Conservation of biodiversity in a world of use

Biodiversity conservation has become the stated objective of national gover nments, state agencies, local communities, and scientific organizations Yet despite this attention tbe term biodiversity remains poorly defined. One o f the unfortunate consequences of this lack of definition is a proliferatio n of claims that biodiversity can De both used and conserved. This claim is difficult to assess without a more precise way of defining biodiversity. W e offer a heuristic framework for measuring the consequences of human use f or biodiversity. Our definition of biodiversity includes three components: genetic, population/species, and community/ecosystem. Each component has it s own three attributes: composition, structure, and function. Using this de finition, we assessed the effects of different types of human use on the di fferent components and attributes of biodiversity. We shore that (I) differ ent degrees of human use or alteration result in differential conservation of biodiversity components; (2) some components non attributes of biodivers ity are more sensitive to human use than others; and (3) only extremely lim ited use or virtually no alteration will protect ail components.