 Sarkar (2017) notes that ecological diversity indices were largely ignored in the early history of conservation biology. In contrast, Meine, Soule, and Noss. (2006) frequently used the term “diversity”, This perhaps reflected co-author Noss’s (1990) much-cited paper characterising biodiversity as including composition, structure, and function, which echoes the range of “diversity” measures in ecology. The unlimited possibilities of such diversity measures may have contributed to the difficulty in finding agreement on a single definition of “biodiversity”. The conservation biology framing thus gains justification in embracing the prospect of “working-backwards”, with the challenge to define “biodiversity” to capture those aspects of biological/conservation normative value.