Conservation Science

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.

Wilmar International, one of the world’s biggest palm oil producers, has agreed to ensure the oil it supplies will not result in any additional loss of rainforests, in a move that could significantly slow the destruction of tropical forests around the world. “If Wilmar is genuine in its commitments to deforestation-free, peat-free, exploitation-free palm oil, this could be a game-changer for the industry,” said Sharon Smith, palm oil campaign manager for the Union of Concerned Scientists.

"From Florida's key deer to Hawaii's monk seals, some of our most amazing creatures could be doomed as the oceans swallow up their last habitat and nesting sites," said Shaye Wolf, the center's climate science director. "If we don't move fast to cut carbon pollution and protect ecosystems, climate chaos could do tremendous damage to our web of life," she said. "Federal wildlife officials have to step up efforts to protect America's endangered species from the deadly threat of rising seas."

It has been more than two years since the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster hammered the Gulf of Mexico with an unprecedented 200 million gallons of crude oil, but we are still seeing the effects today. Coast Guard officials have confirmed that an oil slick found in the Gulf last week matched oil from the spill two years ago.