Value and Advocacy in Conservation Biology: Crisis Discipline or Discipline in Crisis?

Value and advocacy in conservation biology: crisis discipline or discipline in crisis?

Conservation biology is fraught with confusion and controversy about advocacy. Until we resolve the confusion over how we should advocate, controversy will prevail over whether we should advocate. Until then conservation biologists are likely to avoid even directing their expertise to policy decisions, even though many authors agree we are obliged to do this. No stance on advocacy can avoid cri...

Crisis in Clio ' S Family : a Study of the Discipline

Waiting can be an optimal conservation strategy, even in a crisis discipline.

Biodiversity conservation projects confront immediate and escalating threats with limited funding. Conservation theory suggests that the best response to the species extinction crisis is to spend money as soon as it becomes available, and this is often an explicit constraint placed on funding. We use a general dynamic model of a conservation landscape to show that this decision to "front-load" ...

Translation Studies: Pre-Discipline, Discipline, Interdiscipline, and Post-Discipline

In the West, Translation Studies as a discipline has a very short but lively history. Founded in the early 1970s in the Low Countries—Holland and Belgium—translation studies is a fairly new field. Yet, today some theorists suggest that the discipline is too limited to translated texts and excludes much translation data being generated from other fields of inquiry, including theater, art, archit...

The need for speed in a crisis discipline: perspectives on peer-review duration and implications for conservation science

Scholarly peer review relies on rigorous yet fair assessments of articles by qualified referees in a timely manner. We considered the extent to which a prolonged peer-review process can delay the dissemination of results in a conservation context by combining insight from a survey with our own perspectives. A survey of authors who published peer-reviewed articles in biodiversity and conservatio...