7842

• UCREFRP Catalog Number: 7842
• Author: Knopf, F. L.
• Title: Biological Diversity in Wildlife Management.
• USFW Year: 1992.
• USFW - Doc Type: 1992.
• Copyright Material: NO

Special Session 5. Biological Diversity
in Wildlife Management
Chair
FRITZ L. KNOPF
National Ecology Research Center
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
Fort Collins, Colorado
Cochair
MICHAEL H. SMITH
Savannah River Ecology Laboratory
Aiken, South Carolina
Focusing Conservation
of a Diverse Wildlife Resource
Fritz L. Knopf
National Ecology Research Center
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
Fort Collins, Colorado
F. C. Knopf is a dreamer about wildlife.... When he grows up, he decides to build a
park for wildlife only, mostly for extinct species (F. Clifton Knopf [age 11] February 1992).
Like professional careers (Kennedy 1984), professions themselves evolve from
relatively simple, naive premises to incorporate broader, more complex perspectives.
The professions of forestry, range management, and wildlife management have moved
from early emphases on production of commodities to management of sustainable
resources. This professional transition began with the late-career writings of Aldo
Leopold and rapidly gained public support after the publication of Rachel Carson's
Silent Spring (1962), the catching on fire of the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland (1969)
and Earth Day (1970). In the last 30 years, the wildlife management profession
broadened its perspectives from the nearly exclusive management of game species
to incorporate nongame considerations in the 1960s, contaminants impacts and man-
agement of endangered species in the 1970s, and conservation of biological diversity
in the late 1980s. The conservation of biological diversity has generated major, new
challenges for professionals in wildlife management.
Historic and contemporary roles of the wildlife management profession in con-
serving biological diversity were recently summarized by The Wildlife Society's Ad
Hoc Committee on Biological Diversity (Scott et al. 1992). Today's session was
developed at the request of The Wildlife Society Council and Wildlife Management
Institute, with the charge of providing perspectives on how the wildlife conservation
profession needs to focus actions to protect biological diversity during the 1990s,
Focusing Conservation of a Diverse Wildlife Resource ? 241