Abstract for presentation at Biodiversity Extinction Crisis Conference - A Pacific Response

Is context everything in conservation? Not quite everything, perhaps, but more than 50 percent. Conservationists don’t need reminding that context must be considered and somehow dealt with in doing conservation work in real places. The are several kinds of context: geographic context (e.g., climate, topography, biogeography), economic context (e.g., poverty levels, income disparities, investment in women’s education), political context (e.g., civil rights political access, freedom of press, fair elections, rights and sovereignty of indigenous peoples), and culture context (e.g., religion, literacy, corruption, diversity, history). As biologists, we are best able to consider the biographic and scale dimensions of the geographic context? For example, it may be informative to compare the conservation visions and challenges of large continents versus small ones, or compare continents versus islands. I will (probably) compare the conservation challenges in three places that span such a range. These are (1) mainland North America; (2) the island-continent of Australia; and (3) the archipelago of Hawaii. I consider how these three places differ with respect to (a) threats such as exotics/ferals and future "invasibility,” (b) history such as extinction episodes in pre-history and in recent history, (c) sensitivity to climate change, and (d) the kinds, scales, and relevance of dispersal behaviors and adaptive evolutionary potential for different taxa.