Lauren Kuehne, a research scientist in the Freshwater Ecology and Conservation Lab at the University of Washington, shares this Frontiers Focus on the 1972 Clean Water Act and a review of progress and trends in freshwater assessments since the passage of this groundbreaking law, from the May 2017 issue of ESA Frontiers. Stories of transformations are fascinating – especially about deserving people who…
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…
Stephanie Green, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Ocean Solutions at Stanford University, shares this Frontiers Focus on the effects of oil sands development on ocean ecosystems, from the March 2017 issue of ESA Frontiers. North America contains some of the largest sources of bitumen—a thick, sticky petroleum extracted from land-locked clay and sand deposits known as oil sands….
Steven Brady is an evolutionary ecologist with the Department of Water and Land Resources at King County in Seattle, Wa. He and colleague Jonathan Richardson, an assistant professor at Providence College, share this Frontiers Focus on the ways in which species adapt to the pervasive presence of roads—and how those adaptations are not always beneficial for survival in the wider…
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…
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.
Ariana Sutton-Grier, an ecosystem ecologist at the University of Maryland, helps lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coastal Blue Carbon Team. She shares this Frontiers Focus on the long-term carbon storage capacity of coastal wetlands. Recent scientific advances have demonstrated that coastal wetlands — mangrove forests, tidal marshes, and seagrass meadows — pull carbon out of our atmosphere and store…
Margaret Kosmala, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, shares this Frontiers Focus on assessing data quality in citizen science. Have you ever wanted to do scientific research, even though you have never trained as a scientist? Citizen science gives people with no science background the chance to get involved in…
Kaitlyn M Gaynor, a PhD candidate in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California–Berkeley (Berkeley, CA), shares this Frontiers Focus on the effects of war on wildlife. When people make war, wildlife often becomes a casualty. Explosives and war materials kill living things that are not their targets. Valuable wildlife products, like ivory, finance…
Koenraad Van Meerbeek, a researcher in the Departement Aard- en Omgevingswetenschappen (Earth and Environmental Sciences) at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, shares this Frontiers Focus on the potential of Natura 2000 preserves to contribute biomass for bioenergy, without losing biodiversity. Renewable energy from biomass, i.e. “bioenergy,” holds promise for climate change mitigation, but converting big tracts of land to bioenergy crops…
By Jacob Phelps, lecturer in tropical environmental change and policy at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom. https://youtu.be/-I9cWe5N4-M My co-authors and I study and think about wildlife trade in a wide range of contexts, from the actions of wildlife harvesters imprisoned in Nepali jails, to orchid traders at Thai markets, to criminal groups poaching South African rhinos. In the context…
By Xianping Li, of the Key Laboratory of Animal Ecology and Conservation Biology within the Institute of Zoology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, China, as well as the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, China. Li and colleagues’ Research Communications paper “Risk of biological invasions is concentrated in biodiversity hotspots” appeared in the October 2016…