Conservation Science at The Nature Conservancy

John A. Wiens, Ph.D.
Lead Scientist

Contact Information
The Nature Conservancy
4245 North Fairfax Drive, Suite 100
Arlington, VA 22203

Phone: (703) 841-2069
Cell: (703) 201-4051
Fax: (703) 841-1283
E-mail: jwiens@tnc.org

Brief Biography

John Wiens grew up in Oklahoma as an avid birdwatcher. Following degrees from the University of Oklahoma and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (M.S., Ph.D.), he joined the faculty of Oregon State University and, subsequently, the University of New Mexico and Colorado State University, where he was a University Distinguished Professor. His work, which has emphasized landscape ecology and the ecology of birds and insects in arid environments, has led to over 200 scientific papers and 7 books.

John left academia in 2002 to join The Nature Conservancy as a Lead Scientist, with the challenge of putting years of classroom teaching and academic research into conservation practice in the real world. His current scientific work at TNC addresses the critical issue of conservation in a rapidly changing world – “conservation futures.” Most conservation aims to protect and maintain the places that plants and animals need in order to persist and flourish. But these places and the surrounding environments are undergoing extraordinary changes. Climate change, economic globalization, changing land use, and increasing demands on natural ecosystems to provide goods and services are changing the ways in which people relate to nature, and conservation must adapt to this changing context.

1.) John is working with TNC’s climate-change staff to develop the information and guidance that managers and field staff can use to assess the likelihood that the places they care about will change with climate changes and how management practices can help to mitigate or adjust to the changes.

2.) John is also leading a project to evaluate how land uses can affect the value of protected areas and landscapes for biodiversity protection and decisions about how to manage or invest in such places. People live and work in these landscapes, so we must develop science-based ways of evaluating the compatibility of various activities with our conservation goals – what, exactly, are the tradeoffs between, say, grazing or timber extraction or the recreational use of landscapes and the value of such landscapes to harbor biodiversity?

In addition to helping leadership and other senior scientists recognize emerging scientific issues and challenges, one of John’s crucial responsibilities is catalyzing, coordinating, and leading external scientific collaborations with federal agencies, other NGO’s, and multinational institutions. As TNC science becomes more global and seeks broader impact, peer review becomes ever more important, and John is also responsible for facilitating internal scientific peer reviews of major projects, products, and publications in TNC.

To contact John Wiens, try jwiens@tnc.org; when he is out of the office, Nancy Kelley (nancy_kelley@tnc.org) can generally track him down.

Recent publications include:

Wiens, J.A. 2007. The dangers of conservation as black-and-white. Conservation Biology, in press.

Wiens, J.A., M.G. Anderson, and T. Boucher. 2007. Land cover and conservation: From protected areas to landscapes. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, in press.

Walter, T., M. Dosskey, M. Khanna, J. Miller, M. Tomer, and J. Wiens. 2007. The science of targeting within landscapes and watersheds to improve conservation effectiveness. Soil and Water Conservation Society, in press.

Wiens, J.A. 2007. Does conservation need landscape ecology? In Managing and Designing Landscapes for Conservation: Moving from Perspectives to Principles (D. Lindenmayer and R. Hobbs, eds.). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, in press.

Wiens, J.A., M.R. Moss, M.G. Turner, and D.J. Mladenoff (eds.). 2007. Foundation Papers in Landscape Ecology. New York: Columbia University Press. 582 pp.

Wiens, J.A. 2006. Connectivity research: What are the issues? Pp. 23-27 in Connectivity Conservation (K. Crooks and M.A. Sanjayan, eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Groffman, P.M., J.S. Baron, T. Blett, A.J. Gold, I. Goodman, L.H. Gunderson, B.M. Levinson, M.A. Palmer, H.W. Paerl, G.D. Peterson, N.L. Poff, D.W. Rejeski, J.F. Reynolds, M.G. Turner, K.C. Weathers, and J.A. Wiens. 2006. Ecological thresholds: The key to successful environmental management or an important concept with no practical application? Ecosystems 9: 1-13.

Parker, K.R., and J.A. Wiens. 2005. Assessing environmental accidents: environmental variation, ecological assumptions, and strategies. Ecological Applications 15: 2037-2051.

Scott, J.M., D.D. Goble, J.A. Wiens, D.S. Wilcove, M. Bean, and T. Male. 2005. Recovery of imperiled species under the Endangered Species Act: the need for a new approach. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 3: 383-389.

Wiens, J., and M. Moss (Eds.). 2005. Issues and Perspectives in Landscape Ecology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 390 pp.

Bestelmeyer, B.T., J.R. Miller, and J.A. Wiens. 2003. Applying species diversity theory to land management. Ecological Applications 13:1750-1761.

Wiens, J.A., B. Van Horne, and B.R. Noon. 2002. Integrating landscape structure and scale into natural resource management. Pp. 23-67 In Integrating Landscape Ecology into Natural Resource Management. (J. Liu and W.W. Taylor, Eds.). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.