Wildlife in Airport Environments: Chapter 11 Wildlife Conservation and Alternative Land Uses at Airports

Given all the attention paid throughout this book to minimizing the risk of wildlife-aircraft strikes, the title of this chapter may seem like an oxymoron. This book has emphasized management as related to the hazardous (to aircraft) sector of biodiversity. In this chapter we focus on the issue of protection and management of less hazardous taxa, and how altering land use at airports might, in limited circumstances, contribute to this objective. The term conservation often leads to confusion and perceived conflicting goals of management. In fact, many of the direct management techniques used at airports (e.g., deterrents, translocation, etc.) could be considered conservation measures, because they remove birds from harm\u27s way. None of these techniques are designed to extirpate a species from the environment; they are employed to reduce or remove risk to aviation, as well as the birds themselves (Blokpoel 1976, Conover 2002). Even in cases where lethal population control is used, the species involved are typically common and not threatened with extinction. In the context of this chapter we define conservation as the protection and management of biodiversity (Groom et al. 2006)