Customer Reviews

Large Carnivores and the Conservation of Biodiversity

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The contributors to this edited book are all advocates of carnivores as well as being partisans of a particular side in an academic debate. This debate concerns the relative importance of "top-down" and "bottom-up" regulation. For example, are elk in Yellowstone limited by the amount of forage available (bottom-up) or by wolf predation (top down)? The answer to the scientific question matters for environmental policy: wolves are a lot more important for the ecosystem if top-down regulation dominates.

With this in mind, it's possible that the fact that these authors like large carnivores for ethical reasons might influence their scientific judgment that top-down regulation generally characterizes ecosystems. Or, it could be that the world really does work that way - - you be the judge. The authors are honest and up-front about both the policy issues and the scientific issues, and there are several contributions that argue for more complex relationships among trophic levels than the simple bottom/top-regulation dichotomy would suggest.

Within this general consensus, the editors have done a good job selecting papers. There is a nice diversity of cases: the usual suspects (wolves and grizzlies for the lay reader; otters, sea urchins, and kelp for the biologist) as well as some new suspects (Florida panther, coral reefs) and some more unusual items (culpeos and exotic herbivores in Patagonia). Themes included not just basic predator-prey relationships but a wide range of more complex relationships within ecosystems on land and in the sea.

The chapters are written by biologists for biologists, but few of the chapters are particularly technical. It should be readable for a lay person with a college degree (or equivalent) - - but it's certainly not a book for the beach. Nonetheless, it is a good book, and one of the few edited books in which the many contributions really do address the same topic. Not only biologists but anyone interested in policy issues of large carnivore conservation can learn from this book.