Conservation Biology in Theory and Practice

Rating:
Summary: The only textbook out there worth getting
Review: This is a serious book about a serious subject, and reading it makes it clear how much we lost when we lost Graeme Caughley. This book is suitable for an advanced undergraduate or first-year graduate class in conservation where you are dealing with students who have at least some background in basic ecology and data analysis. Written in Caughley's iconoclastic style, with a strong Southern hemisphere emphasis in terms of examples and case studies, the book is a welcome relief from the conservation-lite type texts that litter the booksellers inventories. Caughley pulls no punches when he criticizes some of the more sweeping generalizations that have captured the popular imagination, and he expects his readers to be able to deal with math if they are going to mess around with survival curves, MVPs, or whatever. I found the writing to be clear, lucid, and to the point. Caughley gives an excellent review of theoretical aspects of conservation & then delvs into a series of case studies that illustrate points made in the first half of the book. Some of these will be familiar to most readers, others are more exotic, more intriguing, and each delivers useful lessons-of-practice to ponder over, argue about, and learn from. Even though this text is now 7 years old it is perhaps a mark of Caughley's foresight that it still has a very contemporary feel to it. Anne Gunn is to be commended for making sure that this book got out in a relatively intact form, and i would STRONGLY encourage professionals, teachers, and students to get it & keep it on your desk.