Conservation Management: The British Idea

 

The British idea of a  management system for nature conservation may be traced to an upsurge of sentiment after the Second World War that the world should be made a better place. It was the UK botanist Arthur Tansley who pleaded for organised nature conservation on the double ground of scientific value and beauty. He had advanced the concept of the ecosystem in 1935, and a number of key ideas of relevance to nature conservation stem from this. In the immediate post-war years, he hoped for an 'Ecological Research Council', and a 'National Wildlife Service'. In this context, the idea of national standards of conservation management can be traced to the formation of the Nature Conservancy Council (NCC), and its great survey of UK habitats and species, the Nature Conservation Review, published in 1977. 

From this time there was general agreement that the common purpose of wildlife, conservation management systems was to transform situations of ecological confrontation between humans and non-humans into a system of mutual accommodation. The NCC's first guidelines for managing its national resource was directed at site-level managers to make a document containing a description of the site, the goals of management, and a prescription stating how the objectives of management were to be met. Central to the latter section were lists of codified jobs to help wardens abide by best practice.  

Britain's first proper conservation management system (CMS), which tied objectives to practical interventions with feedback from monitoring outcomes, first emerged in 1971 on Skomer Island National Nature Reserve.  It was the result of discussions between Roger Bray, the Nature Conservancy Council's regional officer. and Denis Bellamy, the newly appointed head of zoology in the University of Wales at Cardiff.  Bray was concerned that the rapidly expanding populations of herring and lesser black-backed gulls on the island were perceived as having a serious impact on other bird species, the vegetation and the island’s amenity value. Also, there was a perception that the rabbit population was also expanding due to the prohibition of trapping, which had been a condition of the agricultural tenancy before the island had been designated as a nature reserve in 1959.  There was no management plan for the island and the outcome of the discussions was that Denis Bellamy was tasked with studying the interactions of gulls and rabbits to evaluate the need for their management.  This work was carried out with student projects year on year from 1972-92.

The idea of a national management planning system was taken up by Mike Alexander who was appointed Warden of Skomer in 1976.  Together with Tim Read (staff member of the UK Joint Nature Conservation Committee) and James Perrins (an environmental/IT graduate of York University) the Skomer initiative led to the creation of the CMS Consortium by the UK's main conservation agencies in the 1980s.  The Consortium validated the first IT relational database for linking management objectives with scheduled on-site operational inputs.  The database recorded all actions, particularly the results of monitoring against performance indicators. The software is still being promoted and developed by Exegesis as an international tool for wildlife conservation.


http://www.culturalecology.info/skomer/index.html


https://www.welshwildlife.org/nature-reserves/skomer-island

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