Conservation ecology
The Conservation Ecology leads findings from different scientific fields, such as ecology , economics and sociology together and sets them for preservation of biodiversity one. The development of a new understanding of the negative effects of new forms of management of intensive land use on natural and semi-natural ecosystems has made a significant contribution to the development of nature conservation ecology .
Field of activity
Conservation ecology acts as a scientific discipline against the background of habitat destruction caused by human activity, which has dramatic consequences for biodiversity on earth. It is in the context of the current mass extinction of plant and animal species. Nature conservation ecology focuses on the question of what significance and consequences such a loss of biological diversity has for the functionality of communities and ecosystems, especially with regard to the importance of interspecific interactions for the functionality of communities. Conservation ecology examines the question of whether the loss of a species has a kind of domino effect . The investigations concern the examination of whether the disappearance of a species affects other species from extinction, whether this results in changes for the ecosystems themselves and whether this affects the ability of ecosystems to provide necessary services to humans.
Theoretical controversy
The importance of biological diversity for ecological communities is answered differently by two models, which illustrates the area of tension in which nature conservation ecology operates.
The ecologists Paul and Anne Ehrlich from Stanford University (USA) presented the rivet model they had developed in 1981 . You are comparing the number of species in a community with the number of rivets on an aircraft wing. In this model, each rivet contributes to a small but noticeable extent to the stability of the entire aircraft wing. While the loss of a few rivets should have little impact on the balance, if a larger number of rivets fail, the stability can collapse in one fell swoop and cause the aircraft to crash. This model sees the structure of communities essentially determined by the interspecific interrelationships and assigns each species a small but important contribution to the functionality of the overall system. The failure of a species, e.g. B. a key robber, can therefore mean a domino effect for the entire community.
The ecologist Brian Walker of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO, Australia) takes a different approach . In the redundancy model he developed , he does not compare the types of an ecosystem with rivets, but with occupants of an aircraft, who apart from the crew have little significance for the stability of the aircraft. Most species are therefore not really necessary for the functioning of an ecosystem, rather they represent a quantity that is currently irrelevant for maintaining the ecosystem. If the system is disturbed, however, these species can step out of redundancy and take over essential system functions. According to the redundancy model, it makes sense to divide the species of a community into functional groups and to classify species that do not play a functional role within their functional group as redundant. The structure and function of the community is mainly focused on the functional groups and less on the individual species. If a key robber is lost, another species would take over the role according to the redundancy model. A domino effect is therefore triggered when the majority of the species of a functional group fail. In this respect, according to the redundancy model, an analysis of the size of redundancies within the community is necessary for an ecosystem to be examined.
Whether the stability of an ecosystem depends more on the interspecific interrelationships of the individual species, in that the loss of one species affects many others, or on the amount of redundancy where the loss of a large part of a functional group leads to destabilization, is probably the type of the respective type Ecosystem dependent and requires scientific assessment. Supporting experimental findings are available for both hypotheses.