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Rewriting the Rules of Conservation

The language of conservation is getting a much needed overhaul courtesy of an international team of conservationists who are trying to standardize the discipline’s language. The project plans to ground the discipline’s problems and tools field in a framework of well defined concepts.

The new system applies at every level of the field, ranging from the global ‘Red List’ of endangered species to bird conservationists working in remote regions such as the highlands of Kenya. The new unified system, uses six basic elements to describe and classify conservation issues, appears in the current issue of  Conservation Biology.

Science relies on clear taxonomies that use the same names for the same phenomena. “If every physician has his own name for diseases and cures, you have no way of having a science of medicine,” Nicholas Salafsky, a team member who works for Foundations of Success in Bethesda, Maryland, told the journal Nature. “We’re facing the same problem in conservation — we need to standardize.”