Guy LEMPERIERE, Université de Grenoble, France
Damien MARAGE, Université de Franche-Comté, France
Sébastien FLEURY, ECOMED, France
Yves PETIT-BERGHEM, ENSP, France
Conservation Biogeography as a newly emerged discipline covers the creation of the new map of life. It includes the redraw of constant changes in the geographic distribution of bacteria, plants, animals and their habitats as a result of human action through the anthropogenic climate change, the extinction of native organisms or the introduction of invasive species. The conceptual tools and methods of landscape ecology, island biogeography, changes in land uses, conservation ecology contribute to the development of this discipline in order to address conservation problems at local, regional and global scales. It also provides predictive models at different time spans. The scope of conservation biogeography is then relevant at the landscape scale (processes, metapopulations, metaclimax, SLOSS…) and bridges ecology and classical biogeography. As far as conservation biogeography concepts are concerned and convened, communities can be considered as open and variable and guided by stochasticity and probabilities. As an example of the heuristic meaning of conservation biogeography, we present a series of studies that illustrate the complexity of designing sites of conservation interest at different scales, from local up to the european scale for various Natura 2000 sites. At a local scale, a methodology aiming at evaluating the local functionality of the Natura 2000 network is described. The connectivity between the sites and among those sites is then evaluated and allows to evaluate the functionality of the network for a special group of species at the landscape level. This methodology is then enlarged at different scales. It includes theoretical aspects but the Natura 2000 network has strong social issues and we must bear in mind "the real world". It is also of major interest for conservation biogeography and represents an interface between life and social sciences.
Mots clés : Conservation|Biogeography|Natura 2000|functionality|scales
A103332DM