Conserving landscape dynamics, not just landscapes

Abstract

Protected areas form the backbone of modern conservation. However, the current policies and practices in protected areas reinforce a static view of nature. This view is further enabled by cultural resistance to change, including efforts to mitigate or exclude keystone ecosystem processes (e.g., characteristic wildfire) that that create and maintain desired conditions. This protectionist model of conservation undervalues the human role in generating landscape dynamics and will be ineffective over the long term and increasingly in the short term. Under climatic change, resisting natural landscape dynamics will backfire and heighten vulnerability to ecosystem transformation through large-scale disturbance (e.g., megafires and megadroughts). Within protected areas, there is an urgent need to rethink what we are protecting: the current landscape conditions or the landscape dynamics that generate those conditions. Cast in a different light, protected areas could be the cornerstones for a new era of conserving landscape dynamics across broader geographies.