Conservation management for the past, present and future

Conservation managers are in the unenviable position of trying to conserve and restore biodiversity, without having a definitive timeframe to restore it to. Currently, managers around the world focus on various timeframes from recent to historical, but without a definitive target, countless conservation problems arise. Managers need to determine what constitutes a native species, which species to reintroduce, whether selective breeding should be implemented to resurrect supposedly extinct organisms, targets on population levels, whether assisted migration should be employed when climate change alters the environmental envelope of a species surrounded by human-altered landscapes, and how to manage for stochasticity and evolutionary processes. Without having definitive goals to target, these issues are difficult/impossible to address. It is only by discussing these important issues that some consensus will be attained that allow us to stop responding to crises and start predicting the future of biodiversity and plan and respond accordingly.