Environment

I’ve got to be honest.  Graduate student life comes with awesome perks: flexible schedules, fun-loving coworkers, and amazing travel opportunities.  But the green-eyed monster occasionally peers over my shoulder. It visited last week, while I flipped enviously through photos my cousin, Jason Moeller, had posted on his blog for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Teacher at Sea program.  I'd been following his three-week adventure aboard a pollock research vessel in the Gulf of Alaska whenever I wasn't reading about a friend's fieldwork in Greenland, getting…

Recently, all species of scombrids and billfish have been assessed by the IUCN to determine their ranking on the Red List of Threatened Species. And for tuna specifically, the results weren't good at all. Five of eight species aren't doing well.Critically endangered: Southern Bluefin (Thunnus maccoyii).Endangered: Atlantic Bluefin (T. thynnus).Vulnerable: Bigeye (T. obesus)Near threatened: Yellowfin (T. albacares), Albacore (T. alalunga). Figure 1: Size comparison chart of some tuna species. The Atlantic bluefin can reach a size of 3m and a weight of 650kg, the Bigeye tops at 2.3m and 200kg…

Last week, the United Nations added 18 sites around the globe to its list of biosphere reserves, bringing the total number of sites so designated under its Man and the Biosphere Program to 581. Most of us are probably more familiar with another U.N. collection: World Heritage Sites, which identify “universally” valued spots for conservation and awareness efforts. Indeed, some particularly special locales receive both designations. But the purpose of biosphere reserves transcends basic conservation. The reserves are intended to showcase ways that humans can reconcile our needs and activities…

Scattered across Santa Clara County — home during our tenure at Stanford — are 23 parcels of land so polluted that they’ve been targeted for government intervention. These “Superfund sites,”numbering more than 1,250 across the United States and its territories,are contaminated by heavy metals, organic solvents and petroleum residues. Some are at risk of contaminating the drinking water of hundreds of thousands of people; others already have. Some sites are sopolluted that their very soil must be scraped away; others will not befit for human habitation for generations. But the purpose of the…

If you pay a lot of taxes and get little to show for it, you don't have much trust in government, but if you are in a disaster-prone area, you have more confidence in government than most, say researchers in the International Journal of Wildland Fire. It makes sense. You wouldn't buy a home near a dry woodland area in California unless you trusted the government could eventually put out the wildfires that are going to happen - and they are going to happen as long as lawsuits prevent dry brush from being cleared.   But it seems activists don't actually live near any at-risk areas;…

An article in Marine Ecology Progress Series found evidence of plastic waste in more than nine percent of the stomachs of fish collected during a recent voyage by graduate students from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego to the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre - also known as the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch.". Based on their evidence, authors Peter Davison and Rebecca Asch estimate that fish in the intermediate ocean depths of the North Pacific ingest plastic at a rate of roughly 12,000- to 24,000 tons per year.During the SEAPLEX voyage in August 2009, the team of…

Ponds are interesting things because their boundaries are always changing.  On a very small scale there's a lot of drama, such as the snakes fishing for Mosquito fish (gambusia) trapped in a drying puddle.  On a larger scale, what happens in the local small ponds may reflect on what happens elsewhere.  So when folks at TRAC told me that the Great Blue Heron pond had dried to a puddle during the summer of 2008, I began to wonder how well the pond would do in this, the third dryest year in Texas since recordkeeping began. 2007, according to the climate records at Texas A&M…

Monday brought a delightful and unanticipated opportunity -- a chance to do a little citizen science at Camp Wisdom Boy Scout Camp (http://camp-wisdom-bsa.org/).  This week's activities were designed for the younger scouts, and on the spur of the moment, I decided that it might be fun for them to do a citizen science arthropod survey.  Kids and weird bugs are always a good match! The site was originally a farm on the Blackland prairie and in the 1930's was turned over to the Boy Scouts.   It's a heavily utilized setting that is somewhat typical of the kind of environment you…

Climate change is very complex, and, consequentially, models predicting it need to take into account many different aspects, from wind patterns to plant and algal growth. One of the expected consequences of the changing climate is that some regions will be drier, while others will be subjected to higher rates of precipitation, which, up in the north, means more snow. Snow doesn't have to be bad. In fact, the insulating effect of snow helps plants grow bigger. But, a new study found that it also encourages the rapid growth of killer fungal strains, killing the plants. Such an outbreak of…

One of the most engaging things about a landscape is how it changes after dark.  I haven't been at TRAC very often after sundown, but last night I was in an Amphibian Watch training program and to count frogs, you have to wait until the sun goes down.  Suddenly, paths that are familiar in the sunshine become enchanting places of pale light and shade and have an element of strangeness after the last of the sunlight has faded. This is "hunting by hearing" and it takes practice to gain confidence.  The katydids are busy sawing away in the trees, grasshoppers are buzzing in the…