The time has come: extending the role of scientists in conservation practices

Excerpt

Biodiversity is tremendously valuable to human beings. Nonetheless, there has been an alarming increase in species extinction rates following anthropogenic pressures on nature: habitat loss and fragmentation, pollution, poaching and other factors that directly damage nature (Butchard et al. 2010; Ceballos et al. 2017). In late 2017, two opinions were published in The Washington Post that expressed opposing viewpoints about how the scientific community should respond to these extinctions. Dr. R. Alexander Pyron argued that, because species will go extinct anyway, we do not need to do anything to save them (Pyron 2017). Drs. Alexandre Antonelli and Allison Perrigo led a response in which more than 3700 people around the world signed a letter arguing that we should be concerned about species extinction because, among myriad factors, increased extinction rates are a negative reflection of the human impact on nature (Antonelli and Perrigo 2017, 2018). …