ICCB 2013 Program - Society for Conservation Biology

Symposium: Roadless and Low Density-Transportation Networks as Permeable Landscapes
and Seascapes. Session I
Room 307
Tuesday, July 23, 08:00 to 10:00
Organizer(s): Dominick DellaSala, Geos Institute
Tuesday
A vast network of roads and marine highways crisscrosses the planet, transporting people and goods over global distances with
substantial environmental impacts. For instance, the ecological footprint of roads is known to extend up to a kilometer on
either side of an individual road (road effect zone) with cumulative effects of dense road networks in some regions impacting
up to 15-20% of total surface area (e.g., continental USA). Marine transportation networks and associated ship transport
lanes also create migration and other problems for wildlife, including acoustic pollution and collision-related mortality.
In contrast, areas with low road densities and/or low-traffic volume (marine and terrestrial) and those with no roads (e.g.,
roadless areas in the USA, South America, Asia, Africa) are a conservation priority globally because they provide habitat for
road-adverse wildlife, have characteristic ecological processes, are relatively resistant to weed invasions, act as strongholds for
aquatic species, and provide climatic refugia. In some terrestrial regions (e.g., western Europe), only low-density roads with
low traffic volume remain and these areas are building blocks for re-wilding landscapes. This symposium will provide a global
synthesis of impacts of vast transportation networks and a region by region and a global synthesis on the importance of intact
areas showcasing new intactness and human footprint technologies.
08:00 The netway system: recovering lost ground, reconnecting the land, and solving big transportation problems
Richard Forman, Harvard University
08:15 Roadless areas as a way to protect biodiversity
Kriton Arsensis, European Parliment member
08:30 Global human-fingerprint project: an overview
Eric Sanderson, Wildlife Conservation Society
08:45 Global human-fingerprint project: an update
Oscar Venter, James Cook University
09:00 Google’s mapping of roadless areas of the Earth
Rebecca Moore, Google Earth
09:15 Roadless and low-traffic areas in Europe. Rewilding European landscapes for permeability
Nuria Selva, Policy Academy of Sciences
09:30 North America’s roadless area network
Dominick DellaSala, Geos Institute, SCB North America
09:45 Latin America and Caribbean roadless area network
Mariana Vale, Departamento de Ecologia Universida
...............................................
Symposium: Still ‘Shooting in the Dark’ Policy Insights from the Frontiers of Evidencebased
Conservation: Session I
Room 308
Tuesday, July 23, 08:00 to 10:00
Organizer(s): Louise Glew, World Wildlife Fund; Michael B. Mascia, World Wildlife Fund
Evidence-based policy and practice has emerged as a major focus of biodiversity conservation research in the past decade.
Scholars and practitioners increasingly recognize that without empirical evidence, decisions on where and how to conserve
biodiversity constitute a ‘shot in the dark’. The nascent evidence base emerging from quasi-experimental impact evaluation,
which allows scholars to make causal inferences about the ecological and social impacts of conservation interventions, has
generated important insights for conservation practice and overturned long-held conventional wisdom. The evidence derived
from these pioneering impact evaluation studies remains limited in scope, however, with considerable mismatch between the
insights generated and the needs of policymakers. Addressing this disparity requires future generations of evaluative studies to
advance six methodological ‘frontiers’: diversifying the range of outcome metrics; documenting variation in impact; linking
interventions to impact; exploring trade-offs and synergies between outcomes; comparing the effectiveness of interventions;
and translating evidence into policy and practice. This session brings together scholars and practitioners to explore these six
frontiers across a range of interventions, biomes and sociopolitical contexts to highlight the potential and the limits of impact
evaluation in conservation, in order to catalyze policy-relevant research and further advance conservation policy.
08:00 It’s tough to learn in the dark
Kent Redford, Archipelago Consulting
94