The use of extinction models for species conservation

The implications of the use of models from three fields in biology, namely, island biogeography, population genetics, and population dynamics, for the management of wildlife populations and the conservation of species are reviewed. The theory of island biogeography has little to offer to conservation practice because the formulation of the model is questionable, empirical evidence does not support it, and the predictions of the theory do not address directly the central problem of species extinctions. Unlike island biogeography, models in population genetics and population dynamics utilise population-specific information and provide answers to problems in terms of extinction probabilities and the change in population parameters in response to changes in specific environmental conditions.