A Primer on Ecology, Conservation, and Game Management
If you hunt or fish, I'm sure you're at least vaguely familiar with terms like ecology, conservation, and game management. But do you understand what they really mean and how they differ? There is so much specialized terminology in this field, and it can easily misused even by wildlife students and professionals. Unfortunately, in some cases, inarticulate use of terminology can drastically change the meaning of an argument. As I will use these terms often on this site, a functional understand of the nuances in them is important.
Ecology
Since ecology is in the name of the site, let's start with that. First and foremost, ecology is a scientific discipline, not a reference to environmental activism or any political movement (even Google got this one wrong for a time). It deals specifically with interactions. Those interactions can be between organisms (plants and animals, predators and prey, etc.) or between organisms and the physical environment (water balance, mineral uptake, etc.). Within ecology, you will find a wide range of subdisciplines. I am a physiological ecologist, so I work on how the environment affects the functioning of an animal's body and how that functioning changes the way the animal interacts with its environment. There are also community ecologists, landscape ecologists, evolutionary ecologists, and many others. Ecology is often most often confused with either environmental science or natural history. Environmental science won't come up often on this site, and you only rarely see it mentioned in discussions about hunting. Environmental science combines natural sciences like ecology with social sciences to address environmental problems caused by humans (like pollution). Natural history is much more relevant to hunters and anglers. It mostly revolves around descriptions of the basic biology of a species. The vast majority of what you see on hunting or fishing shows or read in magazines would be considered natural history. Articles on where deer like to forage or what habitats are likely to hold quail are perfect examples. These are descriptions of the basic biology of these species. In practice, natural history and ecology are intimately related and there can be considerable overlap. It's sometimes difficult (and often irrelevant) to distinguish between natural history and ecology. I teach students that natural history tends to focus more on what, when, and where questions while ecology tends to focus on why and how questions. For example, a natural historian might describe the diet of a leopard by finding leopard kills and identifying the remains of the prey items. An ecologist might use models or experiments to determine why the leopard eats springboks under some conditions and baboons under others. Conservation and Game Management
There may be no more frequently misused term in the hunting and fishing world than conservation. In this context, the misuse almost always involves incorrectly labeling game management as conservation. It happens everywhere. In hunting and fishing magazines. On hunting shows. In the materials distributed by hunting-interest groups. Politicians make this mistake regularly. Even biologists working for state game management agencies often use the term conservation when they are talking about game management. Conservation and game management are not interchangeable terms! I use one simple metric to differentiate between conservation and game management: intent. The goal of conservation is to increase or maintain biodiversity. The goal of game management is to increase or maintain opportunities for consumptive recreation. Conservation can sometimes achieve game management goals and game management can sometimes achieve conservation goals. Still, game management is not conservation. In fact, game management can actually be detrimental to conservation. For example, a staple of game management on state-owned lands is to plant monoculture crop fields or food plots because deer, turkey, and ducks do quite well in agricultural landscapes. In some places, these techniques are used even used on places called "conservation areas". This doesn't mean game management is bad or conservation is superior, but they are distinctly different things. Conservation and Conservation Biology
There's one more small wrinkle, which is the distinction between conservation and conservation biology. The simplest distinction is that conservation is the act of preserving or maintaining biodiversity, while conservation biology is the scientific discipline that studies how to do that. It is technically possible, although probably rare, to be a conservation biologist and not be a conservationist. Conservation biology started as an applied subdiscipline of ecology, but became a fully fledged scientific discipline of it's own in the 1980's. Today, they are largely distinct fields, but some people (like me) move back and forth between projects that would be considered conservation biology and projects that would be considered pure ecology. In broad strokes, ecology tends to focus on how systems work under "natural" conditions, while conservation biology tends to focus on how systems work under human influence (but again, there is a lot of overlap here). I really like the figure included to the right, and the paper is worth a read if you are interested in these topics. I wish they would have included environmental science as well, which I suspect would fall out on the right side of that figure with aquatic pollution and climate change. |
SOME DEFINITIONS AS USED ON THIS SITE
Conservation Any action that either increases biodiversity or acts to resist the decrease of biodiversity Consumptive Recreation The harvest or attempted harvest of wild game of fish for purposes other than sustenance Ecology The field of biological study related to the interactions between organisms or between organisms and their environment Game Management The active manipulation of species or their environment with the intention of creating or improving opportunities for consumptive recreation like hunting, fishing, or trapping Natural History Largely descriptive field of knowledge centered on what, when, and where questions. Examples include descriptions of what an organism eats, when it reproduces, or where it lives (its habitat) |