Conservation Science

The prime culprit in all this is the green crab. And as Brian Beal explains, green crab populations can be hard to control. He's professor of marine ecology at the University of Maine in Machias. "Nobody really eats them and that's the problem," Beal says. "They're just so highly fecund, they have lots of eggs, there's no real predator that can keep them in check." Listen to the full story

Michael S. Stevens is the Co-Founder and Principal of Pioneer Mountain Group, an environmental consulting firm based in Hailey, Idaho. PMG provides a range of management, conservation, scientific and natural resource production and marketing services to clients including non-profit organizations, investment firms, and private landowners. The firm’s current projects are in the western United States, Latin America and Canada.

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A citizen science project to study nesting populations of common backyard songbirds started recently as campus researchers began visiting the yards of 60 volunteer families across western Massachusetts for the "Neighborhood Nestwatch" project.

For millennia, Colorado's Yampa River Valley has followed the rhythms of wildlife mating and migration, the habits of elk and grouse and bear. The arrival of ranching in the 1880s altered the pattern a little, but radical change didn't occur until the last half of the 20th century. That's when the big ranches began to be broken up into small ranchettes and vacation-home lots, the kind of low-density exurban sprawl responsible for habitat fragmentation across the West.