a{color:#4bb6f5 !important;} ENDANGERED SPECIES / CLIMATE CHANGE: Federal Appeals Court Rules Climate Change Projections Can Support Species Listings A three-judge panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled Monday, October 24, that species listings under the Endangered Species Act may be based on climate models showing future habitat loss. The San Francisco based court vacated…

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…

ESA Fellow and AAAS Leshner Fellow Jessica Hellmann is director of the Institute on the Environment and a professor of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior at the University of Minnesota. Some ESA members regularly practice public engagement, but it often falls by the wayside due to lackluster support from their workplace and time pressures. Four ESA members, who are in the fist…

By Elena Bennett, associate professor at the McGill School of Environment and Department of Natural Resource Sciences in Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, Canada. Bennett and colleagues’ Concepts and Questions article “Bright Spots: Seeds of a Good Anthropocene” appeared in the October 2016 issue of ESA Frontiers.   We are constantly being bombarded with negative visions of the future, which may inhibit our ability…

Webinar: Eyes in the Sky- Drone Use for Ecological Research Many researchers use drones in terrestrial and marine environments, giving scientists unprecedented access to areas previously difficult to reach. In August, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced new measures to  accelerate the safe integration and innovative adoption of unmanned aircraft systems across the United States. These announcements…

By Anthony Bicknell, Associate Research Fellow at the Environment and Sustainability Institute, University of Exeter, UK. We have all been captivated by the television wildlife documentaries that provide breath-taking video images of the previously unseen marine world. Although these may rely on the expertise of an experienced camera operator, camera technology has advanced to such an extent over recent years…

Federal Budget: Senate Republicans and Democrats Divided Over Stopgap Spending Bill The White House Office of Management and Budget held a planning call on Friday Sept. 23 with government agencies, as is required one week before agency spending runs out. Federal agencies are prohibited from spending any funds in the absence of enacted appropriations measures. The previous day, Sept. 22,…

I think that if we want to complain about how bad things are in the world, then we need to be prepared to do something about it.

A guest post by Teresa Mourad, ESA  Director or Education and Diversity Programs with help from Arietta Fleming-Davies of QUBES and Radford University. Gaby Hamerlinck and Kristin Jenkins from QUBES and BioQuest, and Sam Donovan from QUBES and the University of Pittsburgh collaborated on this project. As computational power has expanded and cloud-based analytical tools become more accessible, the science…

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…

David Lodge, Director of the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, Cornell University, became President of the Ecological Society of America (ESA) on August 12, 2016. As President, Lodge now chairs ESA’s governing board, which establishes the Society’s vision, goals and objectives. “The need is greater than ever for rigorous scientific information about the dependence of humans on nature, and…

Orie Loucks, Chair of Ecosystems Studies for the State of Ohio Miami University, conducting a field trip in Rock Creek.