The preservation of longleaf pine savanna at the Fort Bragg military base (described in the Case Study)

and on other federal and state lands, coupled with legal protection and extraordinary human effort, has led to stabilization and slow recovery of the numbers of red-cockaded woodpeckers, leading to the U.S.

Conservation biology is the scientific study of the amount of biodiversity (including genetic diversity, species richness, and landscape diversity), how human activities are impacting it, and how best to maintain it and prevent its loss. Biodiversity includes genetic diversity within a species, the number of species, and the diversity of communities across landscapes (see Figure 16.7). Conservation biology applies many of the ecological principles and tools that you have studied in this book to the halting or reversal of biodiversity declines. Later in this chapter, we will look at the reasons why biodiversity is declining and at the strategies conservation biologists use to address conservation problems. But first let's consider why it is so important to prevent and reverse declines in biodiversity.