How to Write a Conservation Biology Cover Letter (With Template)

The order matters. The EIC and the regional editor are scanning for editorial signal density. A letter that names the conservation question, the finding, the relevance, and the article type in that sequence is easier to read and easier to route.

Two sentences are load-bearing and should appear close to verbatim, because the SCB/Wiley editorial office checks for them during the initial file screen.

The non-duplication declaration:

This manuscript is original, has not been published previously, and is not under consideration for publication elsewhere.

The all-authors-approved line:

All authors have read and approved the final version of the manuscript and agree to its submission to Conservation Biology.

Per SCB and Wiley policy, if any manuscript data, figures, or text are already published, in press, submitted, or soon to be submitted elsewhere, you must describe that overlap in the cover letter. This is not optional, and the editorial office reads it as a transparency signal during the first pass.

Weak opening, avoid this: "We investigated the conservation status of species X in region Y using field surveys and modeling."

Strong opening, use this shape instead, shown below.

Why the weak version fails: no real conservation question, no claim, no consequence, and no reason the work belongs in a global conservation-biology flagship rather than a regional venue.

Stronger opening:

"Whether protected-area expansion actually reduces extinction risk for range-restricted species, or only shifts threat in space, has remained unresolved despite two decades of coverage targets. Here we show that expansion reduces modeled extinction risk only when it overlaps climate-refugial habitat, a result that reframes how conservation-biology planning should weight area against placement."

Why it works: the unresolved conservation issue is clear, the finding is concrete, the consequence is decision-relevant, and the regional editor can already see this is conservation biology with relevance beyond one country.

Conservation Biology publishes several article types, and naming the right one in the cover letter is how you keep your manuscript from being routed as the wrong thing.

*Source: Conservation Biology Author Guidelines, Author Style Guide PDF, accessed June 2026.

The most common routing mistake we see is a Practice and Policy paper submitted as a Contributed Paper, or the reverse. If your study tests a hypothesis with data, it is a Contributed Paper. If it reports an applied finding for management, planning, or implementation, it is Practice and Policy. The cover letter is where you make the case if the line is genuinely ambiguous, and the Registered Report path is worth naming explicitly because it carries an in-principle-acceptance commitment most conservation journals do not offer.

Conservation Biology's ScholarOne portal collects most declarations as submission-form fields, so not everything has to live in the cover letter body. But the cover letter is the right place for routing context the fields cannot capture.

• Suggested reviewers. Suggest 3 to 5 reviewers who understand the conservation question and the methods. Avoid recent collaborators, co-authors, institutional colleagues, and anyone with an obvious conflict.

• Excluded reviewers. List anyone you want excluded with a brief, neutral reason. The handling editor is not obligated to honor exclusions, but a credible reason helps.

• Preprint disclosure. If the manuscript is posted on a preprint server, disclose it and link the deposit in the cover letter.

Conservation Biology allows preprints, and disclosing the link up front avoids a flag during the editorial-office file screen.

• Competing interests. State competing interests in the manuscript and flag any in the cover letter that a reasonable person could read as influencing objectivity.

If none exist, say so explicitly.

• Data availability. Provide a data availability statement with a repository link in the manuscript; the cover letter can note where deposited data live.

• Group authorship and diversity policy. If you use group authorship rather than individual names, justify it in the cover letter. If adherence to the journal's diversity policy is not obvious from author affiliations, note that here too.

A clean declaration package reinforces the impression that the manuscript was prepared carefully at every step, which is exactly the signal a three-tier editorial review rewards. Before you submit, a Conservation Biology declarations and scope check can flag whether the cover letter, abstract, and declarations point at the same claim.

When we read a Conservation Biology cover letter the way the editorial tiers do, we are not asking whether the prose is polished. Conservation Biology editors screen first for one routing question: is this a scientific contribution to conservation biology, or is it conservation practice, local wildlife management, or policy advocacy wearing a research jacket? The Editor-in-Chief makes that call in the first pass, and the regional editor confirms it before nominating reviewers.

A letter that buries the conservation-biology contribution under method description forces the editor to reconstruct the claim, and a manuscript that has to be reconstructed is competing at a disadvantage against submissions that state their case in the first paragraph.

In our pre-submission review work with Conservation Biology submissions, four cover-letter failure patterns predict desk rejection or mis-routing before the regional editor nominates a single reviewer. These are drawn from the roughly 100 manuscripts the Manusights team reviewed across Conservation Biology and adjacent SCB-family venues, and each maps to a specific manuscript component you can check against your own draft.

The regional-relevance gap in the conservation-implications framing. The single most common pattern we flag in Conservation Biology cover letters is a finding that is scientifically sound but framed as if it matters only to one taxon, one protected area, or one country. The regional editor handles papers within a geographic or topical area, but the editorial bar is whether the contribution informs conservation biology globally.

When the conservation-implications paragraph names only the local management agency that asked the question, the letter reads as a case study, and case studies without broader relevance get routed toward Conservation Letters or Conservation Science and Practice. The fix is one sentence in the cover letter that connects the local result to a transferable conservation-biology principle.

The conservation-biology versus conservation-practice misclassification. We repeatedly see manuscripts whose cover letter and abstract describe an applied management outcome while the methods and study design are hypothesis-testing science, or the reverse. Because the regional editor routes on article type, this mismatch sends a Contributed Paper into the Practice and Policy lane or sends a policy piece into a research-reviewer pool that will judge it by the wrong standard.

The cover letter is where this gets fixed: name the article type, and make the study-design language in the letter match it. If the methods test a hypothesis with data, the letter should not lead with implementation.

The abstract-in-disguise letter. A large share of the Conservation Biology cover letters we review are restructured abstracts. They list the field sites, the sample size, and the statistical analysis, then stop. The EIC's question is not "what did you do?" It is "why should this be reviewed as conservation biology?" A letter that recites the methods and the results without an explicit conservation-relevance argument answers the wrong question, and at a journal with two editorial reads before review, that wasted opening costs you twice.

The missing or buried prior-publication disclosure. SCB and Wiley policy requires the cover letter to describe any data, figures, or text already published, in press, or submitted elsewhere. We frequently find this disclosure missing entirely, or buried in a methods footnote where the editorial office screen will not credit it. Overlapping data with a preprint, a thesis chapter, or a companion paper is usually fine when disclosed and almost always a problem when discovered later.

The cover letter is the correct location, and the disclosure should be specific about which figure, dataset, or section overlaps. A letter that handles this cleanly signals exactly the reporting discipline a three-tier review rewards.

These patterns are fixable before submission. The common thread is that each one is a mismatch between what the cover letter claims and what the manuscript components (the conservation-implications framing, the study design, the methods, the figures, the prior-work disclosure) actually support. A Conservation Biology scope and routing check evaluates that alignment before the EIC and regional editor do.

The recurring failure is not bad English. It is weak editorial judgment.

Mistake 1: Writing an abstract with a different heading. If the letter mainly repeats methods and results without an explicit conservation-biology relevance case, it is too close to the abstract.

Mistake 2: Hiding the claim behind cautious prose. Editors do not need hype, but they need a clear claim. "Our findings may potentially suggest" wastes the most valuable line in the letter.

Mistake 3: Confusing regional importance with conservation-biology relevance. A regionally specific result without transferable principle reads as a case study at this journal.

Mistake 4: Guessing the editor's name. Verify the current Editor-in-Chief on the journal's editorial-team page before quoting any name. The safe salutation is "Dear Editor-in-Chief" or "Dear Editors."

If you cannot write a convincing conservation-biology-relevance paragraph without it sounding like a regional case study, that is useful information. The paper may fit Conservation Science and Practice, Conservation Letters, or a regional venue better. The cover letter is diagnostically useful: it forces you to articulate whether the work has the conservation-biology breadth you are hoping to claim.