J Environ Stud Sci DOI 10.1007/s13412-015-0353-6
Have you got what it takes? Looking at skills and needs of the modern marine conservation practitioner
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E. C. M. Parsons 1 & R. MacPherson 2
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Across the globe, there are numerous universities offering students programs in conservation biology. But what exactly is conservation biology? This was recently asked during a project documenting the history of the Society for Conservation Biology. If (like 99 % of undergraduate students), you look at Wikipedia first, it is described as the study, and ascertaining the status, of biodiversity with the aim of protecting species and habitats from extinction (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_biology). This is largely based on the definition given by Soulé (1985). Soulé (1985) noted that conservation biology is Bholistic,^ concerned with the science of establishing the long-term viabilities of populations and ecosystems, taking into account dimensions of management, and also that species and ecosystems are not static but are dynamic and evolve. Moreover, although it’is called conservation Bbiology,^ it’s generally a field that is considered to be interdisciplinary. Soulé (1985) also mentions the importance of public policy, ecophilosophy (e.g., animal and environmental ethics), historical biogeography, and in particular the Bdependence of the biological sciences on social science disciplines^ (p. 727), although scientific disciplines (such as biogeography, veterinary science, physiology, and population
biology) featured first and foremost in his seminar paper. Other conservation practitioners subsequently agreed about the importance of having an interdisciplinary approach to conservation (e.g., Jacobson and McDuff 1998). In fact, in most conservation biology textbooks (e.g., Hunter 1996; Meffe and Groom 2006) the importance of multiple discipline contribution to conservation is highlighted, and how fields such as anthropology, law, arts, and education can all benefit conservation practice. Social sciences such as sociology, psychology, and economics are increasingly being brought into conservation programs, and these skills are being sought by conservation groups. It is certainly no coincidence that the social science working group of the Society for Conservation Biology (the professional society for conservation scientists and practitioners; http://www.conbio.org/) is one of the largest and most active groups within the society. In fact, the field is becoming so interdisciplinary that the Governors of the Society for Conservation Biology have discussed changing its name to "the Society for Conservation Science" as many of its professional members and practitioners are not biologists but rather social scientists, managers, geographers, and increasingly psychology and science communications specialists. There is however much resistance to this idea. For example, a colleague of one of us, teaching a conservation biology class, once defined Ba conservation biologist is simply a biologist who studies threatened species^ (ECMP pers., obs.). Perhaps, this used to be the case, but we would argue that today, the field of conservation biology goes beyond that. However, how often do we see papers published purporting conservation biology that are really just physiological or ecological papers that just happen to be on threatened species? There have been a number of new conservation journals that have appeared (for example, Conservation Letters) that specifically highlight that they accept multi- and interdisciplinary papers. Certainly, and increasingly, graduate students studying conservation and
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Keywords Marine conservation . Skills . Training . Inter-disciplinary . Undergraduate / graduate studies . Conservation biology
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* E. C. M. Parsons
[email protected] 1
Department of Environmental Science & Policy, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, MSN 5F2, Fairfax, VA 22030, USA
2
Coral Reef Alliance, Oakland, CA, USA
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think it means) was held in Miami which was attended by a diverse assemblage of marine conservation scientists and practitioners. The participants included academics, marineprotected area or species managers, marine conservation science journalists, communicators, and educators to grant givers for marine conservation projects. The participants came to the conclusion that being a marine conservationist involves the following:
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Managing people and behaviors Identifying stakeholders and their stakes Understanding human nature and social structures; understanding who and what you’re working with Putting conservation into relatable terms and perspective Distinguishing conservation vs. preservation Using science to impact change Using feedback to evaluate further research Determine what policy makers need to know Assuming the precautionary principle—just providing science will not dictate policy
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When asked what skills are required for (marine) conservation in the twenty-first century, training courses for a (marine) conservationist require the following in addition to (marine) science:
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environmental issues are aware of the interdisciplinary nature of conservation (Parsons 2012), and a number of conservation biology practitioners have likewise argued about the importance of the human aspects of conservation. A recent paper by Blickley et al. (2013) specifically investigated the skills that are been sought in job advertisements related to (nonacademic) conservation positions in 2011 (17 international, 43 US based), and 74 % noted a scientific disciplinary skill was required (e.g., ecology, avian biology) as well as 5 non-science skills: specifically project management, program leadership, interpersonal skills, written communication, and the ability to network. Non-profit jobs tended to favor project management and interpersonal, outreach, and networking skills, more than government jobs, which in turn favored these more than private sector positions, whereas government jobs were more likely to request scientific knowledge or research technique/analytical experience (Blickley et al. 2013). This study also interviewed a small pool (n = 14) of conservation professionals, and although specific scientific discipline, analytical or technique-oriented skills were a priority, interpersonal skills and project management were also ranked very highly. They also noted that of these latter two wants, interpersonal skills were much harder to teach during Bon the job^ training (Blickley et al. 2013). In terms of project management requirements, they did say that simply organizing a graduate project was not sufficient evidence of management skills—but rather organizing events for professional societies, or conference organizing, was a better indicator of ability and experience. Moreover, simply writing a thesis did not qualify for evidence of written communication skills (Blickley et al. 2013). As noted above, a number of papers have been written on the skills and training required by conservation biologists (Jacobson 1990; Adelman et al. 1994; Touval 1994; Cannon et al. 1996; Jacobson and McDuff 1998; Inouye and Dietz 2000; Shaw 2000; Clark 2001; Bonine et al. 2003; Campbell et al. 2005; Perez 2005; van Heezik and Seddon 2005; Kainer et al. 2006; Martinich et al. 2006; Fisher et al. 2009; Manolis et al. 2009; Muir and Schwartz 2009; Parsons 2012; Blickley et al. 2013, but these papers have addressed generic conservation, rather than the conservation in marine environment, which in many ways is very different to terrestrial conservation (e.g., Norse and Crowder 2005). To address the issue of what is marine Bconservation^ on this day and age and thus the skills required, a workshop was held to gather thoughts and ideas from a group of conservation practitioners and scientists working in the marine environment.
What skills are required for marine conservation in the twenty-first century? On 12 October 2013, a workshop (entitled: Conservation: BYou keep using that word, I do not think it means what you
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Environmental law Communication theory to promote behavior change Conflict transformation Environmental economics Politics and sociology (especially with respect to conservation values and beliefs) Marketing skills Anthropology and psychology History (for an ecological and political perspective)
Other skills that were mentioned included an appreciation for the humanities, creative artistic skills, which might be useful in helping to interpret marine conservation issues such as designing images that have novel ways of presenting data, and cinematographic and photographic skills to produce images that might help influence behaviors. Dramatic and even dance skills could be useful for helping to interpret marine conservation issues to the public and target groups. Hobbies such as fishing, sailing, and diving were noted as useful—these might help give a common understanding with maritime stakeholders. Not entirely tongue in cheek, drinking skills were mentioned, as very often common ground and understanding with stakeholders can be found during shared conversation in an informal atmosphere in a bar or pub. Along those lines, several people mentioned the importance of karaoke—especially in Asian communities—as willingness to embarrass yourself in public helps to break down Bthem and us^ barriers
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petitions, in addition to details of the most important laws themselves. International law would also be important such as key international treaties and how international diplomacy works. On a more local level, conservation can also occur thanks to state or provincial laws or even voluntary agreements/co-management regimes, and examples of these are important. Finally, environmental economics is a vital component as politicians deal in economic realities, and being able to evaluate conservation in terms of ecosystem services, tourism revenue, and jobs created can be an important addition to the toolbox of the modern conservation practitioner regardless of whether one considers economic factors to essential to modern conservation or not (for example, see the argument over so-called "new conservation": Soulé 2013 versus Marvier 2014).
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One could argue that the three topics above are ultimately the three pillars of modern conservation: (a) accurate science, (b) human values towards and understanding of conservation and how to improve these, and (c) and understanding of the institutions and mechanisms by which conservation interventions can be achieved and managed. Alongside these three pillars of courses, there should arguably be at least one course in conservation ethics, as good ethical practice is essential for good professional practice (see http://www.conbio.org/aboutscb/who-we-are/code-of-ethics for the Society for Conservation Biology’s code of ethics). With such an interdisciplinary program, it could be argued that the modern marine conservation practitioner should not necessarily be pigeonholed as a marine conservation biologist, or perhaps even not a marine conservation scientist (although an understanding of science is extremely important, if not crucial), but perhaps the term Bmarine conservationist^ might better reflect the interdisciplinary nature and training needed for an effective marine conservation practitioner in the modern world. The interdisciplinary nature of modern marine conservation was certainly apparent in the 2014 meeting of the SCB marine section—the 3rd International Marine Conservation Congress (http://www.conbio.org/mini-sites/imcc-2014); a third of symposium sessions and two thirds of workshop sessions were on either communication skills needed by marine conservationists or policy and engagement with stakeholders, managers, and regulators. Thus, there seems to be an understanding of the interdisciplinary nature of marine conservation amongst practitioners and graduate students. But has this transferred to academia? Probably not, as there are few interdisciplinary undergraduate or graduate programs that cater to marine conservation, and academic departments tend to be very single-discipline oriented (for example, focusing solely on fisheries modeling, oceanography, or maritime law and policy), and there are few
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and allow the conservation practitioner to be seen as a peer or even friend, instead of an adversary. The importance of interacting with stakeholders and getting them on your side is probably more important in the marine environment than in the terrestrial environment as marine conservation is typically more expensive, more logistically difficult, and yet underfunded when compared to marine conservation (Norse and Crowder 2005), and so conservation implementation is often reliant upon the goodwill of marine users. Moreover, marine users have more of a history of being able to utilize marine resources with minimal management, whereas users of the terrestrial environment have more of culture of be managed by authorities (Norse and Crowder 2005), and thus getting marine stakeholders to accept management may be more challenging and may require greater social skills and understanding. A key comment was that that advocacy is important for marine conservation scientists in the twenty-first century (see below). Advocacy is important for terrestrial conservation science but arguably even more so for the marine environment, as public awareness of marine species and conservation issues are generally low, human interest in exploiting marine resources is high (whether it be fishing, shipping, or oil extraction and other forms of energy or resources), and many marine issues are Bout of sight out of mind,^ whereas terrestrial conservation problems may be more immediately visible. To get feedback on these results, the conclusions were presented in front of a class of graduate students (n = 16) studying conservation science, and they envisaged what a modern marine conservation academic program might entail a core consisting of the following:
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1. Specialized courses in a scientific discipline such as marine biology, fisheries science, biological oceanography, environmental GIS, population ecology, and conservation genetics. The scientific discipline courses would include courses on techniques and especially statistical analysis. This would give a basic grounding on scientific methods, principles, and literacy, with some specialization in a particular discipline. 2. Courses related to communication and conflict resolution with the public—these would include materials on environmental attitudes, communication and marketing theory, environmental psychology, and social science survey techniques as a means of obtaining information on stakeholder attitudes and opinions. An important component of these courses would be conflict resolution/transformation theory. 3. Courses on environmental law, policy, and economics. These would include course content on (i) how laws are developed; (ii) how regulations produced and laws implemented; (iii) EIA processes and how laws are enforced; and (iv) legal feedback loops such as public appeals and
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Adelman IR, Schmidly DJ, Cohen Y (1994) Educational needs of fisheries and wildlife professionals: results of a survey. Fisheries 19:17–25 Blickley JL, Deiner K, Garbach K, Lacher I, Meek MH, Porensky LM, Wilkerson ML, Winford EM, Schwartz MS (2013) Graduate student’s guide to necessary skills for nonacademic conservation careers. Conserv Biol 27:24–34 Bonine K, Reid J, Dalzen R (2003) Training and education for tropical conservation. Conserv Biol 17:1209–1218 Campbell SP, Fuller AK, Patrick DAG (2005) Looking beyond research in doctoral education. Front Ecol Environ 3:153–160 Cannon JR, Dietz JM, Dietz LA (1996) Training conservation biologists in human interaction skills. Conserv Biol 10:1277–1282 Chan KM (2008) Value and advocacy in conservation biology: crisis discipline or discipline in crisis? Conserv Biol 22:1–3 Clark TW (2001) Developing policy-oriented curricula for conservation biology: professional and leadership education in the public interest. Conserv Biol 15:31–39 Darling ES, Shiffman D, Côté IM, Drew J (2013) The role of Twitter in the life cycle of a scientific publication. Ideas in Ecology and Evol 6: 32–43 Fisher B, Balmford A, Green RE, Trevelyan R (2009) Conservation science training: the need for an extra dimension. Oryx 43:361–363 Hunter ML (1996) Fundamentals of conservation biology. Blackwell Science, Oxford Inouye DW, Dietz JM (2000) Creating academically and practically trained graduate students. Conserv Biol 14:595–596 Jacobson SK (1990) Graduate-education in conservation biology. Conserv Biol 4:431–440 Jacobson SK, McDuff MD (1998) Training idiot savants: the lack of human dimensions in conservation biology. Conserv Biol 12:263– 267 Kainer KA, Schmink M, Covert H, Stepp JR, Bruna EM, Dain JL, Espinosa S, Humphries S (2006) A graduate education framework for tropical conservation and development. Conserv Biol 20:3–13 Lackey RT (2007) Science, scientists, and policy advocacy. Conserv Biol 21:12–17 Manolis JC, Chan KM, Finkelstein ME, Stephens S, Nelson CR, Grant JB, Dombeck MP (2009) Leadership: a new frontier in conservation science. Conserv Biol 23:879–886 Martinich JA, Solarz SL, Lyons JR (2006) Preparing students for conservation careers through project-based learning. Conserv Biol 20: 1579–1583 Marvier M (2014) New conservation is true conservation. Conserv Biol 28:1–3
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There has been for some time a debate as to whether conservation scientists should advocate for their science (ShraderFrechette 1996; Lackey 2007; Noss 2007; Chan 2008; Nelson and Vucetich 2009; Parsons 2013; Rose and Parsons 2015). For many marine conservation scientists, advocacy was often considered to be almost a dirty word. However, it has been argued that advocacy of marine conservation science is really making sure the right scientific information gets into the right hands, in the right format, at the right time (Parsons 2013). Few policy - makers read scientific journals; indeed with the plethora of journals available, scientists rarely can keep up with the deluge of information (Parsons 2013). So advertising and making marine conservation science more available should be an important component of training for the modern marine conservation scientist. In the Internet age, this might include training on tools for distributing conservation papers and data, for example, via social media such as Twitter, which increasingly is becoming an important medium for sharing the latest marine conservation science (Darling et al. 2013; Parsons et al. 2014). Although there are exceptions, many marine scientists are not great public communicators. Graduate students studying conservation increasingly take classes from multiple disciplines and are required to take classes, such as statistics and environmental law, in addition to science classes. But we do not require students to take classes related to effective communication techniques, one of the core skill groups noted above. You need different methods to communicate with different groups: an indigenous community on a South Pacific island requires a different approach to meeting with congressional aides; a group of angry fisherman requires a different approach to a class of elementary school pupils. An integral part of the training of a marine conservation biologist/scientist
References
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Marine conservation science, advocacy, and communication
should be classes in communication (Parsons 2012) and how to appropriately engage with stakeholders and policy makers (Rose and Parsons 2015) . As we said above, if you cannot advocate your conservation science (and by which we mean get unbiased conservation science to those parties that really need the information, in a format they can understand) biodiversity will continue to decline and we ultimately fail to be conservation biologists. Therefore, encouragement and advice (e.g., Parsons 2013) for how to communicate and advocate conservation science should be an essential part of a modern marine conservationist’s toolkit.
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that are truly interdisciplinary. One of the difficulties may be, as with many interdisciplinary programs, is that faculty were trained in specific, single-discipline programs and are physical oceanographers, or ichthyologists, or maritime lawyers, potentially without much Breal-world^ experience of conservation practice. As such, they do not necessarily understand other disciplines, or what they can bring to the table, and would prefer depth in one narrow field of study rather than a more superficial, but broad, level of expertise. Academic departments that compartmentalize less - and that during evaluations and tenure decisions give credit to, and do not penalize, faculty that have diverse skill sets and that regularly engage in Breal-world^ conservation activity - will likely have instructors, and thus graduates, that fit better with the needs of marine conservation in the twenty-first century.
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