The failure of conservation strategies in tropical regions and the need to challenge the "Western World Paradigm"

Conservation strategies for tropical species and habitats are decided largely on the basis of studies and examples made in the temperate regions, especially in North America and Europe. Conservation strategies for tropical species are often thought to fail due to a plethora of «human dimension» reasons. These reasons are external to the natural history and ecology of the target species, being due shortage of funds, education and awareness limits, and institutional corruption in several countries, particularly in the developing countries of Africa and Asia. Although these reasons are certainly important in determining the outcome of the conservation projects, herein we stress that there is a scientific ecological reason behind such failures in tropical ecosystems. Indeed, the ecological «entropy» of the species-rich and niche-packed tropical ecosystems is so much higher than that of North America and Europe that adopting a decision-making process based on relatively simplified (temperate) ecosystems, where a given species typically interacts with a few others, makes the eventual solution very simplistic or even «naive», thus enhancing its chances of failure. We urge that, for the future, conservation policies for tropical regions should be based on experiences designed from more realistic «highly-entropic» species-rich systems, also in the case of those species apparently sharing similar ecological roles as in the temperate regions.