Managing the Consequences of Conservation Success

Dr. Craig Packer

Professor, UMN Dept of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior

Abstract

Conservation biology emerged largely as a crisis discipline focused on preventing population declines, reducing mortality, and restoring degraded ecosystems. Many of these efforts have succeeded. Wolves have recolonized parts of Europe and North America, tiger populations have increased in several regions of India, and coexistence programs have reduced livestock losses and retaliatory killing in numerous landscapes. Yet successful interventions often generate new challenges. Recovering populations produce dispersers that move into human-dominated landscapes, increasing conflict with people. Interventions that reduce livestock losses may alter grazing decisions and create new ecological pressures. Removal of anthropogenic food subsidies can trigger transitional periods in which wildlife behavior changes more rapidly than population size, temporarily intensifying conflict. Similar dynamics occur elsewhere in biology and environmental management, where successful interventions frequently shift rather than eliminate constraints. Antibiotics selected for resistant pathogens, increased human longevity elevated the importance of chronic disease, and fire suppression contributed to fuel accumulation and megafires. I argue that conservation is increasingly confronting a similar process of shifting constraints, in which successful interventions alleviate one limitation only for another to become dominant. Anticipating these transitions may represent one of the central challenges facing conservation in the twenty-first century.