Evolution in biodiversity policy – current gaps and future needs
Article first published online: 29 FEB 2012
© 2012 The Authors. Evolutionary Applications published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
Special Issue: The evolutionary basis of biodiversity and its potential for adaptation to global change
Volume 5, Issue 2, pages 202–218, February 2012
How to Cite
Santamaría, L. and Méndez, P. F. (2012), Evolution in biodiversity policy – current gaps and future needs. Evolutionary Applications, 5: 202–218. doi: 10.1111/j.1752-4571.2011.00229.x
- Issue published online: 29 FEB 2012
- Article first published online: 29 FEB 2012
- Received:17 October 2011 Accepted: 17 November 2011
- anthropogenic evolution;
- biodiversity policy;
- co-evolutionary networks;
- global change
The intensity and speed of human alterations to the planet’s ecosystems are yielding our static, ahistorical view of biodiversity obsolete. Human actions frequently trigger fast evolutionary responses, affect extant genetic variation and result in the establishment of new communities and co-evolutionary networks for which we lack past analogues. Contemporary evolution interplays with ecological changes to determine the response of organisms and ecosystems to anthropogenic pressures. Examples on wild species include responses to harvest (e.g. fisheries, hunting, angling), habitat loss and fragmentation (e.g. genetic effects of isolation), biotic exchange (e.g. evolutionary responses to control measures), climate change (e.g. local adaptation and its interplay with dispersal processes) and the responses of endangered species to conservation measures. A review of international and EU biodiversity policies showed numerous opportunities for the integration of evolutionary knowledge, with the realistic prospect of improving their efficacy. Such opportunities should be extended to other sectoral policies of direct relevance for biodiversity – notably nature conservation, fisheries, agriculture, water resources, spatial planning and climate change. These avenues for improvement are, however, challenged by the low level of enforcement of biodiversity policies, linked to the nonbinding nature of most biodiversity-policy documents, and the decreasing representation of biodiversity in EU’s research policy.