Conservation Science

The 2014 World Ocean Summit was held last week at the chic Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay, California. Together, global leaders discussed the current international dimensions of the global blue economy. The Switzer Environmental Network, namely Jessica Switzer and the folks at Blue Practice, provided the basically-unparalleled opportunity to attend the Ocean Summit.

Humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) are known for the variety and complexity of their feeding behaviors. Here we report on the use of synchronous motion and acoustic recording tags (DTAGs) to provide the first detailed kinematic descriptions of humpback whales using bottom side-rolls (BSRs) to feed along the seafloor. Download the article

Despite decades of discussion and implementation, conservation monitoring remains a challenge. Many current solutions in the literature focus on improving the science or making more structured decisions. These insights are important but incomplete in accounting for the politics and economics of the conservation decisions informed by monitoring. Our novel depiction of the monitoring enterprise unifies insights from multiple disciplines (conservation, operations research, economics, and policy) and highlights many underappreciated factors that affect the expected benefits of monitoring.

A Network Innovation grant supported a special series of events on conservation filmmaking at the North America Congress of the Society of Conservation Biology. Fellows Tara Cornelisse, Kristy Deiner, Naomi Fraga, Matt Hamilton and Sarah Reed helped organize the events, titled “How Filmmakers and Conservationists Connect People, Nature, and Climate”, which also featured ecologists, scriptwriters, directors and producers as panelists and participants.

In 2012, through a Switzer Leadership Grant, I had the opportunity to join the Adirondack Chapter of The Nature Conservancy to help advance work in freshwater conservation and climate change adaptation in the bi-national Lake Champlain Basin.

Mountain bikers, now you can add another resolution to your New Year's list. For 2014, I hope you strive to bike better, smarter and beware of the beetles at Wilder Ranch State Park and other recreational areas in Santa Cruz. It's not that beetles can hurt you; it's the opposite. They need your help to protect them from you, and the rest of your outdoorsy friends.

This reference resource, in atlas format, is an online-only compendium of maps and data sets accompanied by multimedia elements designed to illustrate key concepts in green issues and environmentalism graphically and interactively. Topics for the maps presented in this work were selected from articles in the 12-volume SAGE Reference Series on Green Society: Toward a Sustainable Future. Each map includes links to one or more of the series articles. Maps include interactive components, with clickable icons to deliver the data and statistics that make up each map.

“This is the first time we’ve been able to sneak a peek at a coral pathogen’s behavior in real time, as it responds to the chemical cues leaking into the seawater from its host,” says postdoc Melissa Garren of MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE), first author on a paper about this work that appears Dec. 12 in the International Society for Microbial Ecology Journal. Professor Roman Stocker of CEE is lead researcher on the project.