Hugh P. Possingham Landscape-scale conservation planning is coming of
age. In the last couple of decades, conservation practitioners, working
at all levels of governance and all spatial scales, have embraced the
CARE principles of conservation planning - Comprehensiveness, Adequacy,
Representativeness, and Efficiency. Hundreds of papers have been written
on this theme, and several different kinds of software program have been
developed and used around the world, making conservation planning based
on these principles global in its reach and influence. Does this mean
that all the science of conservation planning is over - that the
discovery phase has been replaced by an engineering phase as we move
from defining the rules to implementing them in the landscape? This book
and the continuing growth in the literature suggest that the answer to
this question is most definitely 'no. ' All of applied conservation can
be wrapped up into a single sentence: what should be done (the action),
in what place, at what time, using what mechanism, and for what outcome
(the objective). It all seems pretty simple - what, where, when, how and
why. However stating a problem does not mean it is easy to solve.