5 - Management of natural habitats

Summary

Management is a central feature of conservation, and an enormous subject. This chapter outlines the general features of management of natural systems, and gives some examples for major biomes of the world.

Management is required to maintain the features of interest of an area, which have been identified by the methods in Chapter 3. For strict nature reserves this is often a protection of naturalness against threats to the species and to the integrity of the habitats in the reserve. In highly natural sites, the threats often come from outside the site, but the more human influence there has been in a site the more management may be required within the site itself. Naturalness may be defined as the lack of human influence, or as how little the habitat would change if there were no people there (Sections 3.2.2 and 4.4.1). We should be careful not to ‘overmanage’ sites – and so do more harm than the threats we are trying to prevent. Overmanagement is a risk when we know little about the natural processes of a site. It is also a waste of effort.

The reason for ‘detaching Man from Nature’ through such definitions is that the human species, through consciousness and prediction, is alone in being able to manage the natural factors that would control its population (Section 1.3.1). Management of the biosphere will be essential to compensate for the power we have developed to overexploit it.