Action Plan. The plan is an excellent example of how pragmatic we have to be. There is no time to take a traditional linear approach to delay action until there is complete scientific understanding. Rather, in an iterative approach, there is an array of action to be taken, while, in parallel, scientific understanding is improved. The more disturbing question is whether this is just the first taxon-specific conservation crisis of many that may emerge. Some new challenges will undoubtedly arise from synergistic interactions among known types of environmental stresses. This is much akin to the world of medicine where it is no longer sufficient just to anticipate possible side effects of a drug, but also essential to anticipate the interactions of all a patient’s medicines. Such syner-