Chilean Patagonia located at the southwestern tip of South America is one of the last regions
on earth where highly intact environments predominate. With a coastline that extends along some
100 000 km of fjords channels and islands it has one of the world´s most extensive
marine-terrestrial interfaces. Local place-based and Indigenous cultures and management
practices are a vital presence across the region while the long and rich history of
conservation efforts have resulted in officially protected areas covering over 50% of the land
and 41% of the coastal-marine area. However Chilean Patagonia is increasingly facing
anthropogenic pressures associated with increased infrastructure and access salmon aquaculture
extractive industries and the spread of invasive exotic species. Despite widespread
recognition that Chilean Patagonia represents a unique global reservoir of socio-natural
heritage to date there has been no region-wide assessment of the scientific evidence of the
conservation status of its ecosystems or the priorities for their effective conservation.
Conservation in Chilean Patagonia: Assessing the state of knowledge opportunities and
challenges is the first book to gather and synthesize the available scientific and
socio-environmental information related to Patagonian conservation. It presents the
collaborative work of 68 researchers and local experts representing a range of specialties and
perspectives including: biology ecology socio-ecology fisheries aquaculture anthropology
economics geography tourism cryosphere oceanography climate and global change. The book's
18 chapters focus on the status of key ecosystems and conservation tools and provide
recommendations toward the construction of a renewed inclusive and integrated conservation
agenda for the Chilean Patagonian region. It provides an essential primer for anyone interested
in the future of this ecologically vital region as well as lessons on interdisciplinary
collaboration and integrated analysis of conservation issues useful for conservation
practitioners and scholars. This is an open access book. This book is a translation of an
original Spanish edition. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence
(machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily
in terms of content so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional
translation.
