Charpentier Anne
CEFE UMR 5175, CNRS-Université de Montpellier-Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier-EPHE, 1919 route de Mende 34293 Montpellier cedex 5, France.
Conserv Biol. 2015 Jun;29(3):738-47. doi: 10.1111/cobi.12442. Epub 2015 Jan 9.
As economic and social contexts become more embedded within biodiversity conservation, it becomes obvious that resources are a limiting factor in conservation. This recognition is leading conservation scientists and practitioners to increasingly frame conservation decisions as trade-offs between conflicting societal objectives. However, this framing is all too often done in an intuitive way, rather than by addressing trade-offs explicitly. In contrast, the concept of trade-off is a keystone in evolutionary biology, where it has been investigated extensively. I argue that insights from evolutionary theory can provide methodological and theoretical support to evaluating and quantifying trade-offs in biodiversity conservation. I reviewed the diverse ways in which trade-offs have emerged within the context of conservation and how advances from evolutionary theory can help avoid the main pitfalls of an implicit approach. When studying both evolutionary trade-offs (e.g., reproduction vs. survival) and conservation trade-offs (e.g., biodiversity conservation vs. agriculture), it is crucial to correctly identify the limiting resource, hold constant the amount of this resource when comparing different scenarios, and choose appropriate metrics to quantify the extent to which the objectives have been achieved. Insights from studies in evolutionary theory also reveal how an inadequate selection of conservation solutions may result from considering suboptimal rather than optional solutions when examining whether a trade-off exits between 2 objectives. Furthermore, the shape of a trade-off curve (i.e., whether the relationship between 2 objectives follows a concave, convex, or linear form) is known to affect crucially the definition of optimal solutions in evolutionary biology and very likely affects decisions in biodiversity conservation planning too. This interface between evolutionary biology and biodiversity conservation can therefore provide methodological guidance to support decision makers in the difficult task of choosing among conservation solutions.
随着经济和社会背景与生物多样性保护的联系日益紧密，资源成为保护工作中的一个限制因素这一点变得愈发明显。这种认识促使保护科学家和从业者越来越多地将保护决策视为相互冲突的社会目标之间的权衡。然而，这种权衡往往是凭直觉进行的，而不是通过明确地处理权衡关系来实现。相比之下，权衡概念是进化生物学的基石，在进化生物学中已经得到了广泛研究。我认为，进化理论的见解可以为评估和量化生物多样性保护中的权衡提供方法和理论支持。我回顾了在保护背景下权衡出现的各种方式，以及进化理论的进展如何有助于避免隐性方法的主要缺陷。在研究进化权衡（例如繁殖与生存）和保护权衡（例如生物多样性保护与农业）时，正确识别限制资源、在比较不同情景时保持该资源量不变以及选择合适的指标来量化目标实现的程度至关重要。进化理论研究的见解还揭示了，在考察两个目标之间是否存在权衡时，若考虑的是次优而非最优解决方案，可能会导致保护解决方案的选择不当。此外，权衡曲线的形状（即两个目标之间的关系是凹形、凸形还是线性形式）已知在进化生物学中对最优解决方案的定义有至关重要的影响，并且很可能也会影响生物多样性保护规划中的决策。因此，进化生物学与生物多样性保护之间的这种交叉领域可以提供方法指导，以支持决策者在众多保护解决方案中进行艰难抉择。
