Conservation Where People Live and Work

Abstract: Effective conservation planning requires information from well‐designed studies across a spectrum of land uses, ranging from wildlands to highly modified production landscapes and large cities. There is currently a lack of such information about human settlement, even though this is a major source of land‐use change with serious implications for biodiversity. Fewer than 6% of the papers in recent volumes of Conservation Biology described work conducted in urban, suburban, or exurban areas or studies in which human settlement was considered explicitly. For a variety of reasons, conservation has tended to focus on lands with a relatively small human presence, often dominated by resource extraction and…

• CS
  Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation