ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in this book. The book focuses on the concept of the metapopulation and 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. It emphasizes that the remarkably high extinction rates for smaller patches contain important lessons for conservation in fragmented landscapes. The book argues that there is another important way in which agriculture and biodiversity are related, one that belies the simple formula of the ‘intensification–land sparing’ argument. It discusses the pattern of associated biodiversity gain or loss as a function of management intensity is one of the major patterns of biodiversity in the world. The book describes that there does seem to be a general structural arrangement that has persisted since the later phases of European–US imperialism, to some extent, the political ecology of much of the contemporary world.
