Conservation Science

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.

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

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.

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.

Many of the tribes that have been most successful in getting their voice heard in resource protection have used education, says Elizabeth Hoover, a Brown University assistant professor and researcher of environmental health and justice in native communities. “If you don’t have people in your community with those science degrees, they [state and federal agencies] don’t see you as qualified,” she says.

Demographic connectivity is fundamental to the persistence and resilience of metapopulations, but our understanding of the link between reproduction and recruitment is notoriously poor in open-coast marine populations. We provide the first evidence of high local retention and limited connectivity among populations spanning 700 km along an open coast in an upwelling system. Read more