Conservation Science

This valentine’s day, Christine Wilkinson spoke with NPR’s Short Wave Podcast to celebrate queer animal love. The story was prompted by the discovery of two gay anteaters at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo. NPR asked Christine if these high...

Martha Matsuoka’s new, open-access book shows how community-engaged research contributes to environmental justice by centering local knowledge, building truth from the ground up, producing data that can influence decisions, and transforming researchers’ relationships to communities for equity and mutual benefit.

"The city is saturated with coyotes—the packs that are there are largely the packs that will remain there… [human-coyote encounters are] something that we need to better plan for in the Bay area and also in California as a whole.”

J. Morgan Grove, Nicole Heller, Sarah Reed and Christine Wilkinson contributed to this text advancing justice-centered biodiversity conservation in cities and demonstrating the necessity of, and tools for, simultaneously addressing social inequities and biodiversity conservation.

“Wisconsin’s Driftless Area, an unglaciated region defined by steep river valley systems, has been plagued by chronic flooding in part due to Euro-American agricultural practices and anthropogenic climate change. The region, which has played a central role in environmental knowledge production, has a storied history of resilience practices and flood experience.”

Suiseeya has devoted her professional academic life to investigating the justice dimensions of environmental governance, principally how different policies and approaches to addressing issues like biodiversity loss and climate change impact people and communities.

“This vote is a huge victory for these special wildflowers,” said botanist and Switzer Fellow Maria Jesus, whose field surveys document the plant’s current range. “With the threat of a massive gold mine looming on the horizon, this rare daisy now has help from the state of California to prevent it from sliding into extinction.”

“To succeed in the next chapter of bay-saving, we’re going to have to widen conservation’s historically narrow lens… this isn’t just about one state, one agency, or one organization; this is an “all of the above” situation. We need to use the science and the data. But we also need to use our heart — our passion, our energy, our compassion and our courage.”

“All the terrible things I’ve seen, all the detrimental changes to the environment, all the impacts of climate change — I use it to fuel my motivation to be a better scientist, to be a better human being, to be a better steward of the land. And honestly, part of it is anger. That’s fuel, OK? I get mad, and I turn that anger into fuel that motivates me.”