Biodiversity Revisited early career essay competition winners

Biodiversity Revisited is the first comprehensive review of the concepts, narratives, governance, science, systems and futures underpinning biodiversity science since the emergence of the term in the 1980s. As part of this review, we ran a competition in 2019 for early-career researchers and practitioners to share their thoughts on one of the six themes (or as a cross-cutting piece).

The eight winners of this competition were:

• Madhurya Balan, collaborator at The Forest Way and from India. Essay: Perceiving the livingscapes we are within
• Natalie Knowles, PhD candidate at the University of Waterloo and from Canada. Essay: When is growth good enough? Asking Nature when to cut consumption
• Eszter Kovacs, Leverhulme Early Career Researcher at the University of Cambridge and from Hungary. Essay: Rethinking biodiversity before the law
• Anselmo Matusse, PhD Student in Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town and from Mozambique. Essay: The art of living in threatened worlds
• Noor A. Noor, MPhil student at the University of Cambridge and from Egypt. Essay title: Sex, drugs and biodiversity: embracing intersectionality within conservation
• Victoria Pilbeam, Senior Consultant at Clear Horizon Consulting and from Australia. Essay: Revisiting conservation through evaluative thinking: towards a more impactful theory of change
• Tlacaelel Rivera-Núñez, PhD Candidate at El Colegio de la Frontera Sur and from Mexico. Essay: “Writing over that which is already written: reconceiving biodiversity conservation in a second world according to the concept of ‘palimpsest’
• Santiago Izquierdo Tort, Senior Researcher at ITAM Centre for Energy and Natural Resources and from Mexico. Essay: Biodiversity revisited: bridging aspirations and conservation in research and practice

Each winner, selected by the Biodiversity Revisited Steering Committee, was invited to our inaugural Biodiversity Revisited Symposium that took place on 11-13 September 2019 in Vienna, Austria. The winners had the opportunity to share with other attendees the ideas and reflections expressed in their essays and contribute to Symposium discussions.

The judges were:

• Prof Georgina Mace, Professor of Biodiversity and Ecosystems. Genetics, Evolution & Environment. Div. of Biosciences, UCL
• Dr John Garcia-Ulloa, Senior Scientist. Ecosystem Management Group, ETH Zürich
• Dr Jasper Montana, Research Fellow in Human Geography. School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford
• Dr Chris Sandbrook, Senior Lecturer and Fellow. Department of Geography, University of Cambridge
• Prof Laurie Yung, Professor of Natural Resource Social Science. Department of Society & Conservation, University of Montana
• Dr Jensen Montamboult, Director, Science for Nature and People Partnership. The Nature Conservancy

Of the 149 essays we received, 136 met our ‘early career’ qualification criteria. Participants came from 46 countries and we received an even split of applications from males and females. Approximately half of the authors were young professionals (e.g. practitioners or academics), with the other half being postgraduate students. Just over half of the submissions were cross-cutting pieces, the remainder focussed on one of the initiative's six themes.