Navigating the complexities of dynamic ecosystem change

book reviews ISSN 1948‐6596 Navigating the complexities of dynamic ecosystem change Novel Ecosystems: Intervening in the New Ecological World Order. Richard J. Hobbs, Eric S. Higgs & Carol M. Hall (editors), 2013, Wiley–Blackwell, 380 pp. £45 (hardback) ISBN 9781118354223; http://www.wiley. com The world’s ecosystems have always been subject to dynamic change and there is every reason to expect this to continue into the future. However, many approaches to understanding ecosystem processes and managing ecosystems have tended to ignore this aspect, instead implicitly assuming historical stability. Recent concerns about climate change and its impact on ecosystems have high‐ lighted the need to be explicit about historical as well as future dynamic change in ecosystems. This has generated considerable interest in ‘novel’ or ‘no‐analogue’ ecosystems (Williams and Jackson 2007), but has raised a wide range of issues re‐ lated to how we deal with, predict, value and manage novel ecosystems. This book tries to address many of these questions, with the weight of focus on the applied implications of novel ecosystems, reflecting the predominant interests of the editors. The focus on management is one of the book’s strengths in that it tries to tackle some practical approaches for dealing with novel ecosystems in real manage‐ ment applications. As a conservation biologist, I found this enlightening and its attempt to develop practical solutions makes the book of interest to both scientific and practitioner audiences. The book arose from a series of workshops and the editors provide an interesting overview of the workshop process in Chapter 1, including a candid account of the difficulty in reaching agree‐ ment on many contentious issues in the book. De‐ spite the large number of contributors and the process through which it was written, the book is generally very well structured. It is organised into seven sections, but they largely cover the follow‐ ing four topics: novel ecosystem concepts and definitions, the characteristics of novel ecosys‐ tems, the management of novel ecosystems, and future considerations. The sections are inter‐ spersed with short case studies which are excel‐ lent illustrations of the issues in real systems, but it does tend to fragment the book a little. There is a great case study early on in the book, describing the ‘Hole‐in‐the‐Donut’ novel ecosystem in South Florida (Smith et al. 2011). This novel ecosystem was originally created through agricultural prac‐ tices, but now lies entirely with the Everglades National Park. Subsequent efforts to manage this ecosystem provide a fantastic illustration of the challenges to managing novel ecosystems that this book attempts to address. There is also a nice his‐ torical perspective on the origin of the idea of novel ecosystems. A considerable amount of space is devoted to dealing with definitions and the conceptualisa‐ tion of novel ecosystems. As you might expect, this is a contentious issue, but is dealt with thor‐ oughly by the book. The definitions that are devel‐ oped focus around the idea of categorising eco‐ systems into historical, hybrid and novel. Although these are conceptualised along a continuum of increasing dissimilarity of biotic composition and abiotic condition from historical conditions, ideas of resilience are drawn upon to distinguish hybrid (for which a return to historical state is possible through restoration) and novel (where a return to historical state is not possible). The idea that a transition to a novel ecosystemis irreversible, in some sense, means there exists a degree of per‐ manence to novel ecosystems that allows them in the future to be historical reference ecosystems themselves. However, it is not clear how this framework might deal with ecosystems that are continuously in flux, for which defining a historical reference system may be problematic. Clearly de‐ lineating among categories may also be challeng‐ ing, although this is discussed in the book. The sections on incorporating the novel ecosystem concept into management are really valuable parts of the book because I think this is where the most difficult challenges lie. A manage‐ ment framework is presented as a decision tree based around the historical / hybrid / novel classi‐ fication. The framework is explicit about defining 216 frontiers of biogeography 5.4, 2013 — © 2013 the authors; journal compilation © 2013 The International Biogeography Society