Special Section: Conservation in Europe as a Model for Emerging Conservation Issues Globally Introduction Conservation approaches and objectives among regions of the world differ strikingly, even when one excludes the ecological differences. Our experience is that many conservation scientists and practitioners do not appreciate that their approach to conservation may surprise those from other countries and that there is much to learn from studying lessons from elsewhere. For example, visitors to Europe from outside the continent are sometimes surprised to learn that most protected areas consist of intensively managed private land and that many recent conservation actions are related to biodiversity on farmland. This is exemplified by the striking differences between the Society for Conservation Biology (SCB) conferences held in North America, which have a strong emphasis on the paradigms of wilderness, protected areas, and corridors, and the SCB European regional meetings, which are dominated by discussions of farmland conservation, coexistence, and agricultural policy. In this introduction, we outline the perspectives of the 6 papers in this special section written to celebrate the third European Conference on Conservation Biology and the International Congress for Conservation Biology in Montpellier, France, in August 2015. The papers examine European conservation practices and highlight how some of the underlying history of the continent has resulted in differences in approach between Europe and other regions. Because Europe has higher human population densities than much of the world (about 500 million people, i.e., 112 people/km2 ), European conservation might anticipate what conservation will become in the developed world in the next few decades as the human population continues to grow. A key factor of the unique European approach to conservation relates to a quirk of global history. Although agriculture arose in a number of regions at about the same period, its impact was most revolutionary in Europe and the Near East due to happenstance: the region held the 2 annual grasses with the largest seeds (barley and wheat), various legumes, as well as goats, sheep, and cattle. The East-West orientation of the Mediterranean and mountain ranges meant that, once domesticated, animals and plants could be exported across an extensive region of similar climate (Diamond 1998). Agriculture then started to transform the western Palaearctic landscape. The increasing human density sustained by agriculture, combined with increasing affluence, drove demand for other natural resources and lead to the

intensive exploitation of a range of habitat types, such as woods, heaths, wetlands, and ponds. For example, Bradfield Wood in the United Kingdom has a continuous record of management since 1252 that includes coppicing (cutting at the base of trees on a rotational cycle) of hazel (Corylus avellana) to produce poles of different sizes interspersed with trees (often oaks [Quercus robur]) left to mature (known as standards) that provides larger timbers for houses and ships. This traditional management continues today. The area has an almost industrial atmosphere because it is divided into large blocks that are cleared on a regular rotation, but the wood is exceptionally botanically rich with a flush of growth following each coppicing as the competition for light, water, and nutrients is dramatically reduced. When such coppiced woodlands are left uncut, much of the diversity disappears (M¨ ullerov´a et al. 2015). Bradfield wood is an example of a common paradox: nature in Europe requires disturbance. One explanation of this paradox is that the landscape was a patchwork of open habitat types created by fire, floods, and wild herbivores (Vera 2000) and that these disturbances were replaced by farm animals and farm and woodland operations (Bat`ary et al. 2015). Many of the species of conservation concern depend on some form of disturbance and favor early or mid-successional stage habitats. As a result, in much of Europe a major concern of conservationists is to create and maintain such early- to midsuccessional ecosystems. When the natural grazers of grasslands, fens, heathlands, and woodlands are absent and cannot be reintroduced, cutting or livestock grazing can then replace them ecologically. As just one of thousands of examples, the management plan of the Majella National Park in central Italy allows sheep grazing in the core area of the park to help maintain the traditional prairies so important for many species of interest, such as the Dotterel (Charadrius morinellus). This approach differs from the traditional model in much of the rest of the world in which the management goals of national parks and nature reserves are to prevent obvious human impacts and curtail grazing by farm animals. Almost everywhere in Europe, the landscape has been modified by humans, and usually markedly so. Whereas in many other regions there is a clear distinction between nature reserves and intensive farmland, in Europe, as in much of Asia and Africa, the 2 often merge. Not only are protected areas farmed, but agricultural land is itself of conservation interest. Tourists visiting beautiful European sites are almost always visiting farmed landscapes. 975 Conservation Biology, Volume 29, No. 4, 975–977  C 2015 Society for Conservation Biology DOI: 10.1111/cobi.12530

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This love of human managed landscapes helps explain the European obsession with declines in farmland species and their concern over agricultural intensification, including issues such as genetically modified crops or neonicotinoid pesticides. Agriculture has dominated western European conservation in recent years as has, especially, the overwhelming impact of the European Common Agricultural Policy, whose budget of €362.8 billion (US$495.4 billion) for 2014–2020 (Pe’er et al. 2014) includes considerable funding for agrienvironment schemes intended to benefit wildlife. Such schemes occur elsewhere in the world, but they do not garner the same level of interest from the conservation community. This distinctive feature of European history affects the way the relationship between nature and human culture is viewed and, consequently, affects current conservation practice. For example, in the United States, most conservation entails protecting existing natural areas and restoring habitat—often to a state it was a few decades in the past. There is good evidence of native vegetation from existing remnants, descriptions, paintings, and photographs. In the more intensively managed areas of Europe, there is often no native vegetation to model restoration on. Nor is there the demand; the interest is in improving and creating hay meadows, heathlands, and other anthropogenic landscapes and in interventions to achieve this (Spooner et al. 2015). As explored by Linnell et al. (2015), the North American model suggests greater emphasis on the dualistic view of the nature–culture relationship in which clear boundaries exist between the realms of nature (seen as the pristine state of the environment) and those of human dominated landscapes. The emphasis then is more on preservation than intervention. European conservation is framed, in both practice and legislation, more interactively, where humans and nature share the entire landscape. This view implies acceptance of the loss of large areas of intact wilderness and minimal human presence but does not imply the loss of any species or habitat. Large carnivores, for example, are generally seen as the most problematic species for humans to coexist with and are often celebrated as evidence of relatively intact natural systems, but in Europe they thrive in large numbers over increasing ranges and are the best evidence that the European view of nature– culture coexistence is extensive and viable, though there are the inevitable tensions (Chapron et al. 2014). More recently, following other perspectives on values of intact nature, there is a renewed interest in Europe in the concepts of wilderness and rewilding (Linnell et al. 2015). Ceausu et al. (2015) discuss the opportunities offered by abandonment of marginal agricultural land and the overall negative trend in land occupied by agriculture in Europe. They make the case for furthering a natural course toward the reestablishment of a complete array of ecological process, especially herbivory and predation. It is a topic of great importance for Europe and probably

Conservation Biology Volume 29, No. 4, 2015

Conservation Issues Globally

other continents because it shows the latent and persistent tension in society between the dualistic and land sharing approaches to conservation. Substantial governmental support of agriculture has been a key policy of the European Union and has succeeded in increasing yields, but often to the detriment of biodiversity. Hodge et al. (2015) examined how the European Common Agricultural Policy has been modified with the intention of maintaining both food production and the environment. They show that existing measures are far from perfect and discuss options for reform. The effectiveness of measures to benefit the environment is reviewed by Bat´ary et al. (2015), who found that in general farmland biodiversity responds positively to agrienvironmental measures. However, schemes implemented recently (after 2007) have not been more effective than older schemes. Furthermore, conservation measures aimed at areas that are not in production, such as hedges and field margins, result in more positive responses from biodiversity than those aimed at productive areas. Nature conservation in Europe is not managed only through agrienvironmental measures; there are programs dedicated to species and habitat conservation under the legislative umbrella of the Habitat Directive and the Bird Directive. The Habitat Directive has been instrumental in setting up Natura 2000, currently the largest continental network of protected areas in the world. Maiorano et al. (2015) examined the efficacy and efficiency of the network in covering European vertebrate diversity. They conclude the network has generally had positive effects, although it would benefit from more flexibility to adapt to changing ecological and socioeconomic conditions. Even a large network of nature reserves such as Natura 2000 has inherent limitations relative to external pressures of the strength and scale of the expected impact of changes in climate and land-use patterns. Rondinini and Visconti (2015) show that, averaging across scenarios, European large mammals could lose 10–25% of their habitat by 2050 if the current model of human consumption is not changed. However, their analysis also shows that a change in human consumption patterns, coupled with the current system of protected areas, might succeed in counteracting the impact of climate and land-use changes. A cautionary approach is mandatory in using these results because this broad conclusion is based on large-scale predictive models and general assumptions applied to a European continent on which geographical, socioeconomic, and cultural patterns are highly diverse. There are many other ways in which different landuse traditions result in different attitudes, research, and practices. It is illustrative to compare the trajectories of conservation in the United States and Europe and the role of different models of hunting rights. In the United States, large areas of public land are open for hunting or fishing, providing the appropriate license is purchased. License fees provide substantial funds for enforcement,

Boitani & Sutherland

research, and management, all of which enable large scale conservation, including habitat improvement even in areas well outside the license jurisdiction. Thus, wildlife management has a long tradition in the United States and offers a career for many practically orientated and scientifically trained biologists. As conservation biology arose as a scientific field, these wildlife biologists provided an army of support and enabled its rapid development. In contrast, hunting rights in Europe are often managed by local communities or are owned, such as in United Kingdom, by local landowners. Game management is then localized and about controlling predators, breeding, and onsite improvements of habitat. Whilst some pay small fees to organizations who carry out some science and coordinate some action, almost all of conservation work is carried out by gamekeepers who are selected for practical skills and rarely have relevant higher-level educational training. The gamekeeping community has not been key in the development of conservation science in Europe. The roots of European conservation were instead in the detailed research into enhancing populations of declining species and maintaining habitats within human-modified landscapes and in the tradition of amateur naturalists, who often acquired substantial expertise and produced remarkable quantities of information. In general, wildlife management and biodiversity conservation in national and European policies are more bottom-up processes and perhaps to a certain extent opportunistic rather than top–down and carefully planned approaches. Although the European conservation model seems unique, we hope this special section provides an explanation of how its uniqueness can be understood when framed by its history. There is increasing interest in Europe in restoring functioning natural ecosystems, and the conservation importance of human created habitats and the means of restoring them are becoming increasingly appreciated on a global scale. However, because Europe has relatively high human population densities, especially for developed economies, its successes and failures in conservation carry useful lessons to those nations moving along similar development paths.

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Acknowledgment W.J.S. is funded by Arcadia. Luigi Boitani∗ and William J. Sutherland† ∗ Dipartimento

di Biologia e Biotecnologie, Universit`a di Roma “La Sapienza”, viale, dell’Universit`a, 32 - 00185, Rome, Italy email [email protected] †Conservation Science Group, Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 3EJ, United Kingdom

Literature Cited Bat´ary P, Dicks LV, Kleijn D, Sutherland WJ. 2015. The role of agrienvironment schemes in conservation and environmental management. Conservation Biology 29:1006–1016. Ceaușu S, Hofmann M, Navarro LM, Carver S, Verburg PH, Pereira HN. 2015. Mapping opportunities and challenges for rewilding in Europe. Conservation Biology 29:1017–1027. Chapron G, et al. 2014. Recovery of large carnivores in Europe’s modern human-dominated landscapes. Science 346:1517–1519. Diamond J. 1998. Guns, germs, steel. A short history of everybody for the last 13000 years. Vintage, London. Hodge I, Hauck J, Bonn A. 2015. The alignment of agricultural and nature conservation policies in the European Union. Conservation Biology 29:996–1005. Linnell JDC, Kaczensky P, Wotschikowsky U, Lescureux N, Boitani L. 2015. Framing the relationship between people and nature in the context of European nature conservation. Conservation Biology 29:978–985. Maiorano L, Amori G, Boitani L. 2015. On how biodiversity is covered in Europe by national protected areas and by the Natura 2000 network: insights from terrestrial vertebrates. Conservation Biology 29:986– 995. M¨ ullerov´a J, Radim H´edl R, Szab´ o P. 2015. Coppice abandonment and its implications for species diversity in forest vegetation. Forest Ecology and Management 343:88–100. Pe’er G, et al. 2014. EU agricultural reform fails on biodiversity. Science 344:1090–1092. Rondinini C, Visconti P. 2015. Scenarios of large mammal loss in Europe for the 21st century. Conservation Biology 29:1028–1036. Spooner F, Smith RK, Sutherland WJ. 2015. Trends, biases and effectiveness in reported conservation interventions. Conservation Evidence 12:2–7. Vera F. 2000. Grazing ecology and forest history. CABI Publishing, New York.

Conservation Biology Volume 29, No. 4, 2015

Conservation in Europe as a Model for Emerging Conservation Issues Globally. Introduction.

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