Ecosystem Conservation and Restoration

Despite being a relatively young discipline, conservation and restoration science has undergone significant transformation in recent decades. Factors such as changing environmental realities, novel conceptual frameworks, and advancements in technology have shaped its evolution. Given its substantial impact on the environment, policy, and society, it is imperative that environmental science students recognize the pivotal role of science in effective conservation practices.

This course explores how ecological science and technology provides the conceptual structure and knowledge base for new approaches to conservation of biodiversity, habitats, and resources. The course begins by examining the theoretical foundations of conservation science, and how these concepts have developed over the past century. It examines alternative approaches to conservation ranging from traditional protected area and wildlife management systems, through to more recent concepts and approaches, including ecosystem services, natural capital, restoration, and rewilding. It emphasizes the role of new technological and analytical methods, including Earth observation, monitoring systems, AI, and genetics. Finally, the students use a horizon scanning approach to determine the future opportunities, priorities, and constraints for conservation science and practice in our rapidly changing world. Students will evaluate several general questions, including ‘What is conservation, and what do we want to conserve,’ ‘What ecological theories frame conservation and restoration practice,’ and ‘how can science guide conservation decisions’, ‘what new concepts (ecological, societal, economical) shape conservation and restoration theory and practice, and what conflicts do they engender, what prospects does technology offer for future conservation and restoration efforts?’

The structure of the course progresses through the different levels of ecological theory, ranging across organismal physiology, population ecology, community ecology, ecosystem ecology, landscape ecology and finishing with global ecology.  

Encouraging Student Engagement

Each class begins with an interactive discussion session, where the students discuss a fundamental academic paper within small groups. They then switch groups, to transfer the learnings from the first discussion into the wider context as they expand their understanding of the topic. After that, the next section of each class takes the form of an interactive game, where students will play different roles within an ecological system. By representing different components of the ecological network, the students drive their own conceptual development. Following that, the group discussion and analysis helps them to place that information into the wider ecological context, and to see how specific theory can be relevant for application. We then finish each class with a case study, where we all discuss a real-world conservation or restoration project that used the principles that we addressed in that class. This mixture of interactive approaches provides the students with a holistic perspective on the challenge, and an understanding of how they might solve problems in this field to improve the