2006 was a key year for disciplines relevant to landscape scale-conservation
planning. Climate change made the April cover
of Time magazine: a polar bear stranded
on a tiny floe of ice stares balefully into the melting waters above a headline
that read “Be worried, be very worried.”
Thus the term “climate change”, a topic that had for some time been regarded as
a pressing environmental issue by the scientific and some sectors of the policy
community, came to public attention in a manner that had not perhaps happened
before.
That same year at their 91st
annual meeting in Memphis, Ecological Society of America, ecology’s largest
professional body, labeled invasion ecology and restoration ecology as “upstart”
disciplines, indicating their relative newness, and contrasting them with
disciplinary “icons” (community ecology, ecosystem ecology and so on).
Moreover, green infrastructure, a concept
that emerged in mid-1990s in discussions over the implementation of conservation-oriented
land management, especially in urban settings, was the subject of a 2006 book by
Mark A. Benedict and Edward T. McMahon, entitled Green Infrastructure:
Linking Landscapes and Communities and published by the influential Island
Press (Benedict and McMahon 2006).
Finally, around this time there was a growing
appreciation of the value of integrating social science perspectives into land
management, and this was signaled by the emergence of a body of theory known as
social ecological systems research, and the assimilation of the notion of “resilience”
into planning for sustainable management (Redman et al. 2004, Folke 2006).
Taken together, climate change science, restoration ecology,
invasive species ecology, social-ecological systems research, and green
infrastructure planning are the predominant disciplines undergirding
contemporary urban conservation management. Considering the relative infancy of these disciplines it is hardly unsurprising that the successful translation of these disciplines into precise recipes for action are slow in coming.
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