Conservation Science

If outdoor learning were a religion, Erika Zavaleta would be among its foremost acolytes. An online ecology course, she realized, could attract students who would never consider taking a class requiring live field trips. By bringing field biology to a broader range of people, Zavaleta hopes the course will help broaden racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity in ecology and environmental studies. “I’m interested in making more ways for people to have an entry point to get interested in conservation, an internship at a reserve, or taking a class with a field component.”

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.

Territorial user rights for fisheries are being promoted to enhance the sustainability of small-scale fisheries. Using Chile as a case study, we designed a market-based program aimed at improving fishers’ livelihoods while incentivizing the establishment and enforcement of no-take areas within areas managed with territorial user right regimes.

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

The promise of environmental conservation incentive programs that provide direct payments in exchange for conservation outcomes is that they enhance the value of engaging in stewardship behaviors. An insidious but important concern is that a narrow focus on optimizing payment levels can ultimately suppress program participation and subvert participants’ internal motivation to engage in long-term conservation behaviors.

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.

A research team lead by Indiana University faculty member Rebecca Lave has been awarded a National Science Foundation grant to study the introduction of market-based environmental conservation policies in the European Union. The two-year, $314,750 grant will fund research focusing on habitat banking, in which the environmental costs of development projects are offset by purchasing credits generated by restoration projects elsewhere.

Pascal Yaa is a small-scale octopus fisherman who has been fishing the coral reefs off Mombasa, Kenya since 1968. As a spear-fisher, Pascal swims the reefs daily with a mask and snorkel. Recently, he has been disturbed by what he is seeing. Increasingly, fishing nets and boats are damaging and killing large, old corals. From Pascal’s perspective, reef protection and restoration are critical to ensure long-term, sustainable fishing. In his own words, Pascal says, “Corals are the homes of fish and other animals like the octopus.