Challenges to Conserving Adaptive Processes in a Changing World

As humans continue to transform the world’s ecosystems, there is a growing awareness that adaptation—once thought to be of only long-term concern—is relevant to conservation, particularly in understanding the responses of species to global environmental change. Thus a major challenge facing conservation today is the development of practical guidelines on how best to conserve the adaptive processes that generate and maintain the web of life. Understanding this complex issue requires an integrative approach that bridges biological and paleontological disciplines, and works within and across spatial and temporal scales. Despite the great potential of such knowledge to improve conservation practice and policy, integrating biological and paleontological observations remains poorly developed. Barriers to an integrative approach include the lack of common variables and difficulty of comparing observations across scales.  A common framework that is able to link processes that occur across varied spatial and temporal scales is required to overcome these barriers.