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...at population productivities change through time, monitoring should not just focus on currently productive populations but also include lower productivity populations (e.g., Walters & Cahoon 1985; Price et al. 2008). Conserving population diversity and the associated asynchrony in population dynamics could be critical for long-term production and sustainability of any spatially structured species. While there has been much attention devoted to species extinction, there have been calls for increased focus on biodiversity loss on the population level (Ehrlich & Daily 1993; Balmford et al. 2003; Luck et al. 2003), especially for exploited populations (e.g., Walters & Cahoon 1985; Hutchinson 2008). Managing for this population diversity and associated response diversity will likely necessitate changing monitoring, management, and conservation strategies to maintain networks of intact habitat and the associated stocks of locally adapted populations (DFO 2005; Schindler et al. 2008). Acknowledgments We thank the people who collected these data. J. Fox and J. Jorgenson provided key assistance with data gathering and analyses. We thank the National Research Council, National Marine Fisheries Service, and t...

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...e influence on ecosystem functioning of certain types of species, such as dominants and keystones, has been well documented. These species are often the focus of management efforts emphasizing the restoration or maintenance of ecosystem functioning or character. However, comprehensively identifying functionally important species in a community can be difficult. Sometimes the functional role of a species varies widely in different times and places, or the species may periodically provide critical redundancy when another species dips in abundance (Walker et al. 1999; Gunderson and Holling 2002; Luck et al. 2003). Sometimes the fundamental role of a species is not apparent until the species is removed (Zavaleta et al. 2001). Attributes such as functional uniqueness, the ability to alter abiotic conditions, and strong interactions with dominants can also confer functional importance and may be overlooked in conservation efforts. Finally, functional importance can depend on how many and what functions one defines as important. While evidence of a strong role in maintaining ecosystem processes or character can identify a species as functionally important, the absence of such evidence does not necessarily...

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.... Third, a wide-ranging species may play different functional roles in distinct ecosystems and hence its ecological diversity and threats to such diversity may also be underestimated across its range =-=[5,6]-=-. Finally, intraspecific diversity and threats to such diversity across a broad landscape, often encompassing different jurisdictions, makes the efficient identification, categorization, and conservat...