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Conservation Letters

Edited by:
Richard M. Cowling, Editor-in-Chief Michael B. Mascia, Editor-in-Chief Hugh Possingham, Editor-in-Chief William J. Sutherland, Editor-in-Chief Corey Bradshaw, Senior Editor Ashwini Chhatre, Senior Editor

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Conservation Letters, A journal of the Society for Conservation Biology, is a new, online-only scientific journal publishing empirical and theoretical research with significant implications for the conservation of biological diversity. It will publish three types of articles:

Letters: novel findings with high relevance for practice or policy
Mini-Reviews: overviews of emerging subjects that merit urgent coverage or succinct syntheses of important topics that are rarely encountered in the mainstream literature
Policy Perspectives: brief essays for a general audience on issues related to conservation and society

TopNews and Announcements

Conservation Letters in the News

Nature covers Critical need for new definitions of "forest" and "forest degradation" in global climate change agreements

Environmental Protection covers Global priority areas for incorporating land-sea connections in marine conservation

Over 100 media outlets covers Carbon payments as a safeguard for threatened tropical mammals, including The New York Times, CNBC, Reuters, CBS News, Forbes, BBC, Scientific American and many others.

Nature covers Assisted colonization in a changing climate: a test-study using two U.K. butterflies

The Economist covers Impending collapse of bluefin tuna in the northeast Atlantic and Mediterranean

Reuters and The Times, among other media outlets, cover Native wildlife on rangelands to minimize methane and produce lower-emission meat: kangaroos versus livestock

Letter From the Editors

Conservation science, like the biodiversity it seeks to understand and safeguard, is evolving rapidly: building in urgency, crossing political and disciplinary boundaries, changing and being changed by the human environment. It is our intention that this new journal reflects those changes. Fast, global and policy-relevant, Conservation Letters will draw on knowledge, tools and interactions from many disciplines - geography, ecology, evolution, mathematics, economics, psychology, sociology and anthropology among them. We want to ensure managers and policy makers are armed with the best information that research has to offer and foreknowledge of the culture of intervention.

Conservation Letters is a forum for the rapid publication of the most novel research that will transform our perspective on important issues that are relevant across borders. Conservation is an explicitly applied discipline: research needs to be geared for implementation within specific social, economic and administrative realities. Consequently, publication in Conservation Letters requires that all authors clearly articulate the implications of their findings for policy and practice. We aim to publish concise papers that merit urgent dissemination by virtue of their originality, general interest and contribution to effective policy and management solutions.

We are most interested in innovative approaches to persistent problems or early detection of emerging ones, and therefore discourage papers that primarily confirm or extend results of previous work. We recognize that in some areas of conservation sample sizes will be small and controlled experiments impossible. Therefore arguments may often rely on novel forms of analysis and synthesis.

The Editorial Office will ensure that manuscripts are handled with dispatch and that accepted articles are published quickly. For the majority of academic journals, first decisions are rendered on the scale of months, and the time elapsed between submitting and publishing can exceed a year. The Editorial Board of Conservation Letters will strive to review all manuscripts within 6 weeks and deliver submission-to-publication turnarounds of 4-5 months. As the inaugural editorial team, we are committed to providing authors with transparent and constructive decisions.

We are genuinely excited by the growth in our discipline and hope that this journal will help to elevate its quality, focus, and relevance.

Richard Cowling
Michael B. Mascia
Hugh Possingham
William J. Sutherland

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