Public Affairs — Page 13

By Eliza Oldach — Science Outreach Intern, Spring 2018 The 19th  century was a time of accelerated ecological discovery. The New World, already plundered for trade and colonization, was opening to Europeans for scientific discovery. Now-famous figures—Humboldt, Darwin, Wallace, Schimper—struck out across oceans, armed with microscopes and collecting bags.  They returned home with trunks crammed full of samples and specimens,…

  President Trump released his Legislative Outline for Rebuilding Infrastructure in America (53 pages) Feb. 12. The outline offers $200 billion in federal spending over 10 years and aims to spur an additional $1.3 trillion in state and private infrastructure spending. It seeks to limit environmental oversight while shortening regulatory review to two years. It includes a directive to the White…

Mark Rains is a Professor of Geology and the Director of the School of Geosciences at the University of South Florida, where he studies hydrological connectivity and the role it plays in governing structure and function in aquatic ecosystems. He shares this Frontiers Focus on how to integrate geographically isolated wetlands into land management decisions from a paper published in…

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…

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…