“ESA in a partnership with 30 leading nonpartisan scientific societies reaffirmed the reality of human-caused climate change…”

A guest commentary by Timothy Treuer (Princeton University), 2016 ESA Graduate Student Policy Award recipient Walking through the door into Senator Lisa Murkowski’s fourth floor office in the Hart Senate Building feels like stepping from the halls of the nation’s capital into a home in Alaska. The walls and shelves are covered in photos of arctic landscapes, Alaska Native artwork,…

Honorary Membership is given to a distinguished ecologist who has made exceptional contributions to ecology and whose principal residence and site of ecological research are outside of North America. Richard Hobbs, a professor of restoration ecology at the University of Western Australia, is an innovative, collaborative scientist with proven capacity to bridge the fields of basic and applied ecology. He…

The Shreve award supplies $1,000-2,000 to support ecological research by graduate or undergraduate student members of ESA in the hot deserts of North America (Sonora, Mohave, Chihuahua, and Vizcaino). Nameer Baker, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Irvine, works on the effects of climate on microbial decomposition and carbon cycling in desert systems.   Camila Medeiros, who is…

The Robert H. Whittaker Award recognizes an outstanding ecologist in a developing country who does not currently reside in the United States and is not a U.S. citizen. Whittaker, a prolific plant community ecologist, is most widely known his five-kingdom taxonomic classification system for living things, which drew from his early, influential work on trophic levels, environmental gradients and community classification…

A guest commentary by Kristen Lear (University of Georgia), 2016 ESA Graduate Student Policy Award recipient As a 2016 ESA Graduate Student Policy Award (GSPA) recipient, I traveled to D.C. in late April for three days to receive hands-on exposure to the interface between science and policy. This was a departure from my “day-job” as a graduate student at the University…

ESA presents the Murray F. Buell  and E. Lucy Braun Awards for an outstanding research talk  and poster presented by students at the  Annual Meeting. Panel members at the Centennial Annual Meeting of the ESA in Baltimore, Md. (August 2015) honored Cody S. Clements, a graduate student in the School of Biology at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Ga.,…

ESA’s Commitment to Human Diversity Award recognizes long-standing contributions of an individual towards increasing the diversity of future ecologists through mentoring, teaching, or outreach. Frank Day, a professor of ecology and eminent scholar at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va. is known for mentoring many graduate and undergraduate students as well as his stellar career as a wetland scientist. For…

Here are some highlights from the latest ESA Policy News by Policy Analyst Terence Houston. Read the full Policy News here.  ENERGY: HOUSE PASSES BILL THAT RESTRICTS CLIMATE, ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH On May 25, the House passed S. 2012, the Energy Policy Modernization Act. The bill passed by a vote of 241-178. Eight Democrats joined all but six Republicans in supporting the…

Innovation in Sustainability Science Award honors Ariana E. Sutton-Grier, Kateryna Wowk, and Holly A. Bamford. The Innovation in Sustainability Science Award recognizes the authors of a peer-reviewed paper published in the past five years exemplifying leading-edge work on solution pathways to sustainability challenges. In the United States, Hurricane Sandy brought unprecedented attention to building resilience of coastal communities and ecosystems to…

Laws allowing open interpretation of ecological restoration undermine sound science in the recovery of self-sustaining living communities. Though mandates like the Clean Water Act have been powerful tools for instituting environmental protections in the United States, loose legal definitions of “restoration” mean that few mitigation projects install whole, functioning, and self-sustaining ecosystems. Likewise, programs aimed at recovery of endangered species…

The Sustainability Science Award recognizes the authors of the scholarly work that makes the greatest contribution to the emerging science of ecosystem and regional sustainability through the integration of ecological and social sciences. Ecologist Margaret Palmer and legal scholar J.B. Ruhl tackle a critical issue in sustainability science: how the application of ecological science can be translated into effective policy that…