The world offers many niches for ecologists. Solving our planet's environmental challenges – both current and emerging – will require individuals who are trained in ecology and able to apply that information across geographic and temporal scales. Professionals are needed to integrate ecological science with various sectors, including business, transportation, engineering, agriculture, communication, and politics. The myriad and complex environmental challenges facing us are creating a variety of career opportunities for ecologists, but what will these opportunities look like and what will it take to be successful in developing such a career? Because many, if not most, of these career pathways will require training outside traditional academic paths, Frontiers is embarking on a series that will explore “non-traditional” (ie non-academic) ecological careers. We will examine a wide range of career options, ask what employers are looking for, and suggest how students can best prepare themselves for these roles. The primary target audience of this series includes students and early-career ecologists, and those with whom they interact (professors, mentors, current employers, and prospective employers, among others). By highlighting the relevant knowledge, experience, and skills to better align their career goals with existing and emerging opportunities, we intend to focus on how students and those in the early-career stages can get a job that connects their passion and talents with a position that serves society and helps preserve the natural world. Historically, graduate students have interacted closely with ecologists whose primary mission is to focus on research and teaching, leading toward an academic career (Janzen 1982; Shaw et al. 2015). Although demand for jobs in academia has long outstripped supply, students often come to assume they will be pursuing jobs in colleges and universities (McCormick 1975; Schillebeeckx et al. 2013). However, for many aspiring ecologists, positions outside academia do not represent a fallback option. In fact, many enter graduate school or professional training with a view toward embarking on a career in which they can apply ecological knowledge to solve real-world environmental and societal problems outside of the ivory tower. Today, ecological careers, especially those outside academia, depend upon a variety of skills and new bases of knowledge that often intersect with policy, community well-being, and human health. For many career paths, prerequisites include acquiring skills that allow the job seeker to cross disciplinary lines; to utilize economics, engineering, political science, and sociology; and to communicate ecological science to an increasingly diverse array of communities and stakeholders. For example, helping the public understand and respond to ecological issues requires an ability to interpret and discuss spatial and temporal patterns. Doing so necessitates training in statistical analysis (Touchon and McCoy 2016), coupled with an understanding of how to deal with uncertainty in making ecological predictions (Brewer and Gross 2003), and the capacity to interact with diverse audiences at local or global levels. Similarly, ecologists are more frequently finding themselves navigating, analyzing, and developing policy, ranging from relatively straightforward municipal regulations to highly intricate international agreements. Ultimately, the flexibility and breadth of training required for environmental problem-solving requires that ecology students learn a whole suite of collaboration and communication skills to effectively address the interdisciplinarity of complex environmental issues (Moslemi et al. 2009). Educators need to broaden the curriculum and mentor students for this new context of team-based science, effective networking, and cross-cultural sensitivity while also incorporating ethics education into the process (Crozier and Schulte-Hostedde 2015). The Ecological Society of America (ESA) has been grappling with the issue of how to help broaden the perspectives of ecologists with regard to available career choices. An initial workshop for graduate students took place at the ESA's annual meeting in 2000 (Kreeger 2000). Since then, especially in the past five years, ESA's efforts have greatly expanded to regularly include workshops and Ignite sessions at annual meetings, as well as the development of an Early Careers Section (Scholes et al. 2014). ESA's Office of Education and Diversity Programs has undertaken the Next Generation Careers–Innovation in Environmental Biology (NGC-IEP; www.esa.org/nextgencareers) project, funded by the US National Science Foundation, in collaboration with the Society for Conservation Biology. The project's primary goal is to coordinate efforts so that college faculty and career advisors become aware of the full range of opportunities to help students successfully embark on an environmental biology career. At the past two ESA annual meetings, a number of established ecologists shared their different career pathways at Ignite sessions (Klemow 2015; Cid et al. 2016). Those sessions, coupled with other discussions among ESA members and staff, led to the development of this new monthly series in Frontiers, for which this article provides an introduction. The series will offer an exploration of a wide variety of exciting careers in ecology. Our ultimate goal is to highlight the relevant knowledge, experience, and skills that can help to align students' career goals with different career possibilities. Most articles will focus on either a specific category of employer (non-governmental organizations, museums, field stations, federal government, state governments, corporations, pre-college educational institutions) or a job classification that might be found at one of multiple types of organizations (science writer, policy advisor). At least one article will address international dimensions of ecology careers while others will examine topics such as working with faith-based communities or citizen-science groups. Some articles will offer recommendations for administrators in higher education on how to engage faculty in mentoring students to acquire marketable skills for non-academic ecology careers. The lead author of each article has direct experience of the career they are describing. Co-authors in the series also have direct experience, either as practitioners or as advisors helping students to prepare for the jobs in question. Those who have selected non-academic ecology careers have often done so because of a desire to combine the joy of practicing science with solving environmental problems in communities at local to global scales (Figure 1). Sometimes these careers also provide greater flexibility in terms of work–life balance or more chances to engage diverse stakeholders in making well-informed environmental decisions. The articles in this series will show that an ecology career is “not a linear progression, with a beginning and an end, but rather a river gathering all of life's valuable tributaries of experiences as it flows to the sea” (Swain [in press]). A career in ecology requires talents in networking and skills in communication for effective outreach and engagement. The authors also stress the need for faculty to help impart this broader set of skills to all ecology students, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, regardless of career goals. A lesson in rangeland monitoring, using a mobile phone app developed by USDA–USAID on a rooftop convention center at the UNCCD Conference of the Parties (COP 12) in Ankara, Turkey, in October 2015. HH Ægisdóttir We have invited the authors to supplement their article with videos, podcasts, blogs, and other media, to be posted on ESA's Facebook page and blog, Ecotone. All the papers will be linked to the new online ESA Careers Center, so that, once published, the whole collection can serve as a valuable one-stop resource for those interested in seeing the series as an integrated whole. We welcome additional submissions from readers for potential consideration – please address presubmission inquiries to the Editor in Chief, at suesilver@esa.org. Ultimately, the goal of this series is to demonstrate that the world really does offer a broad array of employment options for ecologists. It will do so by presenting concrete examples of ways to connect a student's interest in ecology with jobs that help to solve today's environmental problems. Please note: The publisher is not responsible for the content or functionality of any supporting information supplied by the authors. Any queries (other than missing content) should be directed to the corresponding author for the article. Kenneth Klemow Department of Biology, Wilkes University, Wilkes-Barre, PA (kenneth.klemow@wilkes.edu) Gillian Bowser Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO Carmen Cid School of Arts and Sciences Eastern Connecticut State University, Willimantic, CT George Middendorf Department of Biology, Howard University, Washington, DC Teresa Mourad Ecological Society of America, Washington, DC Jeffrey Herrick USDA-ARS Jornada Research Unit at NMSU, Las Cruces, NM