Conservation Biology

Collaborators:

• Tim Lee - University of California, Davis
• Ana Parma - Centro Nacional Patagónico

Current Funding:

NSF - GLOBEC

Focus:

Population dynamics of small, threatened populations, including potentially overfished populations. This includes methods of expressing jeopardy or risk, expression of the recovered state (i.e. delisting criteria), and methods for planning recovery of listed populations.

Our history of interest in this area includes an analysis of global overfishing (Botsford, et al. 1997), and the population viability analysis of the first species of Pacific salmon to be listed under the ESA, the winter run of chinook salmon on the Sacramento River (Botsford and Brittnacher 1997). Both emphasized the role of uncertainty in management. We recently described the rol of uncertainty in marine conservation in terms of a generalized ratchet effect (Botsford and Parma) (Table 1) . Another recent result is an analysis of how well recovery plans under the U.S. Endangered Species Act have been implemented (Lundquist, et al. 2002). A third recent result is participation in a program that cataloged a number of examples of critical species in marine ecosystems being removed several hundred years ago, drawing attention to the fact that these systems were not dynamically pristine when ecologists began studying them (Jackson, et. al. 2001).