Is Island Conservation Fundamentally Different from Continental Conservation?
Channel: Ronald Cannarella
Date: 2012-06-02

The keynote presentation at the 2007 Hawai`i Conservation Conservation by Michael Soulé (Environmental Studies, University of California at Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA) on "Is Island Conservation Fundamentally Different from Continental Conservation?" Conservationists don’t need reminding that context must be considered and somehow dealt with in doing conservation work in real places. There are several kinds of context: geographic context (e.g., climate, topography, biogeography), economic context (e.g., poverty levels, income disparities, investment in women’s education), political context (e.g., civil rights, political access, freedom of the press, fair elections, rights and sovereignty of indigenous peoples), and culture context (e.g., religion, literacy, corruption, diversity, history). As biologists, we are best able to consider the biogeographic and scale issues. For example, it may be informative to compare the conservation visions and challenges of large continents versus small ones, or compare continents to islands. I will compare the conservation challenges in three places that span such a range. These are (1) mainland North America; (2) the island-continent of Australia; and (3) the archipelago of Hawai‘i. I will discuss how these three places differ with respect to (a) threats such as exotics/ferals and future "invasibility,” (b) history such as extinction episodes in pre-history and in recent history, (c) sensitivity to climate change, (d) the kinds, scales, and relevance of dispersal behaviors and adaptive evolutionary potential for different taxa, and (e) the role of large, highly interactive species in maintaining biological diversity.

Hawaii Conservation Alliance
Executive Producer: Ronald Cannarella