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These are not your urban lawn flamingos! This pair dancing in the low tide in Mumbai’s busy harbor are Lesser Flamingos, considered near-threatened species due to declining populations in Africa and India. Yet, over the past decade, some 10-25 thousand of them have been turning up in Mumbai’s Thane Creek to spend the winter right in the middle of a megacity of over 20 million people. I photographed this pair just a year ago at Sewri Port, an industrial dockyard area known more for repairing boats than harboring such wildlife which now teems in the creek’s recovering mangroves. Credit, Madhusudan Katti.

These are not your urban lawn flamingos!

Madhusudan Katti won this year’s ESA Science Café Prize with his lyric contemplation of the wildlife living alongside us in urban spaces, and the necessary participation of cities in the future of biodiversity on planet earth. Katti is a professor at California State University Fresno and records occasional radio essays for Valley Public Radio. He tweets prolifically as @leafwarbler and…

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ESA Policy News May 30: FIRST Act fight over “frivolous” NSF funding

Here are some highlights from the latest ESA Policy News by Policy Analyst Terence Houston. Read the full Policy News here.  NSF: REAUTHORIZATION BILL SPURS CONTENTION DURING COMMITTEE MARKUP On May 22nd, the House Science, Space and Technology Committee began a mark-up of H.R. 4186, the Frontiers in Innovation, Research, Science, and Technology (FIRST) Act of 2014. After postponing completion of…

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U.S. National Security Advisor Susan Rice is pictured speaking at the Global Food Security Symposium in Washington on May 22. She said, “Climate change affects every aspect of food security, from production to pricing. Climate change is not some distant threat. We’re already dealing with its impacts.” (Credit: The Chicago Council)

Building resilience for food security in a changing climate

Climate change is bringing hotter temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, and more frequent natural disasters that could reduce global food production by 2 percent each decade for the rest of the century according to a report from The Chicago Council on Advancing Global Food Security in the Face of a Changing Climate (pdf). “Instead of treating climate change and food security as…

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Virginia Burkett (USGS) speaks to the congressional briefing attendees in Washington, DC on May 22. (Credit: Terence Houston)

Federal scientist, defense officials join forces to relay how the US is “losing ground” in combating climate change

A panel of domestic federal agency personnel and military officials discussed the various impacts of climate change in the Southeastern United States (US). Each entity is currently working to address climate change impacts. Entitled “Losing Ground: Managing Climate Risks in the Southeast,” the congressional briefing was sponsored by the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. Representing the United States Geological Survey…

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ESA Policy News May 16, 2014: national climate assessment, water resources bill agreement, drought initiatives

Here are some highlights from the latest ESA Policy News by Policy Analyst Terence Houston. Read the full Policy News here. WHITE HOUSE: ASSESSMENT OUTLINES NATIONWIDE IMPACTS OF HUMAN-INDUCED CLIMATE CHANGE On May 6th, the US Global Change Research Program released the 3rd National Climate Assessment that summarizes the impacts of climate change on the United States, now and in the future. The…

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Ecology at the USA Science and Engineering Festival

ESA went to the USA Science & Engineering Festival on the weekend of April 26-27 to talk about ecology with some of the 325,000 people who attended. Special thanks to University of Maryland ecologists David Inouye (ESA’s president-in-waiting) and Ben Bond-Lamberty for coming down to the Washington DC convention center for the event. At our booth we had a terrarium…

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Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkins google doodle

Google celebrates Nobel Prize-winning biological chemist Dorothy Hodgkin

Today’s Google doodle celebrates Dorothy Hodgkin, neé Crowfoot, a founder of protein crystallography who famously solved the 3-dimentional molecular structure of of the protein hormone insulin in 1969. The project took 35 years. She won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964 for her structure of vitamin B12. The doodle depicts Hodgkin’s 1945 model of penicillin. She used a Hollerith…

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EPSCoR: Expanding Job Growth and Opportunity in Science

    The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) provides science resources to its jurisdictions, which constitute 28 states, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, Guam and the US Virgin Islands. A recent Capitol Hill briefing spotlighted the program’s work to expand science research and education across US states and territories that have traditionally been underfunded….

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ESA Policy News May 2, 2014: House bill boosts NSF, NOAA climate research reviewed, new USDA conservation programs

Here are some highlights from the latest ESA Policy News by Policy Analyst Terence Houston. Read the full Policy News here. APPROPRIATIONS: HOUSE CJS BILL INCREASES SCIENCE INVESTMENT On April 30, the House Appropriations Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies Subcommittee released its funding bill for Fiscal Year (FY) 2015. The bill includes funding for the Department of Justice, Department of Commerce…

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