The Flint water crisis: a time for reflecting on the need for ecosystem resilience and human well-being in urban communities of color By Kellen Marshall, graduate student in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at and a fellow at the Institute for Environmental Science & Policy at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Follow her on Twitter @greenkels. All humans deserve clean drinking water. The Flint…
Genetic engineering may allow us to rebirth close facsimiles of extinct species. But would bringing back a few individuals of a famously gregarious bird like the passenger pigeon truly revive the species, when the great oak forests that sustained them are gone? And if it succeeds, what if the birds don’t fit in anymore in our changed world? Experience with biological…
Here are some highlights from the latest ESA Policy News by Policy Analyst Terence Houston. Read the full Policy News here. WHITE HOUSE: PRESIDENT’S FINAL BUDGET PRIORITIZES CLIMATE, ENERGY RESEARCH On Feb. 9, President Obama released the eighth and final budget of his administration. The president’s Fiscal Year (FY) 2017 budget request includes significant increases for federal agencies that conduct scientific…
The power of modern technology has made it possible to transport the benefits of ecosystems for human societies (ecosystem services) far from the source. In the February 2016 issue of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, Jianguo Liu and colleagues examine the consequences in a very dramatic example, China’s enormous South-North Water Transfer Project, designed conduct water from the Yangtze…
A New Brunswick family helps remove invasive snowshoe hares from a group of remote Bay of Fundy Islands, five decades after introducing them as Bowdoin professor Nathaniel Wheelwright recounts in the February Natural History Note for Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. Too much of an adorable thing. Snowshoe hares like this one, photographed in its winter finery in Denali…
Here are some highlights from the latest ESA Policy News by Policy Analyst Terence Houston. Read the full Policy News here. EPA: FLINT WATER CRISIS GETS ATTENTION FROM WHITE HOUSE, CONGRESS On Jan. 16, the president signed an official state of emergency declaration for Flint Michigan in light of the city’s drinking water crisis. The action authorizes the Department of Homeland…
Sixty years ago Robert MacArthur ventured into spruce woods in Maine and Vermont to study five species of warblers
The 2014-2015 (August to August) Annual Report is online. The 100th year of the society featured lively conversations on the past, present, and future of ecology. We marked the centennial with special additions to the annual meeting program, reflections on notable papers of the last century, a contest imagining the ecological work of the future, and Centennial research articles, among many other projects. The year…
“Cities are emergent systems, with only 5 to 7 thousand years of history, mostly during the relative climatic stability of the Holocene,” said guest editor Kristina Hill, an associate professor at UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design. “We’ve never tried to operate a city during a rapid climate change, especially not on the scale of population we now have, with our largest cities housing upwards of 20 million people.”
Created by Ray Dybzinski (Loyola University Chicago, Institute of Environmental Sustainability) and Gord McNickle (Purdue University, Botany and Plant Pathology, @EvoEcoGames) and originally published on 8 January 2016. Which ecological concepts have most occupied ecologists over the last fifty years? The video animates the frequency of words appearing in Ecology abstracts from 1964 (when the journal began publishing abstracts with…
Here are some highlights from the latest ESA Policy News by Policy Analyst Terence Houston. Read the full Policy News here. WHITE HOUSE: OBAMA SOTU REFLECTS ON ACCOMPLISHMENTS, CALLS FOR COOPERATION For his final State of the Union address, President Obama sought a conciliatory and hopeful tone while requesting that Congress allay partisan tensions to reach consensus on advancing his remaining…
Many of the ecological issues facing society require cooperation among the international community to effect substantive change. The successful negotiations in Paris that resulted in the first-ever international climate accord affirm the importance of fostering international collaboration to effectively address ecological issues on a global scale. During the most recent edition of the Ecologist Goes to Washington podcast, immediate Past…