It’s nice to have some good conservation news every once in awhile, even with caveats. North Atlantic right whales are one of the most endangered species on Earth. These mammals were dubbed by 18th-century whalers to be the “right” whales to catch because they’re huge (up to 70 tons and 55 feet long), stay close to shore, move slowly and…

An invited feature in this month’s issue of Ecological Applications focuses on the U.S. National Fire and Fire Surrogate Study, a five-year effort to assess the effectiveness of wildfire reduction methods currently in use by forest management agencies. The study compares the effectiveness of fire fuel reduction methods on restoring ecosystem health to national forests. Many U.S. forests once experienced…

Tracking citation data (i.e., which papers cite which other papers) has traditionally been the method for understanding the interconnectivity of different fields and subfields of research. But in the age when most researchers access their information online, the printed word can sometimes be years out of date. In a paper published this week in Public Library of Science ONE (PLoS…

Researchers said yesterday that the potential rise in global sea level by the year 2100 could be almost double the previous estimates. A rise of this magnitude could affect a tenth of the world’s population. At the International Scientific Congress on Climate Change in Copenhagen, Denmark this week, Konrad Steffen of the University of Colorado at Boulder chaired a session…

President Obama issued a memorandum yesterday about scientific integrity in federal executive offices. The memo calls for the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy to conduct a review of the scientific integrity of the executive branch, including policies to ensure thorough scientific review, unbiased scientific reporting, the retention of scientific staff based on credentials and public access…

Ethanol as the next generation of alternative fuels has stirred significant controversy. While some tout its lower-than-gasoline greenhouse-gas emissions and its usefulness in creating carbon sinks in its agricultural fields, many other ecologists call ethanol production the most inefficient of alternative fuel options. Even the most optimistic scenarios still show that using current technologies, it can take years – in…

With funding from the recent the stimulus bill beginning to trickle down to agencies and budgets for the next two fiscal years on the line, it’s all about the Benjamins these days in Washington. Here are some highlights from today’s issue of the ESA Policy News Update, written by ESA’s Policy Analyst, Piper Corp. 2009 Budget. The fiscal year 2009…

Bioclimatic models attempt to draw correlations between species distributions and climate patterns.  As ecologists and climatologists hone these models, they become a useful tool for predicting future species distributions based on projected climate patterns. In the March issue of Ecology, Joshua Lawler of the University of Washington and his colleagues undertook a huge task: using a bioclimatic model, they estimated…

President Obama issued a memorandum yesterday that restored scientific review to federal projects under the Endangered Species Act.  The move overturned steps taken by the Bush administration in December that allowed federal agencies to conduct projects without requesting an independent review by the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service (a part of NOAA). The president…

An article in last week’s Washington Post highlights a few of the many thousands of people and families across the globe who are leaving their homelands behind in fear of global warming. The article mentions the country of Kiribati, a Pacific archipelago, where the government is trying to figure out how to move its 100,000 inhabitants off the island because…

The New York Times’ John Tierney wrote in his TierneyLab this week about a 2007 book by Roger Pielke, Jr., a professor at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado. Because of the doomsday scenarios John Holdren and Steven Chu have depicted (regarding world population levels and water availability in California, respectively), Tierney wonders if the…

The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology announced this week in a letter to Gov. Bobby Jindal that the society would not hold future scientific meetings in Louisiana in response to the recent passage by the state legislature of the Louisiana “Science Education Act.” The letter was first reported Monday in the New Orleans Times-Picayune and has also drawn coverage…