A recent article in BioScience, the journal of the American Institute of Biological Sciences, challenges conventional conservation wisdom, suggesting that protected areas such national parks and designated wilderness areas must embrace natural landscape dynamics rather than trying to preserve static conditions and landscape features.
Dr. Gavin M. Jones (USDA Forest Service) and colleagues contend that current conservation models often resist natural ecosystem processes such as wildfire, leading to a "backfire effect" that makes ecosystems more vulnerable to climate change and other perturbations. "Under climatic change, resisting natural landscape dynamics will backfire and heighten vulnerability to ecosystem transformation through large-scale disturbance," say the authors.
Jones and colleagues point out that in many western US forests, measures to protect mature and old-growth trees by suppressing natural disturbances have paradoxically resulted in more severe habitat loss: "In California, in the United States, mature forest habitat losses to drought and wildfires from 2011 to 2020 were greater inside than outside of spotted owl protected activity centers"—a result of the degradation of drought- and fire-resilient forest conditions.
The proposed shift to protecting landscape dynamics will involve greater intentional human action and may, in the short term, generate conditions unseen in recent times, such as lower tree stand densities. To help guide the process, Jones and colleagues argue for the inclusion of Indigenous knowledge and practices, such as cultural burning, which were typically suppressed within traditional "fortress conservation" models. The authors highlight that, in many areas, Indigenous approaches have millennia-long track records of successfully maintaining ecosystem dynamics.
The authors conclude by noting that, despite the need for a significant paradigm shift, "protecting a place and embracing change are not mutually exclusive. We must consider reducing our focus on conserving landscapes, and move toward the conservation of landscape dynamics."
