Conservation of Biodiversity

Conservation of Biodiversity

Why should a single species matter to an entire ecosystem? The Rivet Popper hypothesis, put forward by the ecologist Paul Ehrlich, offers an analogy: an ecosystem is compared to an aeroplane, and each species in it to one of the rivets holding the plane's body together. Removing one or a few rivets (i.e. losing one or a few species) might not immediately bring the plane down, but as more and more rivets are removed at random, the plane's structural integrity is progressively weakened until, at some unpredictable point, a critical rivet is lost and the whole system fails catastrophically. The hypothesis argues that every species, however inconspicuous, is playing some structural role in holding the ecosystem together, and that the cumulative, often invisible loss of many species is itself a threat to the stability of the whole system — the loss does not have to be dramatic and sudden to be dangerous.

Given this reasoning, conservation biology pursues two broad strategies, of which in-situ conservation is one:

• In-situ conservation means protecting species within their own natural habitat, by legally designating and managing areas such as national parks, wildlife sanctuaries and biosphere reserves, where the species continues to live as part of its normal ecosystem, interacting with other species and subject to natural selection pressures, rather than being removed to an artificial setting.
• Sacred groves are a traditional, community-based form of in-situ conservation found across India, in which patches of forest are set aside and protected by local communities for religious or cultural reasons, and as an unintended but valuable consequence, these groves have often survived as undisturbed refuges of native flora and fauna long after the surrounding forest has been cleared. Well known examples include the sacred groves of the Khasi and Jaintia Hills in Meghalaya, groves in parts of the Western Ghats (Karnataka and Kerala), the Aravalli hills region of Rajasthan, and groves maintained in parts of Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh. …