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Addressing the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of this rapidly growing subject, and its ever more complex and multidisciplinary corpus of scholarly literature, "Biodiversity and Conservation" is a new title in the Routledge series, "Critical Concepts in the Environment".
Edited by Richard Ladle of Oxford University's Centre for the Environment, this new five-volume reference work brings together the foundational and the very best cutting-edge scholarship to provide a synoptic view of all the key issues and current debates. The first volume in the collection ("History, Background, and Concepts") brings together the most important scholarship covering all the major themes that have come to define the scope of the subject. For example, what is biodiversity and how is it measured? Also, what are the geographic and temporal patterns of biodiversity? And what are its values?
Volumes II and III collect the vital research on topics such as: population growth and development; habitat loss and fragmentation; pollution; invasive species; terrestrial, freshwater, and marine biomes; and, climate change.
The scope of the materials in Volume IV ("Responses to Biodiversity Loss") includes international legal frameworks for conservation biodiversity; protected areas and networks; conservation planning; restoration and rewilding; reintroductions and translocations; and ex-situ conservation (via, for instance, zoos, seed and gene banks); conservation education; and, community conservation.
The scholarship assembled in the final volume ("Future Directions in Biodiversity Conservation") collects the best and most influential work on themes such as paleo-ecology (or how to use the past to understand the future); the emergence of conservation biogeography; conservation outside protected areas (or 'reconciliation ecology'); and, the effects of the revolution in IT. Also gathered here is the finest research on the idea of a converging agenda around sustainable development, poverty, and biodiversity, as well as the crucial work on economics and market-led conservation.
"Biodiversity and Conservation" is fully indexed and includes a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context. The collection's fresh and explicitly interdisciplinary approach provides a unique insight into the development of the subject from a predominantly science-based topic to a vibrant interdisciplinary concern, with an increasing appreciation of the social obligations of conservation.
