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.
Ecosystem services are the many and varied benefits to humans provided by the natural environment and healthy ecosystems. Such ecosystems include, for example, agroecosystems, forest ecosystem, grassland ecosystems, and aquatic ecosystems. These ecosystems, functioning in healthy relationships, offer such things as natural pollination of crops, clean air, extreme weather mitigation, and human mental and physical well-being. Collectively, these benefits are becoming known as ecosystem services, and are often integral to the provision of food, the provisioning of clean drinking water, the decomposition of wastes, and the resilience and productivity of food ecosystems.
Sustainability is a social goal for people to co-exist on Earth over a long time. Specific definitions of this term are disputed and have varied with literature, context, and time. Experts often describe sustainability as having three dimensions : environmental, economic, and social, and many publications emphasize the environmental dimension. In everyday use, sustainability often focuses on countering major environmental problems, including climate change, loss of biodiversity, loss of ecosystem services, land degradation, and air and water pollution. The idea of sustainability can guide decisions at the global, national, and individual levels. A related concept is sustainable development, and the terms are often used to mean the same thing. UNESCO distinguishes the two like this: "Sustainability is often thought of as a long-term goal, while sustainable development refers to the many processes and pathways to achieve it."
The aim of water security is to make the most of water's benefits for humans and ecosystems. The second aim is to limit the risks of destructive impacts of water to an acceptable level. These risks include for example too much water (flood), too little water or poor quality (polluted) water. People who live with a high level of water security always have access to "an acceptable quantity and quality of water for health, livelihoods and production". For example, access to water, sanitation and hygiene services is one part of water security. Some organizations use the term water security more narrowly for water supply aspects only.
John Isaiah Brauman is an American chemist.
Gretchen C. Daily is an American environmental scientist and tropical ecologist. She has contributed to understanding humanity's dependence and impacts on nature, and to advancing a systematic approach for valuing nature in policy, finance, management, and practice around the world. Daily is co-founder and faculty director of the Natural Capital Project, a global partnership that aims to mainstream the values of nature into decision-making of people, governments, investors, corporations, NGOs, and other institutions. Together with more than 300 partners worldwide, the Project is pioneering science, technology, and scalable demonstrations of inclusive, sustainable development.
The Center for Climate and Life is a multidisciplinary climate science research initiative based at Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO), a research unit of Columbia University. Center research focuses on how climate change affects access to basic resources such as food, water, shelter and energy. The center's founder and director is Peter B. de Menocal, a paleoclimatologist and Columbia University dean of science in the faculty of arts and sciences.
Noelle Eckley Selin is an atmospheric chemist and Associate Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Institute for Data, Systems and Society and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences.
Line Gordon is a Swedish sustainability scientist whose transdisciplinary research combines food, water, and the benefits people receive from nature. Gordon is the director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre and a professor at Stockholm University, Sweden. She is also on the board of the EAT foundation, and often participates in public discussions of food and climate in Sweden.
Amy D. Rosemond is an American aquatic ecosystem ecologist, biogeochemist, and Distinguished Research Professor at the Odum School of Ecology at the University of Georgia. Rosemond studies how global change affects freshwater ecosystems, including effects of watershed urbanization, nutrient pollution, and changes in biodiversity on ecosystem function. She was elected an Ecological Society of America fellow in 2018, and served as president of the Society for Freshwater Science from 2019-2020.
Sandra Myrna Díaz ForMemRS is an Argentine ecologist and professor of ecology at the National University of Córdoba. She studies the functional traits of plants and investigates how plants impact the ecosystem.
Petra Döll is a German hydrologist whose work focuses on modeling global water resources. She is a professor of hydrology and researcher at the Institute of Physical Geography, Goethe University Frankfurt.
Irena Creed is a Canadian hydrologist. She is currently the vice-principal for research and innovation at University of Toronto Scarborough. She was the associate vice-president for research at the University of Saskatchewan, and the executive director of and a professor at the School of Environment and Sustainability. Creed continues to study the impacts of global climate change on ecosystem functions and services, specifically focusing on the hydrology of freshwater catchments.
Anne E. Giblin is a marine biologist who researches the cycling of elements nitrogen, sulfur, iron and phosphorus. She is a Senior Scientist and Acting Director of the Ecosystem Center at the Marine Biological Lab.
Elena M. Bennett is an American ecosystem ecologist specializing in studying the interactions of ecosystem services on landscape. She is currently a Professor and the Canada Research Chair in Sustainability Science at McGill University. She was inducted to the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists in 2017. She was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022 and became a Guggenheim Fellow in the same year.
Trevor Charles Platt was a British and Canadian biological oceanographer who was distinguished for his fundamental contributions to quantifying primary production by phytoplankton at various scales of space and time in the ocean.
Kathleen C. Weathers is an ecosystem scientist and the G. Evelyn Hutchinson Chair in Ecology at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies. Her expertise focuses on understanding the ecology of air-land-water interactions. Weathers is the current elected President of the Ecological Society of America (2020-2021).
Brian Branfireun is a Canadian environmental scientist. He held a Canada Research Chair (2010-2020) and is a professor at Western University. He studied climate change and directed a laboratory in Western's Biotron for the study of speciated trace metals in the environment such as mercury and arsenic.
Carol Kendall is a hydrologist known for her research tracking nutrients and contaminants in aquatic ecosystems using isotopic tracers.
Upmanu Lall is an Indian-American engineer and the Alan and Carol Silberstein Professor of Engineering at Columbia University. He serves as Director of the Columbia Water Center. Lall studies water scarcity and how to predict and mitigate floods. He was named an American Geophysical Union Fellow in 2017 and their Walter Langbein Lecturer in 2022. He was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2018, and has received the Arid Lands Hydrology and the Ven Te Chow Awards from the American Society of Civil Engineers. In April 2021 he was named to the “Hot List of the world’s 1,000 top climate scientists” by Reuters.
