Moving Beyond Debate into Action

By Nicole Adimey | Atira Conservation Founder

Did you know that almost 40 percent of the Earth’s land surface is covered by human agriculture and that 70 percent of our remaining rainforests are within 1 km of a road or other human disturbance? Thanks to these changes to natural spaces, the rate at which species are going extinct is 100 to 1,000 times greater than before humans dominated the planet.

In North America alone, we have 3 billion fewer birds and insect populations have declined by nearly 50 percent; vertebrates have declined by 70 percent.

Habitat fragmentation — when large contiguous tracts of land are broken into smaller and smaller pieces due to development — is a real concern in species conservation. Interestingly though, there has been ongoing debate in the scientific community since at least the 1970s about which conservation practice is more effective: saving large, contiguous tracts of land or saving numerous small tracts. (You can read about the debate on the topic as well as a call for a way to find some consensus in this paper from the peer-reviewed journal Landscape Ecology).

I think some things we can agree on, however, is that we’re losing too many natural spaces, that animal and plant species are in decline because of it, and our human communities will suffer from the loss of organisms that help us purify our water, disperse our seeds and even filter the very air we breathe. From a pragmatic standpoint, this alone should be enough for us to move beyond debate into action!

We’re not waiting for the argument to be settled, however, we do rely on data to help us make decisions about land conservation purchases we support.

As we consider conservation partners and land transactions, we look at the context of a transaction. Will a property  support the needs of its local and diverse animal and plant community? Does it possess unique qualities or rare habitat? Will protecting a property help to create a wildlife corridor or enhance an existing corridor that wildlife can use to move from one land fragment to another? How will saving this property make a difference?

We’re glad research teams like this one are taking up the debate over fragmentation as it relates to biodiversity and conservation, and hope that better data and better guidelines can be created to support the conservation of wild spaces.

In the meantime, we’re going to keep doing what we’re doing: Conserving lands that matter!