Let’s be honest. Most of us working in conservation science got into it because we wanted to save something. We envisioned our research ultimately protecting a fragile ecosystem or an endangered species from the numerous threats thrown at them by humans. Looking at the current state of the United States, faced with climate impacts and collapsing ecosystems, and the relentless political onslaught against environmental protections, there really isn’t time to lose. We need conservation science, and we need it right now.
But if you are a budding graduate student hoping to dedicate your career to keeping species from slipping into extinction, the National Science Foundation (NSF) just pulled the rug out from under you, and they did it in the most unceremonious, bureaucratic way possible.
In the newly dropped fellowship solicitation (NSF GRFP Solicitation 26-526), a brutal new sentence has been quietly slipped into the eligibility criteria. It explicitly states that:
“research on conservation practice or implementation, wildlife and/or natural resource management, planning or decision support (e.g., habitat restoration, species recovery actions, management interventions) is not eligible for support.”
This is a career killer for young conservation scientists.
If your proposed doctoral research involves developing a decision-support tool for habitat restoration, evaluating a species recovery action, or figuring out which management interventions will actually stop an ecosystem from collapsing, you are officially locked out of funding. Try to submit anyway? Your application will be immediately “Returned Without Review”. Unless you are in the enviable position of having enough money to personally fund your research and your living expenses, your career as a conservation scientist is over.
A dramatic, dark change in policy
Historically, the NSF has had the role of funding fundamental, basic science in the US. But it has also been emphatic that science projects should have broader impacts in terms of educating, and promoting the well-being of citizens and the US landscape (and seascape). This exclusion is being spun as allowing NSF grant-giving to focus on basic science, while Government agencies such as US Fish and Wildlife can fund conservation-oriented applied research. That would be fine if funds were given to the Fish and Wildlife Service specifically to fund conservation research and to support graduate students, but it isn’t. This is a blatant cut in funding aimed at crippling the conservation science community.
A disaster for the next generation
The implications of this rule change for the future of conservation in the United States are deeply troubling.
First of all, it creates an immediate brain drain. The NSF graduate fellowship funding program (GRFP) is the premier early-career science fellowship in the country. It provides three years of financial support, liberating the brightest young minds from teaching assistantships so they can focus entirely on research. NSF is actively disincentivizing young scientists from tackling our most pressing environmental crises.
Secondly, it exacerbates an ongoing equity issue. Stripping away conservation funding further narrows the path for students who want to do community-engaged, boots-on-the-ground conservation work, a field that traditionally attracts a highly diverse cohort of passionate scientists. We are effectively telling the next generation that if they want to do science that matters and keep endangered species alive, they aren’t welcome in the nation’s premier pipeline for scientific excellence.
It will have a knock-on effect for leading conservation programs at universities too. By explicitly banning applied conservation from the GRFP, the NSF is forcing a top-down realignment at research universities, where faculty are already under intense institutional pressure to secure major federal funding (as the much-vaunted R1 research status is based on how much federal funding a university can attract). Because R1s rely on these prestigious fellowships as a metric of institutional success and a source of tuition relief, university administrators will inevitably push their graduate cohorts away from conservation-related research and toward more fundable “basic” sciences.
Finally, it leaves US conservation defenseless. Between legislative efforts to weaken the Endangered Species Act and the chronic underfunding of federal wildlife agencies, academic institutions and independent research are supposed to be the backstop when it comes to conservation science. We rely on university labs to provide the objective, independent science required to challenge flawed policy and guide habitat recovery. By choking off graduate funding for conservation, the NSF is actively hamstringing the very workforce we need to navigate the coming decades, as the impacts of climate change and the biodiversity crisis increase.
So, what can you do?
Where does this leave the next generation of conservation leaders? For faculty advisors and current applicants, unfortunately you are going to have to engage in a high level of obfuscation in your grant writing. If you want NSF money to fund your graduate education, you have to learn the art of linguistic camouflage. You can’t be trying to “save a coral reef”; you must be “investigating the mechanistic physiological responses of calcifying cnidarians to thermal anomalies.” You aren’t “evaluating a wildlife management intervention”; you are “testing fundamental population dynamic models under shifting environmental stochasticity.” Use terms that are unlikely to alert the AI filters that are scanning applications, like terminator robots targeting conservation-oriented proposals.
This new rule is a blatant attempt by the Trump Administration to hobble the conservation community, at a time when American ecosystems are facing unprecedented stress. To help save US wildlife and ecosystems, what we need now is for celebrities and philanthropists who have been talking about how important conservation and saving endangered species are, to put their money where their mouth is and to start endowing grants and scholarships, before the Trump Administration gets the chance to totally kill off career opportunities for the next generation of conservation scientists.
