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…
Read MoreThis post contributed by Heather Kirk, a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Agricultural Sciences in Zurich, Switzerland When a 9.0 magnitude earthquake caused a series of nuclear accidents in Japan back in March of this year, there was nervousness in North America that nuclear fallout could blow across the Pacific Ocean to reach coastal cities in Canada and the…
Read More“Parc National La Visite is one of the few remaining refuges for Haiti’s once-remarkable biodiversity. It is also the only refuge for over 1,000 desperately poor families, the poorest people I have encountered anywhere on this planet. Naked children with bloated stomachs stood next to pine-bark lean-tos and waved shyly to me as I walked through the forest. Their parents…
Read MoreSeveral proposals for geoengineering projects are being explored–including cloud seeding, ocean iron fertilization and afforestation–as a plan for mitigating climate change. Monica Kanojia explores these methods and the current economic and technological issues surrounding them.
Tim Birkhead explains what song bird research can contribute to human health, Surprising Science describes the evolution of a feline’s roar (or meow), a Geophysical Research Letters study assesses the world’s dwindling groundwater supply, Nature News interviews Gabriela Chavarria—the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s top science adviser—and Chris Palmer’s book reveals faking in nature videos. Here are stories in ecology from the last week in September.