Abstract
Our chapter introduces concepts and principles of biological conservation that will be useful when applying landscape ecology to a conservation issue. The points raised here expand the general landscape principles of the first chapter to the broad field of biological conservation. Section 2.2 explains concepts and principles that relate directly to the management of biological diversity, beginning with populations, then addressing communities and ecosystems, and concluding with principles at the landscape scale. Section 2.3 focuses on two emerging ideas in biological conservation that have been largely inspired by landscape ecology: the necessity of conserving a landscape and its functions to protect the process of evolution as the ultimate driver of biological diversity, and the complexity of restoring and managing landscapes. Section 2.4 discusses how an understanding of landscape ecology drives the need to consider long time frames and large areas in developing conservation goals and priorities. Section 2.5 considers general approaches for advancing applications of landscape ecology in biological conservation. It stresses the importance of spatial and temporal scales when considering the maintenance of biological diversity, whether the genome of a population or the range of ecosystems within a landscape.
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Knight, R.L., Landres, P.B. (2002). Central Concepts and Issues of Biological Conservation. In: Gutzwiller, K.J. (eds) Applying Landscape Ecology in Biological Conservation. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-0059-5_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-0059-5_2
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