Maintaining wildlife species

Wildlife can encompass a broad range of organisms. Maintaining wildlife species is essential because of the roles they play in providing ecological resources, functional ecosystems, food and clothing, and recreation. They also serve as indicators of environmental quality.

Background

Prior to 1937, the term “wild life” was defined primarily as only vertebrate species with some economic value. The term “wildlife” (as one word) was adopted and described in 1937 in the Journal of Wildlife Management. At this time, wildlife became known as a diverse array of organisms, including all vertebrates and the other organisms with which they interact. Because wildlife can encompass such a broad range of taxa, it has diverse values associated with it, including providing recreation, food and clothing, and ecological resources for humans and serving as components of ecosystems and indicators of environmental quality.

Hunting for Recreation, Subsistence, and Trade

Recreational hunting of “game species” is a traditional value of wildlife. As Aldo Leopold mentioned in Game Management (1933), one objective of managing “wild life” was to provide “an opportunity to hunt.” Hunting of some vertebrate species provides an opportunity for people to continue a traditional sport; for example, from 2016 to 2018, the illegal trade of ivory tusks from elephants, walruses, and hippos totaled $400 million, and in 2022, the global ivory trade was estimated at $23 billion each year. Hunting is also a population management technique that wildlife managers use to control locally abundant animals, to adjust sex and age ratios of populations, and to collect biological information from harvested animals. Data collected from harvested wildlife can be used in making management decisions intended to help perpetuate the species and hunting. The concept of requiring people to possess a hunting license to pursue game species was first adopted in the United States in Michigan, and North Dakota in 1895, and in 2023, more than 15.9 million Americans obtained hunting licenses. In addition to hunting, wildlife also provides nonconsumptive forms of recreation such as viewing and photographing.

For many people throughout the world, wildlife has served as a source of food and clothing as well as a product to be sold or traded for other goods. For example, the buffalo was used for hundreds—or thousands—of years as a staple for food, clothing, and other artifacts by American Indians in the Great Plains. It was also used by western travelers in the United States during the 1800s. This use of wildlife in the United States changed with the passage of the Lacey Act in the United States in 1900. This piece of legislation had a significant impact on the of many wildlife species because it prohibited the interstate trade of wildlife and wildlife products.

Many people in developing regions of the world continue to consume meat from wildlife species as a staple food and to use animal skins. For example, the Agta people in the Philippines have pursued wildlife species such as birds, lizards, and deer to fulfill some of their food requirements and to trade with other groups of people for agricultural crops. There is also a multibillion-dollar local and international trade of wildlife species and products including meat, furs, skins, animal parts, and items manufactured from these materials. During 1967 and 1968, for example, an estimated 620,000 birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians were traded internationally for approximately $1.9 million. However, this number in 2020 was conservatively estimated at $119 billion, excluding any illegal trade, which the Global Environment Facility estimated to be between $7 and $23 billion per year in 2023.

Ecological and Environmental Aspects

Each wildlife species plays an important role in the functioning of ecosystems. As wildlife species interact with other living and nonliving things in a geographic area, they modify environmental conditions. These modifications help create optimal habitat conditions for other wildlife species. For example, in the Serengeti ecosystem, optimal habitat conditions for the Thomson’s gazelle and other relatively small herbivores are created by the migration patterns of larger herbivores, such as zebras and wildebeest. These animals crop the longer, coarser grasses, which makes the gazelle’s preferred foods of short grasses and forbs more easily available.

Wildlife species are also used as indicators of the health of the environment. Specifically, they are used to monitor the presence of contaminants (bald eagles), trends in wildlife populations (songbirds), and relative habitat quality for other species (game species), communities, and ecosystems. When wildlife species are used as environmental indicators, wildlife managers make two assumptions. They assume that monitoring the population status of an individual species provides a reliable assessment of habitat quality, and they assume that if the population of a wildlife species used as an indicator is increasing or decreasing, other species with similar requirements will have similar fluctuations in their populations.

Because of the vast number of wildlife species and the fact that they all have unique seasonal requirements for food, cover, water, space, and the relative proximity of these components to one another, it is often more economical and efficient to monitor the relative quality of wildlife habitat or health of ecosystems by monitoring a few wildlife species. When wildlife species are used as indicators of environmental conditions, managers select a few species with different habitat requirements and monitor them intensively instead of attempting to know the specific requirements of all species in an area and monitor their populations.

Unknown Potential

Many wildlife species are relatively unknown in terms of the ways they may be beneficial to humans in the future. Because each species has a different set of genetic material, conserving as many species as possible may prove useful in addressing future human health problems. Numerous wildlife species have been investigated by scientists for their pharmacological effects in treating illnesses (marine organisms, arthropods) and have been used in biomedical research (toads, primates).

Finally, the disappearance of wildlife species through human activities—overhunting, encroachment of human development into wildlife habitats, deforestation, pollution, and a host of other modifications of the environment, has accelerated over the past century and has resulted in, and will continue to contribute to, ecological consequences for both the world’s biomes and the resources on which humans have come to rely. According to the United Nation's 2019 estimate, one million species faced the possibility of extinction within a few decades if trends continued.

Bibliography

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