Conciliation biology: A new approach to conservation for the 21st century

Background/Question/Methods

Biotic invaders alter both ecology and evolution in environmental, agricultural, natural resource and health systems. The resulting biological changes often hinder management objectives, as when control and eradication programs are defeated by rapid resistance evolution, or stymied by irreversibility of invader impacts. At the same time, eradication may be ill advised when nonnatives introduce beneficial functions. Contexts that appear to call for control or eradication may instead require managed coexistence of natives with nonnatives, and yet applied biologists have not generally considered the need to manage the short- and long-term eco-evolutionary dynamics that result from interactions of natives with non-natives.

Results/Conclusions

Here I advocate a conciliatory approach to managing the many biotic systems from which novel organisms cannot, or should not, be eradicated. Conciliatory strategies incorporate the benefits of nonnatives to address many practical needs, including a) slowing the rate of resistance evolution, b) promoting the evolution of indigenous biological control, c) cultivating replacement services and novel functions, and d) managing native­–nonnative coevolution. Evolutionary processes shared among the applied biological disciplines can be used to foster cohesion essential for managing the broad impacts of novel biotic systems, in which food, health and conservation often interact. Rather than signaling defeat, conciliation biology utilizes the predictive power of evolutionary theory to suggest new pathways for sustainable outcomes in permanently invaded ecosystems.