Conservation Science

Fellow Sarah Reed argues for providing local communities in Colorado with the resources they need — including information about where important wildlife habitats are located, and planning tools and technical assistance to protect those habitats — to achieve a reasonable balance between conservation and development.

In the southern Pacific Ocean, off south-central Chile, is a wind-swept island with a mountain blanketed in old-growth forest. This mountain is inhabited by 70% of the world’s Pink-footed Shearwaters, a globally threatened seabird related to albatrosses. The island is called Isla Mocha (pronounced with a hard “ch”: Mo-cha), and is also home to around 600 Mochanos—residents who live in the plains below the mountain, harvesting shellfish and seaweed, grazing cattle and sheep, and fishing in the ferocious currents that roil around the island.

Oceanic manta rays–often thought to take epic migrations–might actually be homebodies, according to a new study. A Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego-led research team studied satellite-tracked manta rays to shed light on the lives of these mysterious ocean giants.

As the Arctic warms faster than any other place on the planet and sea ice declines, there is only one sure way to save polar bears from extinction, the government announced Monday: decisive action on climate change.

Ecosystems of California, a comprehensive reference on California's remarkable ecological abundance, has won double honors in the 2017 PROSE Awards, the publishing industry's top awards for professional and scholarly works.

Curtis Daelher coauthored the paper 'Selecting predictors to maximize the transferability of species distribution models: lessons from cross-continental plant invasions' in the March 2017 edition of Global Ecology & Biogeography. Read more

Australia has some 8,300 islands, many of them home to threatened species. But humans have introduced rodents and predators such as feral cats and foxes to many of these islands, devastating native wildlife and changing entire island ecosystems. Removing invasive mammals has proven to be a very effective tool for protecting island species, Fellows Chris Wilcox and Erin McCreless discovered.

A new National Science Foundation (NSF) Coastal SEES grant supports a team of researchers from seven institutions — UC Merced, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UCLA, Stanford University, the Carnegie Institution for Science and Oregon State University — in forming an interdisciplinary “uber-university” to study the relationships between fog, climate change, redwoods and the human response.

A Fisheries Biology Graduate Student at Humboldt State University was recently awarded with an environmental fellowship to conduct research on a tribal trust fish species in the Klamath River. Yurok Tribal Member Keith Parker says some of his first childhood memories are rowing a boat, running gill nets and fishing with his grandfather on the Klamath River. Those experiences left a lasting impression. "It's instilled within us culturally that we have a responsibility to be good stewards to the land and to the river," said Parker.