Systematics is the science of diversity, and if we are concerned about the loss of diversity one might think that it would be a major contributor to the theory and practice of conservation biology. After all, before you can conserve anything, you have to be able to identify what it is you intend to conserve. The U.S. Endangered Species Act (http://endangered.fws.gov/esa.html) specifies, for example, that
§3.D.15 The term ``species'' includes any subspecies of fish or wildlife or plants, and any distinct population segment of any species or vertebrate fish or wildlife which interbreeds when mature.We've already seen some important ways that ecology and genetics contribute to conservation biology, and we'll see many more through the remainder of this course. But we won't see as many contributions from systematics. In fact, we won't say a whole lot about systematics after this lecture and the case study that follows next time.
Nonetheless, systematics plays an important role, and there are some important ways in which it should contribute more in the future. Soltis and Gitzendanner [11] identify four of them.