ABSTRACT
The science of ecology has long sought to understand the nature of biodiversity, while the conservation movement has traditionally taken as its core goal the preservation of biodiversity. It would be surprising indeed if the science itself had not by now come to some agreement on the nature of its subject ma�er. We have already described in great detail in Chapter 2 the modern ideas of how biodiversity is maintained. We also alluded to the fact that this is still a contentious and evolving corner of the scientific world. However, we also noted that if the cobwebs of that contentiousness are wiped away, a core of ideas emerges, a kind of conventional wisdom among ecologists as to how biodiversity ‘works’. It begins with the idea of a metapopulation and focuses on the balance between the perfectly natural tendency for populations to go extinct locally and the tendency for individuals in those populations to migrate to new locations.
