Matthew D. Moran and Maureen R. McClung are professors of biology at Hendrix College, where they collaborate with undergraduate students to study questions about how humans impact landscapes and the implications for ecosystems. They share this Frontiers Focus on estimating the ecosystem services costs of fracking in the United States, from the June 2017 issue of ESA Frontiers. Since the…
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Peter Macreadie, head of the Blue Carbon Lab at Deakin University, shares this Frontiers Focus on strategies for managing tidal marshes, mangroves, and seagrass ecosystems to more efficiently capture and store carbon. His Concepts & Questions article appeared in the May 2017 issue of ESA Frontiers. Five years ago the marine science world gave birth to a new term: “blue carbon,” which was created…
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Edwin Peeters, associate professor at Wageningen University, the Netherlands, and Edward Morris, postdoctoral scientist at the University of Cádiz, Spain share this Frontiers Focus on managing local threats to wetlands so that we may continue to enjoy their benefits as the climate changes, in the March 2017 issue of ESA Frontiers. Wetlands are exciting places to spend our free time, exploring…
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Ensuring the protection of our oceans means we must stem the tide of poaching in Marine Protected Areas. However, doing so requires understanding how much poaching is going on and the reasons why people do it.
By Dana Miller, postdoctoral researcher at the University of British Columbia’s Fisheries Economics Research Unit in Vancouver, Canada. “Pirate” evokes images of legendary figures from the days of the great tall-masted sailing galleons, like Captain Henry Morgan, the famous 17th century “pirate of the Caribbean.” But piracy is still with us today, and modern pirates do not only steal from passing…
Laws allowing open interpretation of ecological restoration undermine sound science in the recovery of self-sustaining living communities. Though mandates like the Clean Water Act have been powerful tools for instituting environmental protections in the United States, loose legal definitions of “restoration” mean that few mitigation projects install whole, functioning, and self-sustaining ecosystems. Likewise, programs aimed at recovery of endangered species…
A New Brunswick family helps remove invasive snowshoe hares from a group of remote Bay of Fundy Islands, five decades after introducing them as Bowdoin professor Nathaniel Wheelwright recounts in the February Natural History Note for Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. Too much of an adorable thing. Snowshoe hares like this one, photographed in its winter finery in Denali…
“Cities are emergent systems, with only 5 to 7 thousand years of history, mostly during the relative climatic stability of the Holocene,” said guest editor Kristina Hill, an associate professor at UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design. “We’ve never tried to operate a city during a rapid climate change, especially not on the scale of population we now have, with our largest cities housing upwards of 20 million people.”
Extinct Mediterranean forests of biblical times could return and thrive in warmer, drier future, researchers argue in a September 2015 report for Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.
Highlights from the August 2015 issue of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment Armored in concrete, hardened shorelines lose the soft protections of coastal wetlands As we expand our coastal cities and armor the coast against the ravages of the sea, we lose the resiliency of the coastlines’ natural defenses. Rachel Gittman and colleagues at the University of North Carolina,…
When wild birds are a big part of your diet, opening a freshly shot bird to find worms squirming around under the skin is a disconcerting sight. That was exactly what Victoria Kotongan saw in October, 2012, when she set to cleaning two of four spruce grouse (Falcipennis canadensis) she had taken near her home in Unalakleet, on the northwest…
“When the sun peeped over the Sierra Madre, it slanted across a hundred miles of lovely desolation, a vast flat bowl of wilderness rimmed by jagged peaks. On the map the Delta was bisected by the river, but in fact the river was nowhere and everywhere, for he could not decide which of a hundred green lagoons offered the most pleasant and least speedy path to the Gulf.”