Saving Nature's Legacy: Protecting And Restoring Biodiversity - Hardcover

Noss, Reed F.; Cooperrider, Allen; Defenders Of Wildlife

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 155963247X ISBN 13: 9781559632478

Publisher: Island Press, 1994

Synopsis

Written by two leading conservation biologists, Saving Nature's Legacy is a thorough and readable introduction to issues of land management and conservation biology. It presents a broad, land-based approach to biodiversity conservation in the United States, with the authors succinctly translating principles, techniques, and findings of the ecological sciences into an accessible and practical plan for action.After laying the groundwork for biodiversity conservation -- what biodiversity is, why it is important, its status in North America -- Noss and Cooperrider consider the strengths and limitations of past and current approaches to land management. They then present the framework for a bold new strategy, with explicit guidelines on: inventorying biodiversityselecting areas for protection designing regional and continental reserve networks establishing monitoring programssetting priorities for getting the job done Throughout the volume, the authors provide in-depth assessments of what must be done to protect and restore the full spectrum of native biodiversity to the North American continent.

About this title

About the Author

Reed Noss is the Davis-Shine Endowed Professor at the University of Florida. Noss is focused on systematic conservation planning at regional to continental scales. He has designed and directed such studies in Florida, the Pacific Northwest, California, the Rocky Mountains, and several regions of Canada, and has been an advisor to similar projects throughout North America and parts of Latin America and Europe. This work seeks to identify areas requiring protection from development and to devise management policies, approaches, and techniques that will maintain the biodiversity and ecological values of these areas and entire landscapes over time. Noss has helped to pioneer methods of integrating population viability analysis into reserve selection algorithms. He currently focuses on fire ecology, forest and grassland restoration and management, the Florida Grasshopper Sparrow and its dry prairie habitat, Florida Scrub-Jays, and the Florida Panther. An emerging theme is the responses of species (especially vertebrates) and ecological processes to environmental conditions along urban-wildland gradients. Road ecology (e.g., responses of wildlife to roads and the design of wildlife crossings and barriers to minimize impacts) and movement ecology (e.g., corridors and connectivity) figure prominently in this research theme.

Review

...perhaps the single most important book to be published in the last decade of conservation/environmental sciences literature. --Lon Drake, Natural Areas Journal Read this book: Two of the nationAEs top conservation biologists...present a science-based approach to policies and practices to maintain biodiversity.... Saving NatureAEs Legacy should be read by every land and resource manager and by their supervisors and the leaders who set policy decisions.... A single book cannot change natural resource management in the United States, but for those who want to try, Saving NatureAEs Legacy explains how. --David E. Blockstein, BioScience ...offers the most comprehensive direction to date on what the United States can do to stop the downward spiral of ecosystem deterioration and to implement policies of ono net losso of the nationAEs native biological riches.... Who needs this book? Conservation biologists should read it to better understand the challenges and practical demands of putting theory into practice. Managers should read it to more fully understand the rationale and context for new management concepts, and to be better able to apply the concepts toward useful purpose in ecosystem management.... Actually this would be a good book for all citizens to read, if only to see what could be were we to muster the will to alter our individual and collective behaviors. --Winifred B. Kessler, Journal of Forestry

Edition details

• Publisher: Island Press
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 155963247X
• ISBN 13: 9781559632478
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 443