A La Jolla Conference Turns Ecology Toward Saving Species Deliberately

Conservation biology applies ecological and population biology research directly to preventing species extinction and habitat loss, combining scientific study with an explicit practical aim rather than treating conservation as a byproduct of pure ecological research. The field took its name and its founding institutional moment at the first international conference on conservation biology, held at the University of California, San Diego in 1978 and organized by Michael Soule and Bruce Wilcox, which brought ecologists together specifically to build conservation into a mission driven applied science with its own methods and professional identity.

Many traditions hold specific species and places, sacred groves, totemic animals, pilgrimage sites tied to a particular ecosystem, as religiously significant, and conservation biology supplies the atlas with the documented ecological status of that species or habitat, whether it is stable, threatened or already lost, independent of the religious value a tradition places on it. The atlas draws on the discipline wherever a sacred natural site or species' conservation status is part of what the atlas describes, since a grove's religious protection has sometimes been the only thing standing between a habitat and clearance.