A fourth-dimensional view about strategies to maximize biodiversity conservation
Development of future strategies for conserving biodiversity could benefit from consideration of longer-term perspectives that urge addition of novel as well as more traditional approaches. In the case of Australia, 219 years is simply not enough when our biodiversity has undergone significant changes in response to changes in environments that are in reality measured on scales of thousands and millions of years. Analysis of the Australian fossil record suggests a range of issues that may be increasingly important for conservationists. This awareness is being developed by, among others, more than 100 systematists, geologists and palaeoecologists researching more than 35,000 fossils from 200 assemblages spanning the last 24 million years at the Riversleigh World Heritage property in northwestern Queensland. These issues include: 1, the need to determine the long-term resilience of geographic areas of particular sizes to maintain (e.g.) endemic mammalian biodiversity in the face of declining capacity for immigration and climate change; 2, the need to convert another 12% of Australia into conservation-capable, private land valued as such by land owners; 3, the need to determine long-term ‘health’ trends in lineages in terms of diversity, abundance and biogeography; 4, the need to consider phylogenetics to maximize, in the face of limited resources, conservation of unique components of the global genome; 5, the need to research the long-term integrity of modern communities (are communities or lineages the most appropriate foci for conservation strategies?); 6, the need to assess fossil assemblages as a source of understanding about potentially viable rearrangements of components of threatened modern communities—e.g., Mountain Pygmy Possums (Burramys) in alpine environments threatened by climate change; and 7, perhaps even the need to begin to consider constructing experimental, non-original but potentially viable communities to maximize overall, global as well as regional conservation