ABSTRACT
What types of information should guide societies in their efforts to conserve and restore biodiversity? Should certain time periods in the past serve as reference points? And if so, what should those benchmarks be? As importantly, what types of information and experiences infl uence or bias our perspectives with respect to biodiversity conservation? These are important questions with wholesale implications for biodiversity and humanity, yet they are rarely discussed and thus this volume is particularly timely. These questions and their answers will inherently involve ecology, evolutionary biology, and the social sciences-but human behavior and psychology will also heavily infl uence them.
