Bruce Byers Consulting Falls Church, Virginia, United States
Abstract: With concern about global ecological problems rising in the late 1960s, UNESCO and the IUCN worked together to organize the 1968 Biosphere Conference, which led to the creation of the Man and the Biosphere Program and its international network of biosphere reserves. Two former ESA presidents were instrumental in this process: Stanley Cain in conceptualizing and establishing the program, and Jerry Franklin in the selection of sites of the first 29 biosphere reserves in the US.
Biosphere reserves are supposed to be laboratories for understanding and managing social-ecological systems in complex multijurisdictional landscapes to conserve biodiversity, increase human well-being, and improve social and ecological sustainability and resilience. This study examined how well the biosphere reserves model has worked in three neighboring biosphere reserves on the US Pacific Coast—Cascade Head in Oregon, and Channel Islands and Golden Gate in California—which differ dramatically in size, human population, and social and economic complexity. It sought lessons and success stories from these biosphere reserves that could help ecologists, conservation biologists, environmental educators, and land and water managers with federal, state, and local agencies.
The study took place over five years (2018-2022). Information was gathered from the historical and ecological literature, field site visits, and interviews with more than one hundred people, including scientists, land and water managers from government agencies, conservation activists, and Native American activists working to restore Indigenous languages, cultures, and traditional ecological knowledge. A comparative approach was used to identify common themes and challenges in each biosphere reserve.
Three lessons, each supported by examples from the three biosphere reserves studied, stand out as relevant to all ecologists seeking to apply ecological science to improve the human-nature relationship. One is that damage to ecosystems and endangerment of species from past human actions often can be reversed through ecological restoration. Lesson two is that ecological restoration efforts create fertile ground for new research and ecological understanding; as species and ecosystems rebound to pre-disruption conditions, ecologists can study them--essentially for the first time--and overcome the problem of skewed baselines. A final lesson is that new normative perspectives about how humans should interact with and manage natural ecosystems emerge from the focus on the social-ecological interface that is the core of the biosphere reserves model.
All ecologists can learn important lessons from US and international biosphere reserves and should consider working with them.
