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1. Demilitarizing Conservation

   Lunstrum, E; Masse, F; Ashaba, IM; Dutta, A; Marijnen, E; Mushonga, T; Matose, F (July 2025, Annals of the American Association of Geographers)

   Many national parks and other protected areas (PAs) are experiencing an intensification of military actors, logics, and partnerships across the globe. This amounts to one of the most consequential conservation trends this century, one that violates human rights and threatens conservation’s long-term viability. These dynamics have been chronicled in the burgeoning literature on green militarization. Set against dire predictions of biodiversity loss and the importance of both PAs and local communities in slowing this decline, this intervention makes the argument for demilitarizing conservation and sets out an initial framework for what this entails conceptually and in practice. We show how demilitarizing conservation must be based on an ethics and politics of care and non-violence. While PAs are already landscapes of care for non-human nature, we argue for a more robustly care-full conservation that, perhaps uncomfortably, requires care to be extended to those who harm wildlife and nature more broadly. We illustrate how demilitarization requires infusing care into conservation at two related moments: the actual encounter between conservation’s transgressors and law enforcement and the larger structures that produce the encounter and military buildup as a response. The latter includes how green militarization is driven by economic logics, global patterns of economic inequality, and colonial structures that continue to shape conservation. This intervention also opens space for considering how the need for demilitarization allies with other movements like Indigenous-led and convivial conservation working to radically reshape conservation theory and practice and makes a case for explicitly including demilitarization within these efforts. 

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2. Conservation museomics

   https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.14234  

   Blair, Mary_E (March 2024, Conservation Biology)
3. Microtargeting for conservation

   https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13315  

   Metcalf, Alexander L.; Phelan, Conor N.; Pallai, Cassandra; Norton, Michael; Yuhas, Ben; Finley, James C.; Muth, Allyson (April 2019, Conservation Biology)
4. Conservation biology and conservation paleobiology meet the Anthropocene together: history matters

   https://doi.org/10.3389/feart.2023.1166243  

   Walker, Sally E. (September 2023, Frontiers in Earth Science)

   Libermann, Bruce (Ed.)

   As a species, we have reached a tipping point for Earth derived from our unsustainable resource use. While conservation efforts occurred early in human civilization, it was not until 1980 that the full force of environmental destruction, including the Santa Barbara oil spill in the 1970s, culminated in the new discipline of conservation biology focused on the biosphere. Similarly, conservation paleobiology, named two decades later, brings the unique perspective of the fossil record to conservation efforts, uniting biosphere and geosphere scientists. To date, conservation history does not include paleontological or geological perspectives. Further, each discipline has a different benchmark—near time—for when Earth’s ecosystems were modified by humans. Accordingly, the history of conservation efforts leading up to conservation biology and conservation paleobiology was examined from a geological and ecological framework. To provide a benchmark for near time, the hominin record and their geo-environmental modifications were also examined and revealed that by the start of the Holocene, all continents except ice-covered Antarctica and Greenland had human-modified ecosystems. Therefore, near time is dispensable when the Holocene Epoch is universally understood and precisely defined as a time when H. sapiens dominated environments. Lastly, a conservation corps is urgently needed, following the long tradition of F.D. R.’s Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930s and J.F. Kennedy’s Peace Corps of the 1960s, to promote a global network connecting all students and practitioners of conservation disciplines to focus on biotic resilience, recovery, and solutions for the world’s most pressing environmental problems. 

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5. Non‐conservation and conservation for different formulations of moist potential vorticity

   https://doi.org/10.1002/asl.1237  

   Kooloth, Parvathi; Smith, Leslie M.; Stechmann, Samuel N. (April 2024, Atmospheric Science Letters)

   Abstract Potential vorticity (PV) is one of the most important quantities in atmospheric science. In the absence of dissipative processes, the PV of each fluid parcel is known to be conserved, for a dry atmosphere. However, a parcel's PV is not conserved if clouds or phase changes of water occur. Recently, PV conservation laws were derived for a cloudy atmosphere, where each parcel's PV is not conserved but parcel‐integrated PV is conserved, for integrals over certain volumes that move with the flow. Hence a variety of different statements are now possible for moist PV conservation and non‐conservation, and in comparison to the case of a dry atmosphere, the situation for moist PV is more complex. Here, in light of this complexity, several different definitions of moist PV are compared for a cloudy atmosphere. Numerical simulations are shown for a rising thermal, both before and after the formation of a cloud. These simulations include the first computational illustration of the parcel‐integrated, moist PV conservation laws. The comparisons, both theoretical and numerical, serve to clarify and highlight the different statements of conservation and non‐conservation that arise for different definitions of moist PV. 

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