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Climate change, conservation and management: an assessment of the peer-reviewed scientific journal literature
Journal article   Peer reviewed

Climate change, conservation and management: an assessment of the peer-reviewed scientific journal literature

A. Felton, J. Fischer, D.B. Lindenmayer, R. Montague-Drake, A.R. Lowe, D. Saunders, A.M. Felton, W. Steffen, N.T. Munro, K. Youngentob, …
Biodiversity and Conservation, Vol.18(8), pp.2243-2253
2009
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-009-9652-0
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Abstract

Recent reviews of the conservation literature indicate that significant biases exist in the published literature regarding the regions, ecosystems and species that have been examined by researchers. Despite the global threat of climatic change, similar biases may be occurring within the sub-discipline of climate-change ecology. Here we hope to foster critical thought and discussion by considering the directions taken by conservation researchers when addressing climate change. To form a quantitative basis for our perspective, we assessed 248 papers from the climate change literature that considered the conservation management of biodiversity and ecosystems. We found that roughly half of the studies considered climate change in isolation from other threatening processes. We also found that the majority of surveyed scientific publications were conducted in the temperate forests of Europe and North America. Regions such as Latin America that are rich in biodiversity but may have low adaptive capacity to climate change were not well represented. We caution that such biases in research effort may be distracting our attention away from vulnerable regions, ecosystems and species. Specifically we suggest that the under-representation of research from regions low in adaptive capacity and rich in biodiversity requires international collaboration by those experienced in climate-change research, with researchers from less wealthy nations who are familiar with local issues, ecosystems and species. Furthermore, we caution that the propensity of ecologists to work in essentially unmodified ecosystems may fundamentally hamper our ability to make useful recommendations in a world that is experiencing significant global change.

Details

UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

This output has contributed to the advancement of the following goals:

#13 Climate Action
#14 Life Below Water
#15 Life on Land

Source: InCites

Metrics

47 Record Views
70 Times Cited - Web of Science

InCites Highlights

These are selected metrics from InCites Benchmarking & Analytics tool, related to this output

Collaboration types
Domestic collaboration
International collaboration
Citation topics
3 Agriculture, Environment & Ecology
3.40 Forestry
3.40.195 Biodiversity Conservation
Web Of Science research areas
Biodiversity Conservation
Ecology
Environmental Sciences
ESI research areas
Environment/Ecology
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