Can evolution contribute to better environmental management and stewardship?

Background/Question/Methods and Results/Conclusions

Environmental management is commonly assumed to be the sole responsibility of ecologists.  Evolutionary biologists are considered more or less irrelevant because evolution is seen as operating on time scales that are so long that they effectively become irrelevant in dealing with human-induced threats acting on the scale of years or decades.  This outlook seemed reasonable a few years ago, but not anymore.  First, we now appreciate that evolutionary change can happen very rapidly in some kinds of organisms and under some circumstances, and that this change can influence ecological dynamics on time scales that matter in devising and executing management schemes.  Second, even when evolution is genuinely slow, an understanding of evolutionary relationships and rates of character change can help us build better models and make better predictions; for example, about the likelihood of invasiveness or the vulnerability to climate change.  In general, the divide that has developed between ecology and evolution is not serving us well, and successful stewardship depends on putting this behind us.  The bioGENESIS Core Project within DIVERSITAS (http://www.diversitas-international.org/) is specifically designed to bring evolution and ecology together in addressing biodiversity conservation and environmental policy on a global scale.