From the Ivory Tower to Reality! Conclusions of the New Edition

Abstract

While many of the traditional scientific disciplines have developed over centuries, animal conservation is a relative newcomer. It relies on multiple specialties with different levels of expertise that, eventually, generate vast amounts of data. More specifically, conservation physiology is an emerging area that can be defined as ‘an integrative scientific discipline applying physiological concepts, tools, and knowledge to characterizing biological diversity and its ecological implications; understanding and predicting how organisms, populations, and ecosystems respond to environmental change and stressors; and solving conservation problems across the broad range of taxa, including microbes, plants, and animals’ (Cooke et al. 2013). Reproductive biology is more focused, given that it mainly deals with the physiology underlying the production of gametes, embryos, and offspring, and the many associated processes that control these events. However, it is integrated into the different components of conservation physiology. In bringing together the various contributors for this book, the editors’ purpose was to provide readers with a new perspective about the complexity behind reproduction and the role it plays in species conservation. Chapters highlight the diversity of reproductive mechanisms across taxa, and provide insight into how they may have evolved, and likely will continue to evolve in a changing environment. To conservation physiologists, the hope is that this information will be applied to sustain populations in both natural habitats and managed facilities. Ultimately, a major goal is to forecast and mitigate negative impacts of environmental change or anthropogenic pressures on animal fitness, which will only follow once we have acquired a solid understanding of reproductive processes.