Name: Yuzhu Gong Due Date: 2015/10/25
Article Title: Which Species Will Live
Author/Source: Scientific American
Article Title: Which Species Will Live
Author/Source: Scientific American
A: List major ideas, concepts or key points - point by point
- Conservation groups have decided to ignore the petrel.
- They judged each species for its importance to its ecosystem, its economic and cultural value, and its potential to serve as a conservation emblem.
- The experts knew that all conservation groups and government agencies were coping with similar choices in tacit ways.
- As budgets shrink, environmental stresses grow.
- Politicians and regulators care more about economy than planet.
- The concept of conservation triage is based loosely on medical triage, a decision-making system used by battlefield medics since the Napoleonic Wars.
- All involve sorting patients for treatment in difficult situations when time, expertise and supplies are short.
- In Noah's Choice: all species are fundamentally equal, and everything can and should be saved, regardless of its importance to humans.
- Triage is one of the most provocative ideas in conservation because it invokes not only political threats to laws.
- Politically controversial species attract more funding.
- The advantage of this function-first approach is that it focuses on specific ecological roles rather than raw numbers of species, giving conservationists a better chance at protecting functioning ecosystems.
- The evolution-first approach emphasizes the preservation of genetic diversity, which can help all the world’s species survive and adapt in fast-changing environmental conditions by providing a robust gene pool.
- The Wildlife Conservation Society combined different triage approaches in its analyses: it gave priority to threatened species that have larger body size and wider geographic range, reasoning that protection of these creatures would likely benefit many other plants and animals. It also gave higher rankings to species with greater genetic distinctiveness.
- In a sense, the Meyer approach combines the function-first and evolution-first processes: it protects ecological relations by focusing on entire ecosystems, and it protects genetic diversity by prioritizing endemic species. The idea caught on and influences decisions by many philanthropists, environmental organizations and governments today.
- In an effort to refine the concept, Possingham and his colleagues developed Marxan, a software program that is now in wide use. It aims to maximize the effectiveness of conservation reserves by considering not only the presence of endemic species and the level of conservation threats but also factors such as the cost of protection and “complementarity”—the contribution of each new reserve to existing biodiversity protections.
- The central difficulty is that, just as with battlefield triage, the line between opportunity and lost cause is almost never clear.
- The ESA has one provision for such a too-hard basket--it allows for a panel of experts than can permit a federal agency to violate the act's protections.
B: Summarize the author's main point or idea
People are gathering together to figure out which species is crucial to the system economically, culturally and potential to serve as a conservation emblem. However, the politicians and regulators care more about the money than planet, thus they have to come up with an idea called triage. Triage has different variations, all of them involve sorting patients for treatment in difficult situations where time, expertise or supplies, or all three, are scarce. It has three types of it. First, the function-first, is useful only in well-understood systems, and the number of those is small. An exclusively function-first analysis would almost certainly leave many ecologically important species behind. Second, the evolution-first emphasizes the preservation of genetic diversity, which can help all the world’s species survive and adapt in fast-changing environmental conditions by providing a robust gene pool. Third, the Meyer-first approach combines the function-first and evolution-first processes: it protects ecological relations by focusing on entire ecosystems, and it protects genetic diversity by prioritizing endemic species. The idea caught on and influences decisions by many philanthropists, environmental organizations and governments today. Hotspots are the maximum number of species by focusing on land areas that were full of plants found nowhere else on the planet and that were also under pressing environmental threats.
People are gathering together to figure out which species is crucial to the system economically, culturally and potential to serve as a conservation emblem. However, the politicians and regulators care more about the money than planet, thus they have to come up with an idea called triage. Triage has different variations, all of them involve sorting patients for treatment in difficult situations where time, expertise or supplies, or all three, are scarce. It has three types of it. First, the function-first, is useful only in well-understood systems, and the number of those is small. An exclusively function-first analysis would almost certainly leave many ecologically important species behind. Second, the evolution-first emphasizes the preservation of genetic diversity, which can help all the world’s species survive and adapt in fast-changing environmental conditions by providing a robust gene pool. Third, the Meyer-first approach combines the function-first and evolution-first processes: it protects ecological relations by focusing on entire ecosystems, and it protects genetic diversity by prioritizing endemic species. The idea caught on and influences decisions by many philanthropists, environmental organizations and governments today. Hotspots are the maximum number of species by focusing on land areas that were full of plants found nowhere else on the planet and that were also under pressing environmental threats.
C: Reaction to the article
My Own Thoughts on the Topic:
Triage is one of the most provocative ideas in conservation because it invokes not only political threats to laws, which basically means that people have the desire to save the environment or to make it better in my point of view. Triage is worthy of all the risks because it saves the ecosystems instead of just humans. It has several types of it, for instance, the evolution-first. The Endangered Species Act has one provision for such a too-hard basket--it allows for a panel of experts than can permit a federal agency to violate the act's protections. I think we should do more things to help the environment getting better.
My Own Thoughts on the Topic:
Triage is one of the most provocative ideas in conservation because it invokes not only political threats to laws, which basically means that people have the desire to save the environment or to make it better in my point of view. Triage is worthy of all the risks because it saves the ecosystems instead of just humans. It has several types of it, for instance, the evolution-first. The Endangered Species Act has one provision for such a too-hard basket--it allows for a panel of experts than can permit a federal agency to violate the act's protections. I think we should do more things to help the environment getting better.