Kenya begins massive animal relocation - Reuters

Herman has opened a huge subject that I can only comment on briefly here. Meanwhile, see a comment on the biodiversity loss issue in our WildlifeWikiProject. I'll cut and past also here a box that Keith Lindsay and I have written for a chapter in a book that a number of us are contributing to for the Chicago University Press. I guess the general point I'd like to make is that these ham-fisted management interventions that that we inflict on non-equilibrium ecosystems that are highly variable, unpredictable, but (happily for us in the short run) amazingly resilient are, to put it politely, micturating into the prevailings...

Box 1 – Amboseli, a non-equilibrium ecosystem

Much has been said about the nature of habitat change in Amboseli National Park, the bulk of it couched in negative terms such as: ‘destruction of habitats’, ‘woodland decline’, ‘loss of wildlife habitat’, etc. Grey-literature assertions hold that Amboseli elephants no longer wander freely outside the park, are therefore unnaturally compressed within the park and negatively impacting biological diversity (e.g. Mitchell 2005, Western 1977, Western and D. Manzolillo-Nightingale 2003; see Chapter 12 for the accurate picture). This conventional wisdom is based on the view that the normal state of nature is fixed equilibrium, the ‘Balance of Nature paradigm’. Woodlands remain woodlands unless ‘damaged’ and change is a disruption of the ‘correct’ state.

Ecologists have come to recognize that ecosystems and their components are in constant change, either continually variable or shifting between temporarily persistent ‘stable states’), at different scales from the local to the regional. The importance of time frame has been recognized: what we observe at any one time is just a snapshot, a single frame of a moving picture show, played out in ecosystems around the world, as different as coral reefs, tropical forests, and savannas shift from one set of conditions to another. The study of paleoecology has shown that semi-arid bush savannas such as Tsavo National Park (Kenya) have shifted between open and more densely wooded habitats over the course of hundreds of years (Gillson 2004). With the benefit of nearly half a century of research, it is now clear that these 'non-equilibrium' ecosystems are highly variable, devilishly unpredictable and very resilient (Ellis & Swift 1988, Primm 1991, Niamir-Fuller 2002).

Applied ecology, in the form of conservation management, often lags behind its scientific counterpart in accepting the new ecological paradigm, and in many cases still focuses on maintaining fixed habitat conditions and wildlife populations at what is termed ‘carrying capacity’ (Fiedler et al 1997). Human interventions to suppress change through time or to homogenize habitats on a spatial scale have been attempted in intensively managed parks. Slowly but steadily, however, conservation agencies around the world are adopting the non-equilibrium view, recognizing, allowing and even encouraging heterogeneity in space and through time (e.g. Yellowstone NP, USA – Keiter & Boyce 1991; Kruger NP, South Africa – Rogers 1997).

In Kenya, the prevailing policy has been to ‘let nature take its course’, with occasional recent calls for more interventive management (e.g. Western & Maitumo 2004), ironically at a time when conservation practice is tending towards a lighter finger on the trigger. Amboseli provides a classic example of the need for caution when interpreting change as necessarily a negative process, pointing towards the appreciation that change is the rule rather than the exception in ecology.

Emerging non-equilibrium theoretical ecological paradigm aside, given the complex juxtaposition of contrasting soil chemistries along with the spatial and temporal vicissitudes of the main driving variables – water flowing from the mountain-fed springs and rain falling with stochastic perversity – the Amboseli ecosystem is supremely primed to be variable. Viewed against this unpredictable backdrop, it is unreasonable to expect constancy in the composition of vegetation and fauna in the Park.

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HC