Potential For Biodiversity Management

While global protected areas, including nature reserves, parks, and areas protected by treaties, protect some aspects of biodiversity, shortcomings remain: the areas only cover certain habitats and local people often resent their formal management. Natural sacred sites exist in a number of countries around the world, with communities often sharing and managing sites that are not under formal protection. Such sites cover a wide variety of habitats and are often located in biodiversity hotspots. Shonil Bhagwat (Natural History Museum, London and University of Oxford) and Claudia Rutte (University of Bern, Switzerland) propose that such habitats should be included in biodiversity management.

Eventhough 23 percent of Earth's tropical forests are formally protected, only 8 percent of cropland and natural vegetation mosaic habitats receive the same protection. Natural sacred sites, protected by local traditions, are often situated within agricultural landscapes, providing corridors for wildlife. These sites come in a number of forms, including burial grounds and sites of ancestral deity worship, and often include organisms not protected in more formal settings. For example, sacred groves in the Koduga district of Karnataka state, India, have relict populations of certain threatened tree species that are not found in formal protected areas.

The scientists stress that a number of sacred groves are still well preserved, others have been destroyed or face threats by human encroachment. Changing values also affect these spaces; from legal ownership to shifting social and economic values as well as changes in spiritual and religious values. Bhagwat and Rutte emphasize the need for integration of sacred sites into conservation practices.

Other reviews in the recent issue of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment include "Marine Ecosystem-based Management: from characterization to implementation" by Katie Arkema (University of California - Santa Barbara), Sarah Abramson, Bryan Dewsbury and "The role of ecological theory and practice in poverty alleviation and environmental conservation" by Fabrice DeClerck and his colleagues from the Earth Institute at Columbia University.


Posted by: Erica    Source