Conservation biology is the study of the conservation of nature and of Earth's biodiversity with the aim of protecting species, their habitats, and ecosystems from excessive rates of extinction and the erosion of biotic interactions. It is an interdisciplinary subject drawing on natural and social sciences, and the practice of natural resource management.
Peter Raymond Grant and Barbara Rosemary Grant are a British married couple who are evolutionary biologists at Princeton University. Each currently holds the position of emeritus professor. They are known for their work with Darwin's finches on Daphne Major, one of the Galápagos Islands. Since 1973, the Grants have spent six months of every year capturing, tagging, and taking blood samples from finches on the island. They have worked to show that natural selection can be seen within a single lifetime, or even within a couple of years. Charles Darwin originally thought that natural selection was a long, drawn out process but the Grants have shown that these changes in populations can happen very quickly.
William Rees, FRSC, is Professor Emeritus at the University of British Columbia and former director of the School of Community and Regional Planning (SCARP) at UBC.
Functional ecology is a branch of ecology that focuses on the roles, or functions, that species play in the community or ecosystem in which they occur. In this approach, physiological, anatomical, and life history characteristics of the species are emphasized. The term "function" is used to emphasize certain physiological processes rather than discrete properties, describe an organism's role in a trophic system, or illustrate the effects of natural selective processes on an organism. This sub-discipline of ecology represents the crossroads between ecological patterns and the processes and mechanisms that underlie them.
The Earth Institute is a research institute at Columbia University created in 1995 for addressing complex issues facing the planet and its inhabitants, with a focus on sustainable development. With an interdisciplinary approach, this includes research in climate change, geology, global health, economics, management, agriculture, ecosystems, urbanization, energy, hazards, and water. The Earth Institute's activities are guided by the idea that science and technological tools that already exist could be applied to greatly improve conditions for the world's poor, while preserving the natural systems that support life on Earth.
Ethnoecology is the scientific study of how different groups of people living in different locations understand the ecosystems around them, and their relationships with surrounding environments.
The Koffler Scientific Reserve at Jokers Hill, is a biological field station belonging to and managed by the University of Toronto. It occupies roughly 348 hectares of old fields, wetlands, grasslands, and forest lands in King Township, on the western portion of the Oak Ridges Moraine and close to the town of Newmarket, Ontario, Canada. The site's ecosystems are home to many species of plants and animals.
The Earth Institute Center for Environmental Sustainability, formerly known as the Center for Environmental Research and Conservation (CERC), consists of two institutions located at Columbia University. The first is an Earth Institute which started as the first Earth Institute in 1995. The second is the Secretariat of the Consortium for Environmental Research and Conservation, established in cooperation with The Earth Institute, the American Museum of Natural History, the New York Botanical Garden, the Wildlife Conservation Society and EcoHealth Alliance on biodiversity conservation.
James J. Kay was an ecological scientist and policy-maker. He was a respected physicist best known for his theoretical work on complexity and thermodynamics.
Dolph Schluter is a Canadian professor of Evolutionary Biology and a Canada Research Chair in the Department of Zoology at the University of British Columbia. Schluter is a major researcher in adaptive radiation and currently studies speciation in the three-spined stickleback, Gasterosteus aculeatus.
Wayne Paul Maddison, is a professor and Canada Research Chair in Biodiversity at the departments of zoology and botany at the University of British Columbia, and the Director of the Spencer Entomological Collection at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum.
Sarah Perin Otto is a theoretical biologist, Canada Research Chair in Theoretical and Experimental Evolution, and is currently a Killam Professor at the University of British Columbia. From 2008-2016, she was the director of the Biodiversity Research Centre at the University of British Columbia. Otto was named a 2011 MacArthur Fellow. In 2015 the American Society of Naturalists gave her the Sewall Wright Award for fundamental contributions to the unification of biology. In 2021, she was awarded the Darwin–Wallace Medal for contributing major advances to the mathematical theory of evolution.
Katherine Jane Willis, Baroness Willis of Summertown, is a British biologist, academic and life peer, who studies the relationship between long-term ecosystem dynamics and environmental change. She is Professor of Biodiversity in the Department of Biology and Pro-Vice-Chancellor at the University of Oxford, and an adjunct professor in biology at the University of Bergen. In 2018 she was elected Principal of St Edmund Hall, and took up the position from 1 October. She held the Tasso Leventis Chair of Biodiversity at Oxford and was founding Director, now Associate Director, of the Biodiversity Institute Oxford. Willis was Director of Science at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew from 2013 to 2018. Her nomination by the House of Lords Appointments Commission as a crossbench life peer was announced on 17 May 2022.
Judith (Judy) H. Myers is a Canadian-American ecologist. In 2014, she was elected president of the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution, and served in that role until 2016. Professor Myers is well known for her decades-long research into plant-animal-microbe interactions, including insect pest outbreaks, viral pathogens of insects, and pioneering work on biological control of insects and plants, particularly invasive species. Throughout her career she has advocated strongly for both the public understanding of science and for increasing the number of women in the STEM subjects: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.
Bradley Cardinale is an American ecologist, conservation biologist, academic and researcher. He is Head of the Department of Ecosystem Science and Management and Penn State University.
Shahid Naeem is an ecologist and conservation biologist and is a Lenfest Distinguished professor and chair in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology at Columbia University. Naeem is the author of Biodiversity, Ecosystem Functioning, and Human Well-Being, and has published over 100 scientific articles.
Diane S. Srivastava is a professor of community ecology and ecology of species diversity. Having grown up in the outdoors of Nova Scotia, she attended multiple universities to eventually earn a Ph.D. focused on the ecology of aquatic plants. Her subsequent research after becoming a postdoctoral researcher and then a professor at the University of British Columbia centered around the interactions of bromeliads with species diversity of their surrounding environment, particularly in the neotropics. She received the 2010 E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship and was made director of the Canadian Institute of Ecology and Evolution in 2017.
