Grand Challenges in Conservation Science

We live in an extraordinary time.Our ingenuity and access to inexpensive fossil fuels has created a remarkably effective industrial complex and permitted our population and our resource consumption to expand-seemingly without checks.But the checks are there and we are in the midst of a sixth mass extinction event driven by our fossil-fuel consumption, our toxification of the Earth, our extensive habitat destruction, and our expanding population.This is all quite a feat given that widespread petroleum production began a bit more than 150 years ago following the discovery of abundant fuel in a field in Titusville, Pennsylvania.The loss of biodiversity is, depending on your values, a tragic loss, a massively destabilizing loss, or a huge economic loss.Nature provides spiritual sustenance and exploring nature is restorative in many ways to many of us.We need nature.We are healthier when we have access to nature.As we learn more about food webs, and interspecific interactions more generally, we find that the loss of even a single species may be magnified, for species do not exist in isolation, they effect other species as well.For example, there are information networks all around us-even when out for a walk you can see a dog scare a bird who gives an alarm call that warns a squirrel.Without the bird, the squirrel is more vulnerable to predation.We are just beginning to appreciate the interactions between microbial diversity and organismal health.And, of course, biodiversity has enormous economic values-ranging from the tsunami protection against storms that healthy and extensive mangroves provide, to the air cleansing and CO 2 sequestration that vegetation provides, to the pharmacopeia of medicines just waiting to be discovered.Bioinspired design has made swimmers swim faster and boats move more efficiently through the water.Combatting biodiversity loss is, however, a wicked problem that is hard to solve because it is complex and requires interdisciplinary collaboration.The field of conservation biology has evolved since its founding as a crisis discipline with strong focuses on genetics and population biology in the late 1970s (Soulé and Wilcox, 1980).Practitioners now recognize the essential nature of interdisciplinary collaboration and communication.Frontiers in Conservation Science was created with this interdisciplinary collaboration in mind.Frontiers in Conservation Science is a multidisciplinary, open-access platform dedicated to the publication of ideas, reports, methods, and techniques that can be applied to biodiversity conservation and management.The aim of the journal is to encourage collaboration between scientists, stakeholders, and civil society to advance the conservation and management of the world's biodiversity.Frontiers in Conservation Science recognizes that a diversity of approaches will be essential to manage our biodiversity crisis.Business-as-usual conservation and management are demonstrably not up to the challenge.Thus, the journal welcomes submissions from natural, physical, and social scientists as well as humanists whose work informs why and how we can conserve and manage biodiversity.Indeed, there is a healthy debate as to the value of instrumental values for conserving nature (e.g., Newman et al., 2017), and there is a healthy debate about the entire field of compassionate conservation (e.g., Wallach et al., 2018;Oommen et al., 2019).We welcome submissions from relatively new disciplines that are relevant to conservation-such as conservation behavior, conservation physiology, and conservation psychology to name but a few.