are particularly warranted. The specific goals of ecosystem-based conservation plans will need to be carefully considered within the Papuan context, but the five basic goals of ecosystem management proposed by Grumbine (1992, 1994) provide a useful point of departure. Ecosystem management should strive first to protect sufficient habitat to ensure the long-term viability of populations of all native species; second, to represent all native ecosystem types across their range of natural variation within protected areas; third, to manage ecosystems on spatial scales that are sufficiently large to maintain important ecological processes (e.g., disturbance regimes, hydrological processes, nutrient cycles); fourth, to create ecosystem management plans for sufficiently long time scales (e.g., centuries) to permit evolutionary change; and fifth, to allow for human use and occupancy at levels that do not result in ecological degradation (Grumbine 1992, 1994). Ecosystem-based conservation plans in Papua are likely to be complicated to devise and even more challenging to implement effectively. Political support will need to be generated at all levels of government, ecosystems will need to be legally defined and delineated, consensus among diverse ethnic groups will need to be reached, and effective mechanisms to monitor the success of conservation interventions will need to be implemented. Ultimately, conservation efforts in Papua will not be successful unless such large-scale conservation issues are tackled.Papua, and New Guinea more broadly, is a region of global biological significance. It includes the highest summit in Oceania, the only equatorial glaciers in the Pacific, the most extensive and diverse mangrove forests in Indonesia, and one of the world’s largest remaining tracts of lowland tropical forest. Human population density in Papua is low. Rates of forest loss and remaining forest cover in Papua are encouraging when compared with many other areas in the tropics. Papua also is home to extensive and highly-diverse reefs that remain largely undamaged, at least in comparison to those in western Indonesia and many other parts of the world. However, threats to these ecosystems exist and will likely increase over time. We should have no illusions that protection of Papua’s ecosystems will be easy or simple. Despite unprecedented investment in conservation, efforts to protect Indonesia’s other lowland forests have largely failed (Curran et al. 2004; Fuller et al. 2004; van Schaik et al. 2001; Whitten et al. 2001). Our current conservation strategies have proved inadequate in the face of the legitimate and pressing demands of Indonesia’s poorest citizens and the greed of illegal logging bosses. Papua presents one of the few remaining opportunities for proactive conservation action in Indonesia. Avoiding the fate of the rest of Indonesia’s once-vast tracts of lowland forest will require a level of political will that has thus far proved difficult to generate in other parts of the country. But the stakes are too high for us to let Papua quietly go the way of Sumatra and Borneo. The fate of Indonesia’s last great wilderness area, and the people who rely on it, hangs in the balance.
Acknowledgments
I thank Hendi Sumantri for assistance with maps and spatial analysis, and Conservation International and the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University for postdoctoral support. I also thank Peter Ashton, Bruce Beehler, Amy Dunham, Mark Leighton, Cam Webb, and Tony Whitten for useful comments on this chapter.
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