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We can solve conservation problems, but we need to do more than simply preserving natural areas and leaving them alone.
Unmanaged natural areas can provide acceptable habitat, but usually far from optimal.
There’s a few reasons for that:
1. land use change and development has so altered the landscape that we need to actively work to represent a diversity of habitats in conserved areas.
2. Natural processes like fire, grazing from native herbivores, and predation by apex predators, which interacted to shape vegetation diversity, are usually absent.
3. Invasive species can dramatically reduce the habitat value of an area
4. A lot of our forests were harvested 80 to 100 years ago, and we now have relatively even-aged stands that lack age and structural diversity needed to support a diversity of wildlife.
Despite all this, we have the knowledge and ability to manage natural areas to support greater biodiversity and abundance.
It often involves targeted disturbance. Warning some of these may surprise you:
-Strategic timber harvest to create structural and species diversity and establish forest understory.
-Herbicide for invasive and undesirable plants,
-Prescribed fire to maintain open grassland areas,
-Timed disking to stimulate wildflowers, and/or
-Targeted grazing to mimic historical herbivory and reduce grass dominance.
Determining how to apply these tools can take a lot of nuance and should be done with forethought, but they can make dramatic improvements for some of our most declining wildlife species.
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