INTRODUCTION

Our natural world is on the verge of a profound loss of biological diversity (Crooks and Sanjayan Chapter 1). Although the economic, cultural, and spiritual costs of this ecological impoverishment are enormous and irreversible, from a human point of view extinction's denouement appears to be “slow-motion.” This slow-motion results in a limited recognition of its urgency and the very little time we have to prevent it from occurring. As evident in this volume, the threats cut across multiple scales of ecological organization, from genes and species all the way to ecological processes. To face this complex challenge, action plans to avoid extinction must become more comprehensive, including strategies to preserve both areas and ecological and evolutionary processes, as well as those targeted to avoid the foreseeable extinction of particular threatened species.

One comprehensive regional-scale approach with great promise for effective conservation is based on the concept of “biodiversity conservation corridors,” a large-scale planning region where actions are taken to integrate representation and viability of species, ecosystems, and ecological and evolutionary processes in a scenario of explicitly defined human needs. The biodiversity conservation corridor approach shifts focus from a local to a regional scale, and represents an ambitious attempt to make protected area networks that are sufficient for species survival besides promoting an optimum allocation of resources to conserve biodiversity at the least economic cost to society (Salwasser et al. 1987).