Journal
BIOLOGICAL CONSERVATION
Volume 122, Issue 2, Pages 263-273Publisher
ELSEVIER SCI LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.biocon.2004.07.016
Keywords
biodiversity; site productivity; economic factors; effectiveness of conservation initiatives
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Conservation initiatives are failing to arrest the global loss of biodiversity. From our mechanistic studies of ecology and economics, we suggest that for grazing lands the root cause of this failure is a powerful economic deterrent to measures designed to protect diversity. We identify an exponential relationship between monetary returns and intensification of farming methods over an extremely wide range of grassland productivities and farm systems. At intermediate to high levels of fertility, however, this exponential increase in financial benefit from intensification is associated with a decline in biodiversity and an acceleration of the ecological processes driving species losses from grassland ecosystems. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available