Clarifying the Role of Species in Ecosystem Management: a Reply

My paper (Goldstein 1999) explored several published suggestions on how to focus conservation prioritization and management efforts and called attention to weaknesses in a variety of paradigms that may compromise our ability to protect threatened wildlife. I highlighted three ways in which shortcuts to conservation planning, management, and monitoring might jeopardize the resources they are intended to protect. The first of these involved the substitution of species richness measures for more focused assemblage-specific information. The second involved the interpretation of such measures as indicators of species richness in unrelated groups. The third concerned the widespread use of ill-defined buzzwords, such as ecosystem processes, ecosystem fttnctions, and ecological integrity, at the expense of actual biological information. Risser, Walker, and Oliver and Beattie have responded to my paper by arguing variously that the problems I describe are nonexistent or contrived, that they are outside or irrelevant to the field of conservation biology proper, or that they do, after all, exist but that my characterization of them is "ill-founded," "false," "unsubstantiated," "unhelpful," "disingenuous," and "counterproductive." Oliver and Beattie seized the additional opportunity to respond to a separate critique of their work in an earlier paper of mine. None of these authors detailed substantive disagreement with my primary points. Only Walker (1999) attempted to discuss the substance of my paper, and his differences of opinion, as I will show, are grounded in mischaracterizations. Risser and Oliver and Beattie chose