Norman Moore in his classic textbook Moore (1987) put forward some very important viewpoints

about his view of the future status of conservation declaring “conservation was both a subject and an
aim” and thereafter that “it provided one of the most potent political ideas since Marxism, and that it
is an idea that will tend to untie rather than divide mankind, but that time has not yet come”. Implicit
in this was the obvious issue that conservation was a science in its own right but that to implement
any action required the co-operation of a series of stakeholders, including politicians, policy-makers
and the general public. Well assuming this is the case how do vegetation scientists fare in bridging the
gap between applied vegetation science and those who implement our findings. One of the crucial
differences between vegetation scientists and the other two disciplines of applied biology (agriculture
and medicine) is that we tend to think in terms of multivariate objectives as mostly we deal with plant
communities, whereas in agriculture the objectives are usually mono-specific. Here I will outline three
areas where I think vegetation science could, and perhaps should, provide a greater contribution (1)
Involvement in the evidence base, (2) Translating science into practice, and (3) the Future importance
of vegetation science in biodiversity offsetting.(Perth 2014)