Islands on the Continent: Conservation Biogeography in Changing Ecosystems

Abstract

Conservation biogeography meets many challenges around the world associated with increasing human pressure on ecosystems and processes like global change. Threats as well as conservation opportunities are differentially distributed over the Chilean territory, and are here explored in relation to modern approaches such as systematic conservation planning.During the seventies researchers found that concepts theoretical and empirical concepts developed under the mainframe of island biogeography, as extinction and colonization, could be adapted to the analysis of other isolated territories on the mainland like mountains, deserts, water pods, or forest fragments surrounded by the human-altered matrix (MacArthur and Wilson 1967; Marzluff 2005; Whittaker et al. 2008). In practice, concepts of island biogeography have been increasingly applied in conservation planning and the design of reserves networks (Wilson and Willis 1975; Shafer 1990; Pisano 1996; Lomolino et al. 2006). The explicit link between conservation and biogeography has been systematized as a new scientific field, namely "conservation biogeography" (Whittaker et al. 2005).