Biodiversity / Conservation Biology

Based on field studies spanning nearly 40 years, this reference book summarizes and integrates past research with new and previously unpublished information on the behavioral ecology of Africa's red colobus monkeys from study sites as diverse as Senegal, Uganda, and Zanzibar. It provides an unparalleled compilation of information on taxonomy, genetics, vocalizations, demography, social organization, dispersal, social behavior, reproduction, mortality factors, diet, ranging patterns, interspecific relations, and conservation. Social relationships in red colobus are less rigidly structured than in other African monkeys, resulting in considerable variation in social organization and group composition, both within and between taxa. This provides a unique opportunity to examine the extent to which social variables correlate with differences in habitat quality, demography, and predation by chimpanzees, and humans. Unfortunately, at least half of the 18 taxa of red colobus are now threatened with extinction. Conservation problems are described, causal factors identified, and solutions proposed. This volume is intended not only to serve as a reference book, but to stimulate and guide future long-term research and to encourage effective conservation action.

“Systemic management” describes a holistic, objective, and universally applicable form of management, providing a framework for addressing environmental challenges such as global warming, emergent diseases, deforestation, overpopulation, the extinction crisis, pollution, overfishing, and habitat destruction. Its goals are the consistently sustainable relationships between humans and ecosystems, between humans and other species, and between humans and the biosphere. This book presents a convincing argument that these goals, and the means to achieve them, can be inferred from empirical information. It describes how comparisons between humans and other species reveal patterns that can serve to guide management toward true sustainability, that is, ways that are empirically observed to work in natural systems by virtue of their emergence. It shows how this objective approach has not been possible in conventional management because sustainability is undermined by other human values. This book presents systemic management as a specialized process of pattern-based decision making that avoids the inconsistency, subjectivity, and error in current management practice. It clearly demonstrates how mimicking nature's empirical examples of sustainability can circumvent anthropocentric tendencies to overuse/misuse human values in management, and illustrates the best science for management (the science best suited for achieving sustainability) through examples of research that address specific management questions. It presents systemic management as reality-based management to replace the misdirected reductionism of conventional management with reductionism useful for directing human self-control.