Marco Festa-Bianchet is Professor of Ecology at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec, Canada.

Marco Apollonio is Professor of Zoology at the University of Sassari in Italy.

General Introduction

Marco Festa-Bianchet and Marco Apollonio

Many of the species with whom we share our planet are going extinct because we overexploit them or destroy their habitat (Ehrlich and Wilson 1991, Caughley 1994). Species extinction and habitat destruction have an immediate impact upon many economic and social activities because various uses of wildlife provide income, enjoyment, or recreation for millions of people (Geist 1994). It is therefore not surprising that interest in the conservation of biodiversity is increasing among the general public as well as among behavioral ecologists who study wild animals and their environment.

Two related disciplines, wildlife conservation and wildlife management, use ethological knowledge to limit the impact of humans on ecosystems. Wildlife conservation is concerned with the preservation of species and their habitat in the face of threats from human development. Wildlife management, including fisheries management, seeks sustainable strategies to exploit wild species while ensuring their persistence and availability for future use. Ideally, these strategies should also not damage components of the ecosystem other than the exploited species. Although the distinction between the two disciplines is often blurred, wildlife management is often oriented toward specific objectives for one or a few species of economic interest. The goals of conservation are broader and include the preservation of genetic diversity so that species will maintain their ability to evolve in response to environmental change. Recently, however, wildlife conservation and management are coalescing into a single discipline. Management is often a component of conservation strategies (for example, limited sport harvest of some high-profile species can be used to generate funds for habitat preservation [Lewis and Alpert 1997]), and the conservation of genetic diversity or interpopulation connectivity is often a goal of wildlife management. For simplicity, we will use the term management in this introduction to refer both to situations where wild animals are the subject of some form of exploitative management, and to situations where they are of concern because they are at risk of extinction.

Regardless of how one defines wildlife management or wildlife conservation, however, practical application of these terms inevitably involves the consideration of both animal and human behavior. This book explores how knowledge of animal behavior can help prevent species extinction and sustainably exploit wildlife populations. It is clear to us, however, that human behavior plays a far greater role than animal behavior in both conservation and management.

The Role of Animal Behavior in Wildlife Management

It is important to define the role that animal behavior can play in wildlife conservation and management. Problems in wildlife management are a subset of the global environmental problems that are of interest to conservation biology. Major ecological problems include the wholesale loss of species through habitat destruction; the pollution of air, soil, and water; the introduction of exotic species (including domestic animals, parasites, and pathogens); and the alteration of global biogeochemical cycles. Knowledge of animal behavior is not the sole key to solving global conservation problems; but then, paradoxically, neither is any branch of ecology or any other science. Indeed, biologists do not make the important decisions that affect species extinction and people's continued ability to benefit from functional ecosystems. Such decisions are the purview of politicians and business leaders, who are primarily interested in political and economic goals and are therefore much more influenced by political and economic processes than by science (Morowitz 1991).

Changes in socioeconomic circumstances are also important. For example, immediately following World War II, agriculture was the main occupation in several southern European countries. People were widely distributed over the countryside. Almost all natural resources were exploited, including lands with low productivity. Following industrialization in the mid-1960s, much of the land that was either hilly or mountainous was abandoned as people sought a more comfortable lifestyle in cities. Space and resources in the abandoned countryside became available for wildlife. Urbanization may thus explain the recent recovery of wildlife in Europe more than any other economic or biological process. In North America, increased affluence, good rural road networks, and ability to work from home are instead leading to suburbanization of wildlife habitat, with negative consequences for biodiversity, especially of large predators.

Everyone can make "minor" decisions with environmental consequences, from not eating seafood caught with methods causing extensive bycatch of nontarget species, to not building a home on critical habitat, to family planning, to voting patterns in democratic societies. Zoologists, including animal behaviorists, clearly play a major role in the conservation of biodiversity by informing decision makers and the general public about the ecological consequences of human activities. Solving the global conservation problems that threaten our quality of life, and in some cases our very lives, will require scientific knowledge, but first and foremost it will require a better system of economic valuation of goods and...