Designing nature reserves: Adapting ecology to real-world problems

Establishing nature reserves is the foundation of regional conservation strategies. The science of nature reserve design is relatively new, having emerged alongside the interdisciplinary field of conservation biology over the past three or four decades. Its goal is to apply scientific ideas and methods to the selection and design of nature reserves and to related problems, such as deciding what kinds of buffer zones should surround reserves or how to establish corridors to link reserves and allow organisms to move from one area to another. As in other areas of conservation biology, designing nature reserves is a 'crisis' science, whose practitioners are driven by an acute sense of urgency over the need to stem the loss of species caused by human population growth.