Paul Beier gave the keynote this morning and talked about his work in southern California working on connectivity issues for wildlife (originally and mostly mountain lions / cougars / pumas / catamounts). He spoke, of course, about the importance of maintaining connectivity among wildlands — none of the mountain ranges in the Los Angeles area are big enough on their own to sustain mountain lion populations — and the utility of involving key stakeholders, etc. But the most important thing, to me, was his final slide. He showed a picture where four highways, a railroad, the California aqueduct, and high-voltage power lines all crossed, and then pointed out that above them all stood a key wildlife corridor. He indirectly suggested that in highly-disturbed environments we push for “greenness” to be considered an element of our infrastructure. This is the sort of mental jui-jitsu that can succeed in pulling in important governmental agencies in working towards and responsible for conservation. Convincing Caltrans (which Beier’s done!) to participate in conservation programs is a brilliant way of increasing the number of stakeholders.

• BirdLife International has proposed a classification of conservation terms to create a common language among scientists. This was first published in the August issue of Conservation Biology. The IUCN has signed on to use the lexicon in its Species Information System, and it looks like (judging by the authors) WCS, WFF, ZSL, NatureServe and probably a host of other NGOs have agreed to try it out — well, with WCS, at least a subset of their scientists will…
• Who’s psyched for the Society of Conservation Geographic Information Systems (SCGIS) annual meeting?! I’ll be there tomorrow and Thursday, hopefully live-blogging up a storm.