7.9. Siepel
Keynote Presentations from the 2nd ALTER-Net Summer School, Peyresq 1 - 13 September 2007
Speaker: Henk Siepel
Henk.Siepel -at- wur.nl
Centre for Ecosystem Studies, Alterra and Wageningen University, PO Box 47, 6700 AA Wageningen, The Netherlands
Title of the talk: How to handle biodiversity for nature managers and policy-makers? (pdf: 100KB)
Summary of the talk by Petteri Vihervaara: Students´ summary (pdf)
Abstract
How to handle biodiversity for nature managers and policy-makers?Biodiversity is a nice word containing all the diversity of life. For policy-makers such an all-in concept is ideal to put down in treaties and policy documents. For nature managers it serves to stress the relevance of their jobs as well as for scientists. The task of both latter groups, however, is not just to communicate on the subject, but to investigate and help conservation and restoration. Conservation of a species, or a species group, already is quite a task, not to speak about conservation of biodiversity. Here the term ends its usefulness. Conservation of one species, including habitat restoration is already quite a job, the awareness that such a job has to be repeated for all red-list species has a paralyzing effect on almost everyone involved. So, the challenge is to find common pattern in an ecological sense that helps the biodiversity conservation (communication) and helps to conserve and restore groups of species in practice (research and management). Life-history tactic studies may serve here. Life-history tactics are defined as the co-adapted set of traits to overcome environmental conditions – a complex adaptation, or in other words the integrated response of a species to its environment. Species having similar life-history tactics may be conserved or restored in similar ways. In this presentation I will show several groupings of life-history traits into tactics, taking into account the co-adaptation of traits as well as trade-offs among traits. Examples will be given from soil micro-arthropods, pest species in trees and shrubs and aquatic macro-invertebrates. General theme is to compare traits in rather different systematic groups (mites, snails, worms, insects) to define life-history tactics, irrespective of the systematic group, that reflect the environmental effect on that group of species, giving the possibility to formulate management tools for mitigation or restoration.
Recommended background literature on this presentation
- Siepel H (1996) Biodiversity of soil microarthropods: the filtering of species. Biodiversity and Conservation 5:251-260, doi 10.1007/BF00055834
