Good agricultural practices to manage agricultural biodiversity

Biodiversity is associated with a high diversity and stability of crops in a landscape. These can provide forage and nesting ground for insects and larger animals. Biodiversity helps in regulating the functioning of ecosystems by improving the variety and level of biological processes that help in agricultural production. A diversity of goods can also help to meet demand of consumers, by providing a range of good that often have higher nutritional value as crops that are cultivated in monocultures. The inclusion of perennial crops in agricultural field can provide essential habitat for pollination species and predators of pest species and by this regulate functioning of biological control (against insects and weeds). Perennials also require less nitrogen compared to most annual crops, which will result in less downstream pollution that can result in dead zones (algal blooms) that harm diversity in aquatic bodies. Since perennial crops are not also associated with high profits, but the role they play in the health of the overall ecosystem and the enhancement of biodiversity that will help to provide food and sustain agricultural production is very important, including perennial crops in agricultural fields could be promoted by policies, so that farmers receive more incentives to include living barriers, nitrogen fixing legumes and other perennial crops in their farming system.

Biodiversity is an important regulator of agro-ecosystem functions, not only in the strictly biological sense of impact on production, but also in satisfying a variety of needs of the farmer and society at large. In particular it increases resilience of agro-ecosystems and is as such a means for risk reduction and adaptation to climate change. Agro-ecosystem managers, including farmers, can build upon, enhance and manage the essential ecosystem services provided by biodiversity in order to work towards sustainable agricultural production. This can be achieved though good farming practices which follow ecosystem-based approaches designed to improve sustainability of production systems. Good agricultural practice should:

• Maintain a high level of crop-genetic diversity, both on farm level as in seed banks, which will help to increase and sustain production levels and nutritional diversity throughout the full range of different agro-ecological conditions.
• Integrate, through ecosystem approach strategies, the planned biodiversity (crop sequences and associations) that is maintained with the associated diversity (for example, wild pollinators).
• Adopt production system management strategies, such as not disturbing soil, maintaining mulch covers from crop residues and cover crops which increase the biological activity and diversity of the production system.
• Consider the benefits of having fragmented land (riparian areas, forest land within the agricultural landscape) on the agricultural yield, through improved biological processes such as pollination.
• Improve the adaptation of good farming practices (i.e. pest management strategies, etc.) which follow ecosystem-based approaches designed to improve the sustainability and agricultural biodiversity of production systems. 
• Aim at producing commodities that meet the consumer needs for products that are of high quality, safe and produced in an environmentally and socially responsible way.

Species-based conservation

Species-based conservation
There is no global consensus as to what constitutes an important species, but species may be singled out for conservation action if they fall into one or more of the following categories: (a) threatened species; (b) ecologically important species; (c) species useful to humans; and (d) species with non-use value.

Threatened species

Threatened species are those that are believed to be in danger of extinction. Threatened species listing systems, such as the US Endangered Species Act and the IUCN Red List of Endangered Species, give clear guidance as to which species are believed in most urgent need of conservation action. But the guidance is incomplete because only a small proportion of the world's species has yet been assessed in terms of extinction risk. Information is most complete for birds and mammals and is very incomplete in most invertebrate and plant groups.

It is widely agreed that it is unrealistic at present to expect concerted conservation efforts to be undertaken for each of these threatened species individually, but there is not much agreement on which threatened species are most deserving of attention. For example, it is often assumed that the most threatened species are those that should be accorded highest priority and should therefore be the principal focus of action. But it can also be argued that some of these species are lost causes and that resources are better spent elsewhere.

Ecologically important species

It can be inferred from basic ecological understanding that keystone species which play a crucial role in ecosystems should be considered to be a high priority for conservation, and the thinking of ecologists is being vindicated by the results of so-called ‘small world’ analyses. “The true keystones in an ecological community are the most highly connected species, the hubs of the network. The keystones are the ecological control centres, so to speak, and clearly the most important targets for preservation.” (Buchanan, 2002, page 154). But there are no rules for determining which are likely to be the keystone species, so identifying them can be difficult and demanding.

Species useful to humans

These include wild species that are harvested for food, medicines, clothing, building materials or other purposes, wild relatives of domesticated species or wild species (chiefly bacteria) with biochemical attributes that can potentially be harnessed industrially. In addition, some species are subject to non-consumptive use that can be expressed in economic terms. These are chiefly species that play an important role in tourism.

Species with non-use values

A number of species have an importance that cannot easily be quantified in economic terms. That is, a significant number of stakeholders ascribe a non-trivial existence or bequest value to them. Globally, the most important of these are the so-called “charismatic” species, particularly the charismatic megafauna, including large carnivores and birds of prey, cetaceans, sea-turtles, elephants, rhinoceroses and the great apes, but also some groups of smaller species such as other primates, parrots, large butterflies, and even some plants. Species may also be important for religious, spiritual or scientific reasons.

Area-based conservation

Area-based approaches are widely advocated for planning in species’ conservation. They are based on the observation that some parts of the world have far more species than others. Areas with large numbers of species, especially endemics, are often referred to as "hotspots" (Myers et al., 2000). It is argued that by concentrating conservation efforts in these areas, a disproportionate impact can be had on the maintenance of global biological diversity. This approach can theoretically be applied at any geographical scale. It is widely accepted that such area-based approaches are the only realistic hope of maintaining a significant proportion of the world’s biological diversity, but there are both practical and theoretical difficulties in identifying the most important areas.

On problem is that information on global species’ distribution is very incomplete and heavily biased towards large, conspicuous forms, so identification of important areas has to be made on the basis of partial knowledge and is usually based on an assumption that areas important for well-known species are also important for others, that is that measures of diversity in different groups of organisms are highly correlated, but this may not necessarily be the case. A further difficulty is that species’ diversity may be important either for its richness or for its endemicity. There is notway of judging the relative importance of an area with high species’ richness but low endemicity against an area with lower species’richness but higher endemicity.

Much also depends on the scale at which any assessment is made: a square metre of European chalk grassland will contain many more plant species than a square metre of tropical moist forest, while for an area of one square kilometre the reverse will be the case. Concentration of conservation efforts on global hotspots of species’ richness and endemism, assuming that these can be reliably identified, has a number of implications. Most importantly, it implicitly ignores the large part of the world that is not within a hotspot, and the high proportion of species not present in such areas. It therefore embodies what is ultimately a narrow conception of global conservation priorities.

The ecoregion approach avoids the problem associated with hotspot methods, of recognizing only a limited set of areas as of conservation importance. It combines analysis of biogeography, based on the distributions of species and species’ groups, particularly narrow endemics, with an assessment of the dominant natural ecosystem or ecosystems in a particular area to divide the world, or part of the world, into a series of ecoregions. The identified conservation goal is then to maintain representative samples of natural areas in each of the identified ecoregions, or in those identified as of high priority because of their uniqueness or the urgency or scale of the threats they face.

Ecosystem approaches

The Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity have decided that the ecosystem approach should be the primary focus for actions undertaken to meet the objectives of the convention. They have subsequently devoted some effort to deciding what this actually means in practice. There appear to be two separate, though linked, concepts involved here. The first is the maintenance of particular ecosystems of importance. Implicit in this is the assumption that such ecosystems can be considered to be spatially distinct entities, so that this involves conservation of particular more or less well-defined areas. The second is the maintenance of ecosystem processes. The ecosystem approach is a strategy for the integrated management of land, water and living resources that promotes conservation and sustainable use in an equitable way. Application of the ecosystem approach will help to reach a balance of the three objectives of the Convention. It is based on the application of appropriate scientific methodologies focused on levels of biological organization which encompass the essential processes, functions and interactions among organisms and their environment. It recognizes that humans, with their cultural diversity, are an integral component of ecosystems. The ecosystem approach is based on the following 12 principles (CBD- www.cbd.int)

1. The objectives of management of land, water and living resources are a matter of societal choices.
2. Management should be decentralized to the lowest appropriate level.
3. Ecosystem managers should consider the effects (actual or potential) of their activities on adjacent and other ecosystems.
4. Recognizing potential gains from management, there is usually a need to understand and manage the ecosystem in an economic context
5. Conservation of ecosystem structure and functioning, in order to maintain ecosystem services, should be a priority target of the ecosystem approach.
6. Ecosystem must be managed within the limits of their functioning.
7. The ecosystem approach should be undertaken at the appropriate spatial and temporal scales.
8. Recognizing the varying temporal scales and lag-effects that characterize ecosystem processes, objectives for ecosystem management should be set for the long term.
9. Management must recognize the change is inevitable.
10. The ecosystem approach should seek the appropriate balance between, and integration of, conservation and use of biological diversity.
11. The ecosystem approach should consider all forms of relevant information, including scientific and indigenous and local knowledge, innovations and practices.
12. The ecosystem approach should involve all relevant sectors of society and scientific disciplines.

The CBD itself recognizes ecosystems importance that are containing high diversity, large numbers of endemic or threatened species, or wilderness; required by migratory species; of social, economic, cultural or scientific importance; or, which are representative, unique or associated with key evolutionary or other biological processes. An alternative approach to conservation emphasizes natural processes rather than the particular entities (populations of various species) that mediate these processes. At the most fundamental level, these processes are energy fixation (almost entirely through photosynthesis), the cycling of that energy and of a range of organic and inorganic chemicals. These processes take place across all spatial and temporal scales.

Maintenance of these processes is seen as important for three main reasons. The first is to allow ecosystems to continue providing goods and services to humans; the second is to maintain or restore naturalness; the third is as a means of allowing populations of species to be maintained, or rather to maintain themselves. This last case can be seen as essentially a methodology for organism or species-based conservation, discussed above.

Major constraints on the effectiveness of ongoing efforts to conserve existing biological diversity

Given the uncertainties that arise from the lack of consensus about optimal approaches to conservation, it is hardly surprising that manifold difficulties are experienced in attempting to carry out effective conservation in practice. There are many reasons for this, ranging from the global to the local, and from the general to the highly specific.

Increasing the effectiveness of conservation

Because of the complexity and unpredictability of the world, there is no single, definitive approach to effective conservation. Those implementing conservation activities have to deal with the complexities of the physical environment, of ecosystems, of populations of non-human species and of human society, and with the interactions between all these levels. Any given conservation scenario will almost certainly present a unique combination of these. Thus, even if it is possible to obtain a persuasive account of why certain approaches have succeeded or failed, it may be difficult to work out which of these may be widely applicable and which may be products of a particular and unique set of circumstances.

But of course as experience accumulates generalities do emerge and it would be extremely wasteful to ignore all previous activities. Success lies in learning from other experiences without being prescriptive and avoiding a “one size fits all” mentality. A general issue that requires more attention than it has yet received is the opportunity that exists to conserve biodiversity in production landscapes of all kinds. Given the inexorable expansion and intensification of human activities, this is a crucial issue. Those who fund and manage conservation can contribute to improved practice on the ground by working to create an supportive environment for conservation. Those who implement conservation on the ground are best placed to improve its practice.

Creating a supportive environment

Engaging with the biodiversity- related conventions

The processes of the biodiversity- related conventions involve the vast majority of the world’s governments and have generated wide-ranging programmes of work that directly or indirectly involve conservation. Constructive engagement with these processes on the part of non-governmental and government organizations that are concerned with conservation is a way of working to make national and international government and policy arenas more amenable to and supportive of conservation efforts.

Achieving internal coherence

Organizations involved in conservation should articulate strategic goals and visions so that those working for them, particularly those on the ground, know what they are supposed to be aiming at. This would provide a vital wider context for local efforts, as well as help bring a sense of cohesion to what are often a highly dispersed group of people. It involves devoting considerable energy and resources to communications, which should be two-way, so that the practical experience of those working locally informs higher-level policy and advocacy work and vice-versa.

Moving away from the centrality of projects

It has become clear that if conservation is to be successful it has to be a sustained and continuing process, like providing health care, for example. This means modifying the time-scale over which interventions take place, accepting the possibility of long-term support, for example through trust funds and other means, and eschewing expectations of rapid results, both in terms of changes in human behaviour and in impacts on biodiversity.

It does not mean that good money should be thrown after bad, that once a commitment has been made, investment should continue regardless of outcomes. There should always be a preparedness to withdraw from a particular area or activity as a last resort. Indeed, any programme working in an area as complex as conservation should expect a certain percentage of failures. But this percentage can be kept to a minimum if great care is taken in deciding what to invest in and where to invest.

No less important than a decision to invest is a decision, after careful appraisal, not to invest in a particular area or activity - that is, a willingness to walk away if there is little realistic hope of any significant success. A further requirement is that any long-term commitment should involve not just financial investment, but also the establishment of mechanisms to ensure that the activities undertaken are subject to continuing review and, if necessary, modification.

Improving the practice of conservation on the ground

Clarify objectives

Just as any organization involved in conservation activities should articulate its visions and long-term goals, so field activities should have a clear objective or set of objectives that fit in with those visions and goals. These should be specified as precisely as possible.  A set of activities may, of course, have multiple conservation objectives. In this case the objectives should be set out and prioritized - it is very possible, or even likely, that the objectives may conflict with each other (e.g. restoration of natural ecosystem processes may be inimical to some threatened species’ populations).  Interventions in any given area may equally have development objectives as well as conservation objectives. If this is the case it is vital that the relationship between the two sets of objectives is clarified and made explicit at the outset. Determining which takes precedence may have a profound impact on the nature of the activities undertaken.

Set targets

Once the conservation objectives of a set of interventions have been established, explicit targets for each of them should be set. These targets should relate to outcomes rather than activities. For example, the target should be that the population of a given threatened species has reached a certain threshold, or has increased at five percent per year for at least five years, not that hunting has been successfully controlled.

Targets should be realistic. They do not necessarily have to be quantitative - in many circumstances, particularly in tropical forest ecosystems where accurate monitoring of most components of biodiversity is extremely difficult, it may be counterproductive to set precise quantitative targets. Here, targets based on relative changes in abundance, say, or even qualitative measures based on expert assessment may be as valuable. It is equally important in these cases, however, that the targets, and the criteria used to judge whether they have been met, are made explicit.

Identify impediments

Having determined objectives and set targets, the next step is to identify impediments to reaching those targets. These can be loosely divided into two categories: actual or potential threats to the components of biodiversity in question, and constraints on action. Identifying actual or potential threats to particular components of biodiversity may be extremely complex. General categories of threat may be rather obvious, but determining the relative importance of different threats is often much more difficult. It is crucial that the assumptions on which threat assessment is based are carefully questioned. Without this a great deal of time, money and energy can be spent trying to address factors that are of little or even no immediate importance (e.g. brown tree snakes, cahows, logging in tropical forests).

There will always be limits to the kinds of actions that can be undertaken locally to mitigate threats. These limits may be imposed by the interests of different stakeholders, by technical constraints, limitations in available resources, or where the origin of the threat lies outside the geographical sphere of influence of those engaged in direct management. A clear, realistic understanding of these from an early stage in planning may prevent much wasted effort later on.

Adaptive management

The original proponents of adaptive management (e.g. Holling, 1978) intended it to be management by active experimentation. This involves construction of a model of the system under consideration. Different management scenarios are applied to the system to generate a series of possible outcomes. The most favourable of these are then tested in real-life situations. Monitoring before and during the application of a particular management regime allows its impacts on the system to be assessed. A choice can then be made between different regimes. Implicit in this technique is the comparison between different approaches, with one (usually non- or minimal-intervention or business-as-usual) regarded as control. This entails operating different management regimes either in parallel, which is in two areas at the same time, or in series - that is one after the other in the same area.

Stakeholder involvement

Rarely will conservation entail a single individual acting entirely in isolation. In most cases more than one person, and often a large number of different interest groups, will be involved. The perceptions of the different groups, the relationships between them and their respective responsibilities must be clearly understood if any other than the simplest of plans is to be successful. Clearly the better people understand what is expected of them, the greater the likelihood of success. As a general rule, this implies that the more participatory the approach, the better.

Thus, whenever management programmes are being planned, priority should be given at the start of the process to explicitly identifying different stakeholder groups, what their stake or interest in the process is, and how best they might be represented. Many different methods for ensuring participation have been developed. Most involve facilitated workshops or other kinds of meetings. Whatever system is adopted, it is important that at each step, clear individual responsibilities are allocated for carrying the process forward.

Reporting and documentation

For most people involved in conservation management, reporting is one of the most unrewarding and onerous tasks. Unfortunately it is also one of the most important tasks, particularly in complex situations, which most conservation activities are. The major reason for keeping records should be to improve conservation management in the area concerned. Conservation objectives are not, or should not be, time-bound, so that the need for management of some form should outlive the involvement of any given individuals. However, much successful conservation action depends on the expertise of particular individuals. Ways need to be found of transmitting this expertise to succeeding generations of managers. Oral transmission and learning-by-doing are very often the most successful of these, but there are almost certain to be gaps and discontinuities at times when these forms of transmission are broken. Permanent records – written words, photographs, video or tape-recording – can play a vital role in filling this gap. This form of documentation does not necessarily have to be highly formalised.

Documentation in conservation management activities is also important in situations where different interest groups are involved. Sooner or later disputes are almost certain to arise over why a given set of actions has been carried out. The better the decision-making process has been documented, the more easily such disputes can be resolved. In this case, documentation should concentrate on what decisions have been made (i.e. actions to be undertaken and designated responsibilities) with brief justification. Concision and clarity are the two most important characteristics of this form of documentation.