Press Release

for the Academic Programs in Conservation Biology: http://conbio.net/scb/services/programs/

Summary

The Society for Conservation Biology would like to announce the presence of a newly updated internet database of Colleges and Universities that have graduate level academic programs in conservation biology. The purpose of this site is to function as a clearing house for information on academic opportunities in Conservation Biology, and in doing so, increase the likelihood that mentor and mentee will find each other.

This document highlights the following areas of the Programs Division:

• Present Features and Future Plans
• Background Information
• Other Features

Present Features and Future Plans

At present, we have indexed description of 62 different graduate programs in Conservation Biology and over 500 professors listed with their research interests, academic affiliations, and contact addresses. We have links to schools and programs that have a presence on the internet as well as to email address directories for all faculty who use that medium.

Our data is searchable by degree offered, study taxon, study site areas, regions, name of faculty or program, and a variety of other useful combinations of fields. Eventually we plan to include: (1) Academic job postings in conservation biology; (2) an area where new Masters and Ph.D. recipients can post their C.V. for potential employers to browse the available conservation biology talent.

Using Jacobson, Vaughan, and Webb-Miller's 1995 Journal of Conservation Biology article entitled New Directions: Graduate Programs in Conservation Biology as a seed-crystal of information (with permission from the authors and publishers), we initiated an ambitious new resource for students and faculty alike.

Jacobson et al. (1995) created the original document by soliciting descriptions of graduate programs in conservation biology from (1) universities represented at the 1993 annual meeting of the Society for Conservation Biology; (2) that were listed in the 1992 Conservation Directory published by the National Wildlife Federation, Washington, D.C.; and (3) that were participating in the national initiative, Integrated Approaches to Training in Conservation and Sustainable Development (Jacobson et al. 1992).

Since this conception, the database has been steadily growing as schools now have the ability to insert their programs directly into our database. It is our plan that this web site will be a dynamic and always current source of information on conservation biology programs available to all people, at all time.

At the web site, we can accommodate up to 300-word program descriptions and 150-word research interest descriptions from each faculty who's research interests obviously align with topics in the field of conservation biology. If you are the chair or a faculty member from a program not represented in the list, but you would like to be, or if your program or research interests are included but need to be updated, please use the interactive forms.

Alternatively, you can send US mail to the address below with the relevant information:

Alan D. Thornhill, Ph.D.
Director, Learning & Communications, Conservation Science Division
The Nature Conservancy
4245 N. Fairfax Drive, Arlington, VA 22203
v. 703-841-2080 f. 703-525-8024 athornhill@tnc.org