Future Human Intervention in Ecosystems and the Critical Role for Evolutionary Biology

In 1978, at the first conference to discuss the emerging field of conservation biology, there were 4 billion people on Earth. Now there are more than 7 billion, with 10.1 billion projected by 2100. Sustainably meeting the needs of 10 billion people and conserving natural resources at the same time will require profound creativity and innovation. Scholars who study human-caused climate change have a word for this creativity, adaptation. Adaptation involves some acceptance that change is occurring and will continue to occur and an acknowledgment that new forms and combinations of nature are being created. Adaptation also requires humans to design new tools, draw upon new theories and resources, and manage natural and social systems to a greater degree than we have before. To allow successful adaptation of ecosystems to global change, conservation biology will have to shift its perspective from backward to forward looking. Restoring and maintaining ecosystems to a historic baseline has been a common goal of conservation, but alterations in land cover, climate change, and environmental contaminants are making it impossible to recreate the past. Instead, society has to ask what kind of nature it would like to create and what ecosystem functions it would like to maintain. We think conservation biology should strive to preserve economic, cultural, aesthetic, and option value with little or no reduction in the biological diversity that underlies that value. To achieve this, however, society will need to maintain genetic diversity and functioning ecosystems alongside humans. And it will be necessary to foster biotic changes that are achievable given the realities of global change. We argue that adaptation of nature by humans to global changes such as climate change, habitat loss and fragmentation, and nutrient deposition will require a sophisticated understanding of evolutionary theory and genome