Conservation Biology: The Need for Multidisciplinary Approaches

Human impacts – anthropogenic climate warming, habitat loss and fragmentation – are likely to increase during the twenty-first century (Smith et al., 2009). Thus, the challenges facing conservation biologists tasked with preserving biodiversity and evolutionary processes are likely to become more complex. One of the important challenges is how to determine conservation strategies without comparable biodiversity metrics (Bach et al., 2012). Population and evolutionary genetics will become increasingly important both in theoretical and applied research. The description and quantification of species distributions and diversity patterns at the levels of genes, species, and ecosystems will be integrated within appropriate hypothesis-testing frameworks, with the aim of identifying the causal determinants of evolution (Guisan and Zimmermann, 2000; Allen et al., 2002; Franklin, 2010). Notably, the role of geographic variation in environmental factors such as climate creates an important basis for predicting responses to future climate change (e.g. Thomas et al., 2004; Kjærsgaard et al., 2012; Kristensen et al., 2012). Although evolutionary biologists and ecologists increasingly are turning to molecular genetics to study the demographic and genetic consequences of natural selection and evolution in the wild, a need for integrative approaches is apparent. Important topic