ABSTRACT
The scientific study of connectivity conservation dates from the 1970s, and considerable attention and controversy has attended their benefits and costs in the subsequent decades (Simberloff and Cox, 1987; Hilty et al, 2006). Yet with the 2006 publication of five major treatises synthesizing the role of connectivity conservation in biodiversity conservation (Anderson and Jenkins, 2006; Bennett and Mulongoy, 2006; Crooks and Sanjayan, 2006a; Hilty et al, 2006; Lindenmayer and Fischer, 2006), it is probably fair to say that the science of connectivity ecology has only recently come into its own. It should also be said that these publications were hardly the first to synthesize the myriad issues surrounding connectivity conservation, with two important examples being the contributions by Graham Bennett (Bennett, 2004) and Andrew Bennett (Bennett, 2003). Given the dual deleterious trends of increasing habitat fragmentation and climate change, biologists, scientists and managers have increasingly turned to the potential of connectivity conservation areas in protecting biodiversity. Indeed, it may only be a matter of time before ‘connectivity ecology’ becomes as familiar an endeavour as, say, ‘forest ecology’.
