The Role of Protected Areas as Ecological Baselines

Learning to manage wildlife communities and ecosystems for stability, dynamic change or yield is an endeavor of general value, but we are not yet proficient at meeting these objectives. We argue for managing a representative number of protected areas as ecological baseline controls to help in understanding the effects of humans worldwide, and thus to enhance our ability to manage natural resources for a wide range of goals. The decision to manage protected areas as ecological baseline controls has several practical consequences, including that: (1) no effort is made to maintain an ecological status quo; (2) human interference that confounds natural ecological processes is kept to a minimum; (3) monitoring of natural and human-induced changes inside and adjacent to baseline controls is essential; and (4) if subjective opinion perceives that human effects are, nevertheless, altering the system, then management intervention should be carried out on part of the system only, leaving the rest as its own control. J. WILDL. MANAGE. 61(3):587-602