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Even Conservation Rules Are Made to Be Broken: Implications for Biodiversity

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ABSTRACT

Despite efforts to enclose and control conservation zones around the world, direct human impacts in conservation areas continue, often resulting from clandestine violations of conservation rules through outright poaching, strategic agricultural encroachment, or noncompliance. Nevertheless, next to nothing is actually known about the spatially and temporally explicit patterns of anthropogenic disturbance resulting from such noncompliance. This article reviews current understandings of ecological disturbance and conservation noncompliance, concluding that differing forms of noncompliance hold differing implications for diversity. The authors suggest that forms of anthropogenic patchy disturbance resulting from violation may maintain, if not enhance, floral diversity. They therefore argue for extended empirical investigation of such activities and call for conservation biologists to work with social scientists to assess this conservation reality by analyzing how and when incomplete enforcement and rule-breaking drive ecological change.

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Acknowledgment

Research supporting this review was made possible with the support of the National Science Foundation (Grant #0351037).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography and Regional Development, University of Arizona, 437B Harvill Building, Tucson, Arizona, 85716, USA

    Paul Robbins

  2. Department of Geography, Ohio State University, 1036 Derby Hall, 154 N. Oval Mall, Columbus, Ohio, 43210, USA

    Kendra McSweeney

  3. Department of Evolutionary Ecology and Organismal Biology, Ohio State University, 382 Aronoff Laboratory, 318 W, 12th Avenue, Columbus, Ohio, 43210, USA

    Thomas Waite

  4. Department of Geography and Regional Development, University of Arizona, Harvill Building, Tucson, Arizona, 85716, USA

    Jennifer Rice

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  1. Paul Robbins
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  2. Kendra McSweeney
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  4. Jennifer Rice
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Correspondence to Paul Robbins.

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Robbins, P., McSweeney, K., Waite, T. et al. Even Conservation Rules Are Made to Be Broken: Implications for Biodiversity. Environmental Management 37, 162–169 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-005-0009-5

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