Earth is a beautiful place containing a wide variety of ecosystems and many different species. Unfortunately, there are many threats to biodiversity across the world, such as pollution, habitat destruction, and invasive species. This has encouraged conservationists to come up with solutions to prevent the extinction of species and to restore their habitats by cleaning up, fencing habitats, and removing invasive species. But species are not alone, they depend on interactions with other species for their survival. Such as predators hunting prey, insects pollinating flowers, birds dispersing seeds and fruits, conservation efforts do not always restore interactions between species. Some strategies actually end up conflicting with naturally occurring interactions. The loss of interactions can cause more species to go extinct. Some interactions do not restore themselves over time with general management efforts such as fencing and area, captive breeding of animals and plant and trees. These interactions may have specific requirements and need focused conservation efforts to be restored. It is not always clear if species that occur in the same area are still able to interact. We need to check if there are any disturbances to their interactions so that we can restore them. These disturbances may change over time in space. Ecosystems that have properly functioning interactions can become less dependent on continuation of management and are more likely to become self-sustaining, which is ultimately the goal of conservation efforts. We need conservation of species interactions to achieve self-sustaining ecosystems. Julia Heinin and colleagues from the Center for Micro Ecology, Evolution and Climate present a framework for this and their article. The article can be downloaded via the link or you can listen to the audio version.