Fauna in decline: The community way

Abstract

Current conservation strategies to mitigate the impact of climate change on terrestrial biodiversity rely heavily on capture, transfer, and release of single species (single-species translocation), despite the fact that ecological interactions between species are likely to be the first component of the ecosystem to be impacted by climate change (1) before any population or species goes extinct. In their Review (“Reversing defaunation: Restoring species in a changing world,” 25 July, p. 406), P. J. Seddon et al. analyzed conservation translocations and emphasized the need for “more intensive forms of threatened species management.” To conserve functioning ecosystems, management tools should focus on conserving whole communities rather than single charismatic species.

Ecosystem-scale translocation is one way to accomplish this goal: Aboveground and belowground elements of a functioning terrestrial ecosystem (including vegetation and topsoil) are carefully collected and moved together. Small-scale examples of ecosystem-scale translocation have been applied for 30 years for the purpose of ecological restoration under the name of habitat translocation or vegetation direct transfer (2–5). The strategy has proven successful in conserving plant, invertebrate, and microbial communities as well as ecosystem functions (5–9). By moving subsets of ecosystems from climatically unstable regions to more stable ones (10), ecosystem-scale translocation provides an opportunity to conserve mature and complex ecosystems threatened by climate change.