What is wildlife instinction?

Wildlife and Modern America...give me a primer.

• Do you know of any good resources providing data on how industrialization, urban expansion and / or hunting affects wildlife populations and ecosystems in the United States? Also interested in how conservation efforts do or do not produce a stabilizing effect. I have recently been interested in learning more about the wildlife management debate in the US. I am interested in good resources - pdf papers, websites, books, etc... - that provide comprehensive overviews of the effects of urbanization and modern expansion on ecosystems within the United States - particularly with regards to native wildlife populations. I am especially interested in how expansion / hunting might be affecting wildlife stocks in public lands / national forests / national parks. Historical trends would be desirable too. I am familiar with the decline of buffalo, grizzly bears, and wolves; the decline of pronghorn and elk populations in many areas of the US; the extermination of the California grizzly, the passenger pigeon and the Carolina parakeet - but I am less familiar with the conclusions drawn from these facts and the hard data behind decline. I am also interested in what we have learned regarding patterns of decline. How does hunting / vehicular traffic / expansion / mining / fracking etc affect patterns of wildlife decline in existing public lands? Is conservation possible? What does wildlife decline mean for our ecosystems and what are the costs? You get the idea. I like http://www.thewildlifenews.com/ but would really like resources that take aggregated information into account to provide a top-down more general look at trends as a whole. What is the current "snapshot" of human impact on native wildlife stocks remaining on US public lands and forests - where have we been, where are we going? Any ideas?

• Answer:

  I'm sorry to say that even after a night thinking about likely resources, I can't think of a good primer for what you're asking about. It's kind of embarrassing really because I have a lot of opinions about these issues but no summarizing literature to cite. These questions "Is conservation possible? What does wildlife decline mean for our ecosystems and what are the costs?"* are pretty much the field of conservation biology. The textbook http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0878936408/metafilter-20/ref=nosim/ has a section related to applied uses for conservation biology which covers protected areas and management. Conservation biology is not longer really concerned with hunting in the United States. Most of the extinctions due to over-harvesting happened long enough ago that we've significantly changed the laws and/or lost the sensitive species. In fact, several of the over-harvested species now need to be managed (i.e. killed by people) to keep their numbers down - deer, alligators, various ducks/geese - because their numbers have recovered so well. On the other hand, fragmentation and the effects of urbanization (or suburbanization or exurbanization) are of huge concern in conservation biology. Importantly the benefit of reserves on animal populations has declined because the human impact outside protected areas (e.g. http://www.leopold.wilderness.net/pubs/724.pdf). My first conservation biology teacher told us that conservation wasn't about managing the animals, but managing the people. Here's a neat paper (http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/2306/1/MPRA_paper_2306.pdf) about the causes of endangerment for species in the US (overall, not just on public lands). The top five are: interactions with non-native species; urbanization; agriculture; outdoor recreation and tourism development (doesn't include hunting); domestic livestock and ranching activities. It's out of date but I would assume the pattern holds except that climate change has emerged as an issue. This paper (http://www.arcfuels.org/maggie/AGER%202011.Data/PDF/salwasser%20conservation%20biology%201991-1688083968/salwasser%20conservation%20biology%201991.pdf) discusses how national forests and grasslands are being managed for both species diversity, ecosystems services and human use. It's also pretty old but you can get the idea of how the Parks Service and the Forest Service approach conservation. *the short answers - "I hope" and "Oh, God, it's going to be horrible and so expensive and mostly hopeless"