Conservation Science

Becky Cushing, Mass Audubon’s Berkshire Sanctuaries director, is soaring. She is supervising six properties, hosting bird walks and organizing concerts with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. She says of her new home, "I feel like the Berkshires has all these hidden places to explore that make you feel like the first person to have found them."

For decades, California Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia has been trying to clean up the air in polluted neighborhoods — first as an activist, then as a legislator. Recently, she celebrated her most significant victory: Governor Jerry Brown needed her help to extend California’s cap-and-trade program. In return for her support, she got the legislature to pay attention to not just greenhouse gases, but all the accompanying nasty that pours out of smokestacks. The result: California’s most significant air-pollution law in years.

Living on the edge of urban sprawl in Los Angeles inevitably means dealing with the wild creatures who have lived here for thousands of years before homes were built, including rodents. But using anticoagulant rodenticide to control the rat and mouse population around homes can expose pets and local wildlife to this deadly poison, writes Fellow Nancy Steele.

The health of dolphin populations worldwide depends on sustained access to robust food sources. A new report by UC Santa Barbara researchers and colleagues at UC San Diego and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration looks at three different dolphin species, studying what they eat and how they divide ocean resources and space — important information for conservation and management. The team’s findings appear in the journal PLOS ONE.

North Carolina State University researchers have received funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop and test a system that would reduce populations of invasive mice on islands to help conserve threatened seabird populations. ... The project will also delve into community engagement and education efforts on gene drive systems, with NC State’s Jason Delborne, an associate professor of forestry and environmental resources, leading that effort.

Rather than conduct an aquatic roll call with nets to know which fish reside in a particular body of water, scientists can now use DNA fragments suspended in water to catalog invasive or native species. The research from Cornell, the University of Notre Dame and Hawaii Pacific University was published July 14 in Methods in Ecology and Evolution. Read more