This course teaches students about cutting edge, controversial and current topics in Conservation Biology. We will focus on big-picture, global-scale topics such as climate change, habitat loss, and the biodiversity crisis. Case studies span marine, terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, and explore human dimensions to conservation such as management, sustainability and stewardship. There will be a particular emphasis on coastal and marine issues because of the local importance of those issues. Labs in this course will introduce students to open-source conservation datasets, how they are used in conservation biology, and how to conduct basic analyses of these data in R.