The full programme book (PDF) - Royal Geographical Society

THEME 9: PALAEOECOLOGY
Conservation policy, politics and palaeoecology
Kathy J. Willis
Long-term ecology Laboratory, Biodiversity Institute, University of Oxford, OX1 3PS
The political background surrounding biodiversity conservation has shifted markedly in the
past 50 years. Originally there was a strong focus on identification and policies to
conserve hotspots of biodiversity i.e. those areas containing high numbers of unique and
threated species. This was then followed by additional policies that sought to conserve
ecological and evolutionary processes responsible for biodiversity including management
strategies to conserve the natural variability and resilience of species and communities.
Most recently the political conservation goalposts have shifted once again, this time
emphasising the need to identify and conserve biodiversity that is responsible for the
important ecosystem services that it provides for human-wellbeing. Throughout this
transition, neo-ecologists have redesigned their spatial datasets, metrics and models to
meet these political challenges – in most cases extremely successfully. So how have
palaeoecologists and the long-term datasets relevant to biodiversity conservation, fared
over the same interval in time? This talk will examine how the changing political landscape
in biodiversity conservation been embraced by the palaeocological community at large
and where there have been successes and challenges in the use of long-term ecological
datasets for biodiversity conservation. It will then ask what new approaches and datasets
are needed to address the challenges of biodiversity conservation over the next 50 years.