Conservation Biology Workflow Router (conbio-workflow)

The orchestrator for a Conservation Biology submission. Figure out the stage and the article type, then send the user to the matching skill. Conservation Biology is the flagship journal of the Society for Conservation Biology — the router's first job is to make sure the work has direct, transferable implications for the conservation of biological diversity, not just a clean result.

When to trigger

• Starting a new Conservation Biology paper and unsure where to begin
• Mid-project and unsure which skill applies next
• Deciding which article type fits the work
• Returning with a decision letter (route to conbio-revision-and-rebuttal)

First question: which article type?

Use the live Instructions for Authors page for upload-week per-type limits and article-type availability (see resources/official-source-map.md).

Routing map (stage → skill)

Idea / conservation fit?         → conbio-topic-selection
Where does it sit in the field?  → conbio-literature-positioning
Is the design sound?             → conbio-study-design
Are the analyses appropriate?    → conbio-data-analysis
Are the exhibits clear?          → conbio-figures-and-tables
Data + code archived?            → conbio-reporting-and-data-policy
Does it read accessibly?         → conbio-writing-style
Are the implications actionable? → conbio-conservation-relevance-and-implications
How will it be judged?           → conbio-review-process
Ready to submit?                 → conbio-submission
Got a decision / R&R?            → conbio-revision-and-rebuttal

Default order

topic-selection → literature-positioning → study-design → data-analysis → figures-and-tables → reporting-and-data-policy → writing-style → conservation-relevance-and-implications → review-process → submission → revision-and-rebuttal

Iterate: most papers loop design ↔ analysis ↔ relevance several times before writing-style.

Disambiguating the article type (common confusions)

The first question decides the whole route, so resolve these edge cases before dispatching:

• Contributed Paper vs. Research Note — if the study answers one focused question or reports a preliminary result, route to Note and hold its scope tight; do not pad it toward the ~7,000-word Contributed-Paper benchmark just to look complete.
• Contributed Paper vs. Essay — if the contribution is a forward-looking argument grounded in existing evidence rather than a new dataset, it is an Essay; send it to conbio-conservation-relevance-and-implications to sharpen the thesis.
• Contributed Paper vs. Conservation Practice and Policy — an applied tool, management lesson, or policy analysis fits Practice and Policy; lead with conbio-study-design plus relevance.
• Review vs. everything else — only route to Review when the literature is well-developed enough to synthesize; a thin literature is an Essay or an empirical paper, not a Review.

Registered Reports (where offered) must be chosen while the design is still prospective — route to conbio-review-process early so Stage 1 can be submitted before data exist.

Reading the iteration loops

The default order is a spine, not a straight line. Two loops recur and the router should expect them:

• Design ↔ analysis ↔ relevance — if the analysis cannot support an actionable so-what, loop back to conbio-study-design before writing, not after a reviewer flags it.
• Relevance ↔ topic-selection — if the actionability sentence will not complete honestly, the fit problem is upstream; re-open conbio-topic-selection rather than over-claiming in the Discussion.

Only advance to conbio-writing-style once these loops have converged; polishing prose around an unresolved fit problem wastes the pass.

Anti-patterns

• Treating a sound-but-inconsequential study as publishable — the journal demands conservation relevance
• Forcing every study into one statistical template (match design to the ecological question)
• Padding a Research Note into a Contributed Paper, or vice versa
• Polishing writing-style before the design ↔ relevance loop has converged
• Leaving the data/code archive until acceptance instead of building it as you go

Router pass for Conservation Biology

Treat this skill as an executable review pass, not a prose hint. First lock the species/system threat, conservation decision, and uncertainty relevant to action; then judge whether the current manuscript answers the venue's real reader: conservation-science reviewers who ask whether evidence changes biodiversity, management, or policy action.

• Do the pass: Run the pack as a sequence: fit gate, evidence gate, writing gate, source-map gate, and final output contract; stop when a gate lacks evidence.
• Return a ledger: give claim / evidence / risk / manuscript location rows, so the next agent can edit rather than rediscover the issue.
• Sibling guard: compare against Biological Conservation for applied conservation breadth, Global Change Biology for climate/ecosystem process, Ecology Letters for theory-forward ecology; if a sibling owns the contribution, recommend re-routing before polishing format.
• Submission-ready gate: do not give final advice until the pack's resources/official-source-map.md has been checked for upload-week rules and the manuscript has one concrete fix for the largest venue-specific risk.

Output format

【Stage】idea / positioning / design / analysis / exhibits / data-policy / writing / relevance / review / submit / revise
【Article type】Contributed Paper / Research Note / Review / Essay / Practice & Policy / Comment
【Route to】conbio-<skill>
【Why】one line
【Then】the next skill after that

Supplementary resources

• ../../resources/external_tools.md — conservation data + software by method
• ../../resources/official-source-map.md — official Conservation Biology URLs behind every fact in this pack