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For many, conservation is more a personal calling than a job. Therefore, preparing a personal mission statement early in career development is an essential first step toward professional effectiveness. Traditional undergraduate education in conservation should provide understanding of the biological and physical sciences, while graduate education should contribute specialized experience in research or professional practice. As conservation science has expanded, there is also new opportunity to contribute through the social sciences. Professional organizations are now more active in recruiting women and minorities, so individuals in underrepresented groups may contribute to conservation practice. At all times, however, the overarching goal is to transition from being a student of an academic subject to becoming a citizen of professional culture through collaboration and participation with established conservation scientists.

Ecosystem-based management (EBM), formerly called ecosystem management, employs management approaches for entire systems rather than merely system components like timber or wildlife, and considers humans an integral part of the ecosystem to be explicitly addressed in management strategies. Decision-making is informed by adaptive management, in which management actions are executed as experiments to both enhance system performance and acquire reliable knowledge about system behavior. Management objectives are achieved, whenever possible, using ecosystem processes (for example, fire) and in collaboration with human “stakeholders” vested in the health of the ecosystem. EBM is employed in conservation biology to correct limitations of management efforts targeted to only a few species or limited areas, but needs further clarification of its distinctions to offer more effective contributions to biodiversity conservation.

Populations are coexisting individuals of the same species living in the same area at the same time. Populations may subdivide into spatially distinct subunits comprising a metapopulation, where different subunits experience varying probabilities of extinction. As habitat loss and fragmentation have progressively contributed to population subdivision and increased extinction probability, metapopulation theory has received increasing attention in conservation biology and remains an area of active study and management application. To estimate extinction probability of populations generally, conservation biologists determine the size of minimum viable populations and employ population viability analysis, using analytical and simulation models to estimate the likelihood of population persistence. As some species recover from endangered status, these may transition to conservation reliant species, whose populations still need ongoing management intervention to persist.

Aquatic environments are among Earth’s most species-diverse ecosystems, yet remain under-protected. Rivers face multiple threats, the most systemic being alteration of streamflow through human withdrawals or impediments by dams. Dam removal, once rare, is an increasingly used technique to restore stream flows. Marine populations are most threatened by overharvest, with more than 60% of commercial stocks classified as overfished or collapsed. Bycatch, the inadvertent capture of animals when fishing for something else, threatens non-target species, with losses to marine mammals alone between 300,000 and 600,000 individuals annually. Time and area closures, fishing effort reduction and gear modification can reduce bycatch mortality. Marine reserves produce increasing fish populations under “no-take” management as well as in commercial catches if harvest areas within the reserve are limited.

Economics influences conservation because it offers a way of valuing biodiversity and ecosystem services and a means for conservationists to make decisions for allocating their own resources to address threats to biodiversity. Ecosystem services are often public goods not easily valued in traditional markets. Cost-benefit Analysis, Hedonic Valuation Models, and Stated Preference Methods are adaptations of traditional economic approaches to capture conservation value. Integrated Conservation and Development Projects (ICDPs) are used in the Majority World to involve people in economic development attained through enhanced sustainability of their natural environment. Conservation biologists today must make economic activity a reflection of nature’s value rather than a determinant of it, and incorporate conservation as a normal part of economic activity rather than an external restraint that reduces its benefits.

Ethics and values have been foundational to conservation biology as a mission-driven discipline dedicated to a moral imperative –preserving global biodiversity. Value-based policies limit conservation success more than biological knowledge, so conservation biologists must establish the intrinsic value of nature in conservation efforts. Many conservationists have employed moral extensionism – the application of mortal standing to non-human entities – to establish nature’s value, expressed through positions based on Biophilia, Deep Ecology, the Land Ethic, Animal Rights, and others. In contrast, religious traditions establish intrinsic value through divine revelation, providing powerful arguments for biodiversity conservation expressed in a proliferation of faith-based organizations (FBOs) in conservation. Using these and other sources, conservationists must mature in their expression of ethical reasons for saving biodiversity to make conservation goals culturally persuasive

Habitats are sites having appropriate levels of biotic and abiotic features required for a species’ survival and reproduction, and so are vital elements of species conservation. Habitat loss, fragmentation, isolation (increasing distance between similar habitat types) and degradation are threats to habitat conservation. Contemporary tools for conserving habitat for threatened species include species-specific habitat suitability models (HSMs), “GAP” analysis (relating species’ distribution to distribution of protected areas), Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) technology employing laser scanning to measure habitat attributes, and dispersal models relating movement of individual organisms to relative “connectedness” of habitat patches. Human alteration of habitats cannot be eliminated, but can be mitigated through site-specific restrictions on human occupancy and disturbance, methods of resource extraction, and treatment of habitat following disturbance.

Biodiversity refers to the structural and functional variety of life at genetic, population, community, and ecosystem levels. Biodiversity is the core value of conservation biology, and preventing biodiversity loss is the discipline’s mission. Such loss is a systemic outcome of human use and occupancy of land and disruptions of ecological processes. Various systemic strategies of protection including direct legislation, regulation of trade in endangered species, and establishment of protected areas for endangered species have had significant but incomplete success. Protection-oriented approaches employ systematic prioritization of sites by treating site-specific threat of loss, ecological uniqueness, and opportunity for acquisition as primary determinants of priority. In contrast, management-oriented approaches emphasize maintenance of gene flow, creation of resources for habitat and niche specialization, and maintaining effective population sizes.

Conservation biology emerged in the 1970s and 1980s from older, more established applied biological sciences in response to increasing rates of extinction and threats to global biodiversity. Described as “a science of scarcity and abundance” applying biological principles to prevent the extinction of species, conservation biology grew rapidly in membership and influence following its inception. Foundational ideas of conservation are much older, drawn from philosophical and religious traditions emphasizing the intrinsic value of nature. Manifested historically as expression of privilege, nature appreciation, and preservation of landscape, conservation biology today is moving away from the idea of protecting nature from people to protecting nature for people, as extractive reserves, integrated development, and rights of indigenous people have become increasingly emphasized in and integral to conservation effort.

Many scientists today argue for designating the present age as a new geologic epoch – the Anthropocene –characterized by unprecedented current effects of humans on climate, land use, and geologic processes. Today less than 25% of the Earth’s ice-free surface is uninhabited (“wild”) landscape. The rest is either densely occupied or highly modified by humans. Such anthropogenic biomes or “anthromes” may themselves be home to “novel ecosystems” containing species assemblages never previously observed. Urban areas represent the most novel anthromes of all, yet may be sites where the future of biodiversity conservation is determined. Today conservationists must help create a “responsible Anthropocene” where human influence is more beneficent toward nature, not only to prevent extinction of species but the extinction of experience between humans and nature.

Conservation biology is a discipline that is empowered by legal support for accomplishing its mission of global biodiversity conservation, with such support rooted in legal frameworks grounded in ethical rights, utilitarian interests, and equal distribution of risks. Two US environmental laws, the National Environmental Policy Act (1970) and the US Endangered Species Act (1973) reframed biodiversity conservation in the US, and provided models used by other nations. The Stockholm Conference of 1972 and the adoption of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES) in 1973 engaged international support in new, systemic, and collaborative associations to achieve conservation. From these foundations, conservationists today must become more astute in understanding conservation law to make research effective in achieving conservation goals.

Global climate change poses a fundamentally different threat to biodiversity conservation than any other. Meta-analyses of species’ distribution studies demonstrate a “diagnostic fingerprint” of climate effects on species worldwide, characterized by advancement of spring events, range shifts, changes in local abundance, interactions across trophic levels, and climate-related extinctions. In some cases entire ecosystems, such as cloud forests and coral reefs, have been locally eliminated by warming temperatures. Conservation biologists are now using integrated vulnerability assessments (IVAs) assessing species exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity to climate change to estimate their risk of extinction from it as well as models of species-specific “bioclimate envelopes” to determine climate vulnerability. Both science and policy-based strategies will be needed to reduce effects of climate change and prevent losses to global biodiversity.