From Keith Hiscock, Associate fellow at the Marine Biological Association of the UK
Your editorial suggests it would be better to rebuild damaged ecosystems to incorporate human activity, rather than rewind them to how they were before we started meddling (18 May, p 3). But we shouldn’t yet throw in the towel for most seabed ecosystems.
Many are close to their natural state and those that are exploited are not manipulated by humans to the same degree as terrestrial ecosystems. Many will rebound if damaging pressures are removed.
For those that are damaged or threatened, I fear we will end up with a few well-studied ones in the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s proposed Red List of Ecosystems, while most will fall into the “data deficient” dustbin. As with the Red List for species, policy advisors and politicians will only pay attention to ecosystems on the list and not to those without the requisite quantitative information on rarity or decline.
Plymouth, Devon, UK
