Are you interested in biodiversity and conservation? As the impact of industrialization and population growth on natural systems has become more severe, conservation has emerged as an important area of practical endeavour. In this domain you will study the linkages between the academic study of biodiversity and the applied field of conservation biology.
The study of biological diversity, or "biodiversity," lies at the intersection of evolution with ecology and genetics, and combines the subdisciplines of evolutionary ecology, evolutionary genetics, and ecological genetics. It has two main branches: the creation of diversity and the maintenance of diversity. Both processes are governed by a general mechanism of selection acting over different scales of space and time. This gives rise to a distinctive set of principles and generalizations that regulate rates of diversification and levels of diversity, as well as the abundance or rarity of different species. Conservation biology constitutes the application of these principles in the relevant social and economic context to the management of natural systems, with the object of preventing the extinction of rare species and maintaining the diversity of communities.