Ask Kathleen Flower what drives her work in biodiversity science and she'll tell you about people: a village of 500 in rural Cameroon where residents saw large volumes of timber leaving their surrounding forest each day or women on the South African coast harvesting mussels. Today, as Conservation International’s biodiversity science lead, Flower brings that same perspective to some of the biggest questions in conservation — how to measure what we're losing, how to protect it through a changing climate and how conservation science can evolve to address increasingly complex environmental challenges. She spoke with Conservation News about a career spent at the intersection of biodiversity and the people who depend on it. Your career has taken you all over the world — let’s start at the beginning. KF: I grew up loving science and knowing I wanted to explore the world. I got my first chance in college, while studying abroad as a biology major at the University of Ghana.…