David Towns did his MSc and PhD at the University of Auckland. After six years overseas at universities in the USA and Australia, he returned to New Zealand in 1982 to work with the New Zealand Wildlife Service as a conservation scientist. In 1987 the Wildlife Service became part of the newly formed Department of Conservation (DOC). He stayed with DOC until 2012, when he began a shared appointment between DOC and Auckland University of Technology (AUT), teaching conservation there as a Professor of Applied Conservation. David won the Charles Fleming Award for Environmental Achievement from the Royal Society Te Aparangi for his pioneering research in conservation and island ecosystem ecology in 2019. David retired from AUT as Professor Emeritus in 2020, which gave him time to distil the key messages from a lifetime's conservation experience into this book. He lives in Auckland.