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Anthropocene

An ancient thatched-roof farm house in Ogamachi, Japan, is typical of the traditional Japanese Satoyama agricultural landscapes, which benefit both people and nature. Farm stay programs, in which urban residents spend time living on farms, often participating in daily farm life, are increasingly being implemented in depopulated rural areas. Credit, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

Envisioning a good Anthropocene

By Elena Bennett, associate professor at the McGill School of Environment and Department of Natural Resource Sciences in Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, Canada. Bennett and colleagues’ Concepts and Questions article “Bright Spots: Seeds of a Good Anthropocene” appeared in the October 2016 issue of ESA Frontiers.   We are constantly being bombarded with negative visions of the future, which may inhibit our ability…

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A schematic of the South–North Water Transfer Project. From Figure 2 of Liu et al (2016) Front Ecol Environ 14(1): 27–36, doi:10.1002/16-0188.1

Telecoupling ecosystem services through China’s prodigious N-S Water Transfer Project

The power of modern technology has made it possible to transport the benefits of ecosystems for human societies (ecosystem services) far from the source. In the February 2016 issue of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, Jianguo Liu and colleagues examine the consequences in a very dramatic example, China’s enormous South-North Water Transfer Project, designed conduct water from the Yangtze…

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These are not your urban lawn flamingos! This pair dancing in the low tide in Mumbai’s busy harbor are Lesser Flamingos, considered near-threatened species due to declining populations in Africa and India. Yet, over the past decade, some 10-25 thousand of them have been turning up in Mumbai’s Thane Creek to spend the winter right in the middle of a megacity of over 20 million people. I photographed this pair just a year ago at Sewri Port, an industrial dockyard area known more for repairing boats than harboring such wildlife which now teems in the creek’s recovering mangroves. Credit, Madhusudan Katti.

These are not your urban lawn flamingos!

Madhusudan Katti won this year’s ESA Science Café Prize with his lyric contemplation of the wildlife living alongside us in urban spaces, and the necessary participation of cities in the future of biodiversity on planet earth. Katti is a professor at California State University Fresno and records occasional radio essays for Valley Public Radio. He tweets prolifically as @leafwarbler and…

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Erle C Ellis, and Navin Ramankutty. 2008. Putting people in the map: anthropogenic biomes of the world. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 6: 439–447. http://dx.doi.org/10.1890/070062

Where the ecologists are: a Field Talk podcast with Erle Ellis

The UM-Baltimore County ecologist talks about geographical context in field research and why he thinks the value of nature is more than the sum of it’s services. by Liza Lester, ESA communications officer Listen to the podcast on the Field Talk page, or download it from iTunes. Ellis collaborated with Laura Martin and Bernd Blossey of Cornell University on the Frontiers…

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Easter Island’s quiet message

Ahu Tongariki, the largest platform on the island, features fifteen restored Moais. The Moai in the foreground was likely damaged in transit and never erected. Credit: Brian Wee. This post contributed by Brian Wee, chief of external affairs for NEON, Inc. The July 2012 edition of National Geographic features Easter Island – known also as Isla de Pascua in Spanish…

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Symposium I of ESA’s Emerging Issues Conference

This post contributed by Celia Smith, ESA Education Programs Coordinator A high standard was set by the first symposium of the Ecological Society of America’s (ESA) weeklong 2012 Emerging Issues Conference, which kicked off Monday at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Conservation Training Center (NCTC) in Shepherdstown, WV. The first of four sessions, Symposium I:  “Protected Areas: Fostering…

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