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Urban ecology

Humans are components of ecosystems: a response to “100 articles every ecologist should read”

In November 2017, the publication in Nature Ecology & Evolution of “100 articles every ecologist should read,” by Franck Courchamp and Corey JA Bradshaw, stirred the ecological community. Timon McPhearson, an associate professor of Urban Ecology at The New School in New York City and Research Fellow at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and Stockholm Resilience Centre, Dagmar Haase a Professor of…

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A simple puzzle for corvids, with Cheetos. Credit, Rhea Esposito

In a race for Cheetos, magpies win, but crows steal

Black-billed magpies and American crows, both members of the clever corvid family of birds, have adapted comfortably to life in urban and suburban communities. In Jackson Hole, Wyoming, the two species often nest nearby each other in backyards and parks. Nesting near their much larger crow cousins affords magpies a margin of extra safety from a common enemy—ravens, an even…

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Reflections on Flint and environmental justice

The Flint water crisis: a time for reflecting on the need for ecosystem resilience and human well-being in urban communities of color By Kellen Marshall, graduate student in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at and a fellow at the Institute for Environmental Science & Policy at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Follow her on Twitter @greenkels. All humans deserve clean drinking water. The Flint…

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The Dutch Sand Engine experiment in dynamic coastline management is an artificial sand beach designed to erode. Sand pulled away from the 126-ha peninsula by wave, wind, and currents spreads along the Delfland Coast of The Netherlands, naturally nourishing a shoreline that has suffered rapid erosion. The project, a collaboration of government, private industry, and academic researchers, was completed in 2011 and is expected to maintain the shoreline for the next 20 years. The peninsula is also popular with wind and kite surfers. Guest editor Kristina reviews innovations in coastal infrastructure designed to work with storm surge, sea level rise, and other natural processes in “Coastal infrastructure: a typology for the next century of adaptation to sea-level rise,” on page 468 of the November Special Centennial Issue of ESA Frontiers.

Building with Nature: the Dutch Sand Engine

“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.”

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Backyards prove surprising havens for native birds #ESA100

Tucked away from judging eyes, backyards are unexpected treasure troves of resources for urban birds. ESA Centennial Annual Meeting, August 9-14, 2015 in Baltimore, Md. Ecological Science at the Frontier Program Press Releases Media Registration Many of us lavish attention on our front yards, spending precious weekend hours planting, mowing, and manicuring the plants around our homes to look nice…

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ESA launches new OA journal with the Ecological Society of China

Ecosystem Health and Sustainability showcases applications of ecological science in support of sustainable development during an era of extensive and accelerating human and environmental change. Today, the Ecological Society of America (ESA) and the Ecological Society of China (ESC) jointly launch a new open access scholarly research journal to foster communication of applied ecological research across national and disciplinary boundaries….

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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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Ecology at the USA Science and Engineering Festival

ESA went to the USA Science & Engineering Festival on the weekend of April 26-27 to talk about ecology with some of the 325,000 people who attended. Special thanks to University of Maryland ecologists David Inouye (ESA’s president-in-waiting) and Ben Bond-Lamberty for coming down to the Washington DC convention center for the event. At our booth we had a terrarium…

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The dense urban life of Queens surrounds Jamaica Bay, NY, where Timothy Hoellein and Chester Zarnoch measured the effect of oysters on the nitrogen cycle. Oysters once clustered thickly in Hudson River estuaries, but disappeared in the twentieth century under the combined effects of harvesting, habitat loss, and pollution, especially sewage. Public interest in oyster restoration and ecosystem services has opened many research questions. Hoellein and Zarnoch fixed cages of oysters below the low-tide line (top left) and returned twice a month to sample carbon and nitrogen in the sediment. A natural-gas-burning power plant flanked the moderately nutrient-loaded study site at Mott’s Basin (right panel). Credit, Timothy Hoellein and Chester Zarnoch.

Oysters of New York

Denitrification heroes?
The dense urban life of Queens surrounds Jamaica Bay, NY, where Timothy Hoellein and Chester Zarnoch measured the effect of oysters on the nitrogen cycle. Can oysters help remove an excess of the nutrient from the bay?

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Call for nominations! Joan Ehrenfeld Award for Best Student Presentation in Urban Ecology

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baltimore urban density. landsat image with aproximate location of ws263

Baltimore’s Watershed 263 experiment in socioecology

Ecological restoration makes city dwellers happier and healthier. by Liza Lester, ESA communications officer IN the first summer after my move from the cool green climes of western Washington State to Washington, DC, I gained a primal, physical understanding the urban heat island effect. Summer in the District of Columbia is a hot, humid shock for a native northwesterner, and…

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