TL;DR: Worst class I’ve ever took. Professor doesn't lecture on tested topics and is virtually unreachable outside of class.

Dr. Schindlinger might be the worst professor I've had at UCLA. The only reason I did well is because it was online, students were allowed to collaborate, and there was no curve.
Dr. Schindlinger almost never responds to his email. If you do happen to get a response, consider yourself lucky. This was frustrating during COVID because we had no other ways to ask him questions outside of lecture time.
Class attendance was mandatory. We got a zoom message from one of the TAs at the end of the class with a code we had to input into a google sheet. If you had a time conflict, internet went out, lived in a different time zone, etc., you were out of luck.
For homework every week, we were given an assigned reading that we had to write a 1 page summary plus questions and answers (took about 2-4 hours). Two weeks of the quarter, you had to do a presentation with your discussion group about the article.
Weekly quizzes would be about assigned readings. Usually, this would be ~2 chapters from the textbook and a couple of "related articles.” In lecture, he would use the textbook company's slideshows to lecture, so we basically got a bad summary of what we had to do for homework. He would also not connect the related articles to the textbook chapters, so they felt like they didn't really connect even though they were supposed to. We'd then have a quiz about the topics we were supposed to do for homework. On a 5 question quiz, 2-3 would be about the related articles that were never talked about, so you just had to do your best. The remaining questions would be on information that was normally not covered during his lectures, making lectures feel like a waste of time.
The midterm and final were both composed of 5 short answer/essay questions that we got a week to complete. The questions were often worded poorly or were overwhelmingly vague, so students didn't know what he was trying to ask. Some questions would be about material that was never talked about in lecture or assigned for homework. We had a math question on the midterm after learning no math during the class (wasn't information I had learned in other classes). The professor and TAs wouldn't answer questions because it was a midterm question so students just had to guess.
After all of these issues, he never submitted final grades, so every student received an NR in the grade book.

TAKE THIS WITH A DIFFERENT PROFESSOR!
Due to the online format, the only way to reach him was by email, but it seems like he never reads his emails because he never responded to any of the emails sent by people in my class. The only way to reach him was to email the TA, then they would relay the message to him. We had two take-home tests that we were allowed to collaborate on but they were so poorly written that we had to ask several times for clarification. There are also timed weekly quizzes based on lecture material and the articles he gives us to read.

Amazing professor! He is very kind. This class was very fun, and he deserves better reviews.

I agree with the other review about this class. Dr. Schindlinger is a very nice person, just not as great of a lecturer since he speaks so slowly and some of his lectures weren't applicable to the exams so it kind of felt like a waste of time to go to synchronous lecture. Watching his recorded lectures at 3x speed was much more productive imo.

Conservation biology in general is a very interesting class, but it's moreso what you put into it. You learn more from the textbook than you do from the professor. Evan's a great TA, but assigned a LOT of papers for discussion (like 100+ pages a week... skimming them to get the gist is fine, though).

Just do the textbook readings and show some sign of life during discussion for participation and you'll do great. Grading was super lenient.

Overall this class was pretty decent. Professor Schindlinger is a nice man at heart, and really does try to interact with the people who do go to lecture. However, his lectures were very hard to watch as he talks kind of slow, reads from the slides, and has a lot of pauses. For this reason I think a lot of the students (including myself) did not go to lecture and chose to watch them after the fact where you could speed up his talking a little bit. The TA Evan was pretty cool and would try to make discussion sections worthwhile. I do feel a little bad for Evan because nobody turned their camera on and only a few people would talk, but he still had good interaction with some of the students. The class had 3 midterms that were in the form of essay questions (we had to select 4 questions from a list and answer them in up to 400 words) woth 100 points each and 150 points for discussion which came from reading articles that Evan assigned and writing 4 questions about them to discuss in class. Evan and the professor were really lenient graders on the midterms and discussion assignments, so as long as you kept up with lectures you were pretty solid. The midterms did require you to know quite a bit from the assigned readings in the textbook and from some of the articles we would read for discussion, so I would recommend staying on top of those to succeed in the class.