What is conservation biology? Conservation biology is the scientific field that focuses on documenting biodiversity, studying human impacts on species, genetic variation, and ecosystems. The field focuses on studying methods to prevent species extinction, maintain genetic diversity, and protect/restore biological communities and their ecosystem functions (Primack 2012). Being a conservation biologist means studying these topics with the intent of preserving the diversity of species and biological communities, maintaining ecological complexity, promoting evolution, and educating the public and those in the scientific community. The goal of this essay is to examine what it means to be a conservation biologist and the role it plays in protecting the environment. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Conservation biologists typically analyze the probability of survival of species, examine ecosystems and communities, examine the gene pools of a community or population, compose population studies, examine physical/chemical effects at all biological levels and examine current environmental issues. From the studies conducted, conservation biologists begin to synthesize the knowledge gained from their studies and from previous studies conducted to create solutions to environmental problems and then test them. These studies are generally focused on small-scale or large-scale conservation and take place at local and international levels. Conservation biology has changed over time and started to focus more on human impacts on biodiversity loss and degradation. This involves examining social, cultural, and economic systems and how they interact to create specific worldviews about the environment. By studying the anthropogenic sources of environmental problems, the environmental community believes it can create solutions that integrate humans into the environment without significant degradation and loss of biodiversity. Conservation biology also focuses more on designing networks of protected areas rather than simply conserving as much or as large an area as possible. Conservation biologists design protected area networks by focusing on resilience, redundancy, and reality to achieve broad representation of biodiversity at all organizational levels and have sufficient area to be resilient enough to maintain current biodiversity. Finally, conservation biologists must face the reality that they must acquire political will and funding to protect lands and regulate/manage protected areas. This can be done by becoming more involved in environmental protection. Conservation biologists are actually already involved in environmental defense, as they are the basis on which environmental defense works. Environmental advocacy is the social movement with the goal of promoting environmental health and protection through education, activism, and politics. Environmental advocacy bases its activism on the science that environmental biologists provide through research published in scientific journals and at scientific conferences. Environmental protection receives much more attention from political figures and the media because their activities are intended to attract public attention and influence political leaders and their decisions. Whether or not scientists should participate in environmental protection is a complex question. Scientists should have one.