TY - JOUR T1 - Precision conservation professional JF - Journal of Soil and Water Conservation SP - 134A VL - 60 IS - 6 AU - Craig A. Cox Y1 - 2005/11/01 UR - http://www.jswconline.org/content/60/6/134A.abstract N2 - Getting the right practices, in the right places, at the right time, and at the right scale is what makes conservation effective. And making conservation effective is the main justification for investing in a conservation profession. If it didn't matter where, when, and how conservation happens, we wouldn't need a conservation profession. But it does matter because soils, landscapes, hydrology, people, weather, and objectives aren't the same everywhere. Fitting conservation into this variable physical, biological, and social landscape is what professional conservation is all about. The special section of this issue of the Journal takes a look at emerging tools and approaches that promise to help us do a better job getting the right practices, in the right place, at the right time and at the right scale. Precision conservation uses a set of spatial technologies—some currently applied in precision agriculture—to “implement conservation management practices that take into account spatial and temporal variability across natural and agricultural systems.” Most of the papers in the special section illustrate the promise of the precision conservation at the field level. At the field scale, precision conservation can mean precisely managing soil … ER -