Coastal & Marine Conservation

By the mid-2000s, reality was hitting hard: The commercial seafood supply and distribution chain was all but broken. Overfishing had depleted fish stocks and, in turn, marine biodiversity. By and large, fish had become a commodity caught in one place, trucked to a processor in another and then sold to stores and restaurants.

Mercury is a potent neurotoxin that accumulates in food webs, posing a global threat to environmental health. Marine mammals are common sentinel species for studying marine pollution; however, their potential role as vectors of contaminants to local ecosystems has rarely been addressed. By quantifying the concentration and chemical form of mercury in seawater affected by Northern elephant seal (Mirounga angustirostris) colonization, we demonstrated here that marine mammal behavioral ecology can substantially influence nearshore mercury cycling.

Brenda Zollitsch recently completed her report, Status and Trends Report on State Wetland Programs in the United States, which provides a comprehensive look at how states are approaching each of the four core elements for state wetland programs, including state summary documents, comparative data analysis and maps, descriptive text on status and trends and documentation of potential models.

Jennifer O'Leary has been appointed an Honorary Warden of the Kenya Wildlife Service for her work there.

Countries are loosely interpreting the legal meaning of “rational use” of natural resources to escalate fishing efforts in Antarctic waters and hinder efforts to establish marine protected areas in the Southern Ocean, scientists and legal scholars say.

We are pleased to have in residence the recipients of the inaugural Future of Ice post-doctoral fellowships below.

As the management adage goes, "you can't manage what you can't measure." At Yale's Environmental Performance Index they are all about integrating data and indicators into environmental policy and decision-making. This summer, Ariana Spawn was fortunate to receive an on-the-ground lesson in how the United States government is putting this concept into practice for ocean and coastal management.

Black-footed and Laysan albatrosses are charismatic, long-lived, pelagic seabirds that are considered important indicators of North Pacific ecosystem health. New information indicated that the most recent official government status assessment for these species might have underestimated population threats and overestimated population health. Thus, the main purpose of our project was to re-assess the conservation status of these albatrosses and share our results with a broad group of stakeholders to ensure these species are adequately protected. We assembled an expert adviso

Marissa McMahan spent that notoriously warm summer of 2012 lobstering with her father out of Georgetown and encountered a different visitor, a large, stout gray-and-black fish she’d never seen before. The fish, which began turning up in lobster traps up and down the coast, was the black sea bass, a succulent mid-Atlantic species normally unable to tolerate Maine’s cold sea.