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Draft Cover Letter to Science DRAFT COVER LETTER TO SCIENCE We are pleased to submit the manuscript Pleistocene Rewilding: An Optimistic Vision for 21st Century Conservation. In this review article, we justify using extant conspecifics and related species as functional analogs of recently extinct North American vertebrates to partially restore ecological roles and evolutionary potential that were lost with the end-Pleistocene megafaunal extinction. Pleistocene rewilding, conceived as a series of carefully managed ecosystem manipulations, would counter the pest-and-weed biotas promoted by human impact, facilitate the persistence and evolution of large vertebrates on a global scale, and change the underlying premise of conservation from managing extinction to actively restoring biological processes. Our vision is supported by ecological, economic, esthetic, ethical, and evolutionary considerations. Because of the twelve author’s unusually diverse experiences, expertise, and pre-existing biases regarding Pleistocene rewilding, we sought pre-publication outside reviews from only four people: S. Dobrott, M. Phillips, and J. C. Truett of the Turner Endangered Species Program, and C. Vriesendorp, a conservation biologist at the Field Museum of Natural History. None of the material has been published or under review elsewhere. We recognize that our paper will almost certainly be highly provocative, and we are confident that R. K. Colwell and D. J. Erwin of your board of editors are highly qualified to give our manuscript a fair and scholarly consideration. Suggestions for external reviewers are below. David Western Email: [email protected] Paul K. Dayton Email: [email protected] Email: [email protected] Wildlife Conservation Society & Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSD African Conservation Centre, 9500 Gilman Drive Box 62844, Nairobi, Kenya La Jolla CA, 92093-0227 James H. Brown Tim Flannery Email: [email protected], Email: [email protected] Biology Department South Australia Museum, North Terrace University of New Mexico Adelaide, South Australia 5000, Australia Albuquerque, NM 87131 Jeremy Jackson Terry Chapin Email: [email protected] Email: [email protected] Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSD Department of Biology and Wildlife 9500 Gilman Drive Institute of Arctic Biology, University of Alaska La Jolla CA, 92093-0244 Fairbanks, Alaska, 99775 For the authors, C. Josh Donlan Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Corson Hall, Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 U.S.A. [email protected] Voice: 607.254.4269 Voice: 607.227.9768 Fax: 607.255.8088 Pleistocene Rewilding: An Optimistic Vision for 21st Century Conservation C. Josh Donlan1,*, , Joel Berger2, Carl E. Bock3, Jane H. Bock3, David A. Burney4, James A. Estes5, Dave Foreman6, Paul S. Martin7, Gary W. Roemer8, Felisa A. Smith9, Michael E. Soulé10, and Harry W. Greene1 Running Head: 21st century conservation Word Count: 4860 1Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853 U.S.A. 2Teton Field Office, North American Program, Wildlife Conservation Society, Moose, WY 83012 U.S.A. 3Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309 U.S.A. 4Department of Biological Sciences, Fordham University, Bronx, NY 10458 U.S.A. and National Tropical Botanical Garden, Kalaheo, HI 96741 U.S.A 5U.S. Geological Survey, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95060, U.S.A. 6The Rewilding Institute, P.O. Box 13768, Albuquerque, NM 87192 U.S.A. 7Desert Laboratory, Department of Geosciences, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721 U.S.A. 8Department of Fishery and Wildlife Sciences, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM 88003 U.S.A. 9Department of Biology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131l U.S.A. 10P.O. Box 2010, Hotchkiss, CO 81419 U.S.A. *Correspondence: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Corson Hall, Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 U.S.A. [email protected] Voice: 607.254.4269 Voice: 607.227.9768 Fax: 607.255.8088 1 We propose to partially restore ecological functionality and evolutionary potential to North America that were lost with the late Pleistocene megafaunal extinction. From Bolson tortoises (Gopherus flavomarginatus) and feral equids to Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) and Holarctic lions (Panthera leo), our vision for this restoration begins immediately and spans the coming century. We justify using extant conspecifics and related species as functional analogs of recently extinct vertebrates on ecological, evolutionary, economic, esthetic, and ethical grounds. Pleistocene rewilding, conceived as a series of carefully managed ecosystem manipulations, would counter the pest-and-weed biotas promoted ever more widely by human impact, facilitate the persistence and evolutionary potential of large vertebrates on a global scale, and change the underlying premise of conservation from managing extinction to actively restoring ecological and evolutionary processes. 2 Africa’s large mammals are dying (1-4), stranded on a continent where wars are being fought over scarce resources (5). With the loss of most large mammals and their commensals, much of North America died c. 13,000 years ago (6-8). More than any other species in the history of life, humans cause extinctions, change ecosystems, and affect the very future of evolution (9-13), and they surely will continue to do so by default or design (14). Here, we outline an alternative vision for 21st century conservation biology that is based on our late Pleistocene heritage, one that is bold, optimistic, and ethically defensible. There has been no single, non-arbitrary conservation benchmark since the end of that epoch. Thus, we propose Pleistocene rewilding—re-instituting ecologically and evolutionary processes that were transformed or eliminated by megafaunal extinctions— as a conservation priority in North America. We first discuss the ecological, evolutionary, economic, esthetic, and ethical justifications for this proposition, then describe six case histories to inform the debate we aim to provoke. Our vision is based on the following observations. First, Earth is nowhere pristine in the sense of being substantially free from human influence (1-7,9-15). Human economics, politics, demographics, and chemicals pervade every ecosystem; even our largest parks require management and suffer extinction (16). These human impacts are unprecedented in their magnitude, cosmopolitan in their distribution, and show alarming signs of worsening (9,10,12-14). Second, conservation biology is largely characterized as doom and gloom; conservationists have largely accepted this losing battle to slow biodiversity loss, and with few exceptions struggled only to diminish its rate. Third, future human demographic and land use patterns will be dynamic and uncertain. Many areas in the U.S., such as parts of the Great Plains, are depopulating (17), and may offer 3 future conservation opportunities (18). Fourth, humans probably were responsible to some significant degree for the late Pleistocene extinctions in North America (6,7) and our subsequent activities have curtailed survival prospects and evolutionary potential for most large vertebrates (19). We therefore bear an ethical responsibility, as citizens and scientists, to redress these problems insofar as possible. JUSTIFICATIONS FOR PLEISTOCENE REWILDING IN NORTH AMERICA Our prevalent conservation benchmarks dictate which taxa are regarded as native and which are not, irrespective of ecological and historical insights (20). In North America we routinely turn to Columbus and 1492 as a de facto restoration baseline (21), thereby discounting significant, earlier ecological impacts by humans (22,23). The arrival of the first Americans, the Clovis culture (c. XX,XXX YBP, 24), constitutes a less arbitrary benchmark that is justifiable from multiple perspectives. Prior to the late Pleistocene extinctions, mammal body size distributions were remarkably similar across all continents, despite little overlap in species composition (25), and the subsequent extinction of most large mammals in Australia and the Americas drastically altered those distributions to favor smaller forms (Fig. 1, 26). Given that body size appears to be highly conserved across taxa (25), these losses are significant with respect to ecology and vertebrate evolutionary potential, particularly in the Americas where the losses were greatest (8,27,28) Ecology and conservation have recently become more process-oriented (30). Prehistoric, historic, and contemporary evidence lend credence to the premise large carnivores and herbivores often play important ecological roles in the maintenance of biodiversity (8,27,29-35). It follows that many now extinct large mammals must have 4 shaped the life histories of extant species through the selective forces of strong species interactions (8,27,35,36). In some cases interaction loss leads to extinction (37,38), others result in disequilibria (8,39,40). Numerous North American species are now believed to be anachronistic on modern landscapes due to losses of species interactions c. 13,000 YBP (41). Osage orange (Maclura pomifera) and American pronghorn (Antilocapra americana) provide two notable examples – extinct proboscidians and other large herbivores likely dispersed seeds of the former and the American cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus) likely preyed on the latter (8,36,41). The inferred ecological roles of Pleistocene megafauna and their modern conspecifics or analogs imply specific hypotheses that
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