The Uneasy Chair
By Jon Christensen
A year ago, when The Nature Conservancy was confronted with a blistering exposé in the Washington Post, it did what big companies often do. It went into damage control mode. Executives halted practices that were criticized while they reviewed policies. They took out ads. They got friends in high […] Read More »
Getting It Right the First Time
The article Degraded Darkness (Spring 2004) provides a nice overview to help us begin to fathom the environmental impacts brought about by the technological revolution of artificial lighting.
I am sorry that efforts such as the Fatal Light Awareness Program (FLAP) have arisen only in the last decade. It […] Read More »
Books
The Whale and the Supercomputer: On the Northern Front of Climate Change
By Charles Wohlforth
North Point Press, 2004
Reviewed by Jonathan Beard
For most of us, the threat of global warming seems vague, distant: winters getting half a degree, even a whole degree, warmer over a decade may even sound appealing. But for […] Read More »
Dutch conservation agreements pay farmers for adopting agricultural practices intended to benefit nature, but a new analysis suggests that they are not working. The agreements are not helping and in some cases may even harm their target species — the diversity of plants and meadow birds has failed to increase, and the numbers of wading […] Read More »
When it comes to subspecies, which ones count? A new study suggests current conservation of bird subspecies is misguided. In fact, there is a dramatic mismatch between named subspecies and genetically distinct populations.
“The focus on subspecies could misdirect conservation effort,” says Robert Zink of the University of Minnesota, St. Paul, in the March 2004 […] Read More »
Flagship species such as the giant panda and the jaguar often drive the establishment of small reserves. But is this a good idea? Not according to new research that shows no link between flagship species and biodiversity in a Belize rainforest.
Flagship species “appear to be a poor conservation tool… for delineating the location of […] Read More »
No-take marine reserves are controversial partly because they are expected to help local people by providing more fish to catch, yet there is no solid evidence that they actually do so. Now a new study in the Philippines confirms that marine reserves can boost the catch and lower the fishing effort in nearby fisheries.
“The […] Read More »
Private landowners don’t have to help endangered species on their property, but conservationists hope they will want to. Several incentive programs encourage habitat protection on private lands in the U.S., and a new study suggests that they can work.
“These incentive programs are the most promising development in endangered species conservation in a decade,” says […] Read More »
Journal Watch
Even as conservationists promote whale watching over whaling, the debate is shifting. A new report says that whaling nations are focusing less on whether rebounding whale populations should be hunted and more on whether they are threats to marine ecosystems.
“The debate on managing whale killing is moving to the question of how […] Read More »
Brazilian law requires rural landowners to preserve a fifth of the native forest on their property, and new research suggests that this law may provide economic as well as conservation benefits. The study shows that forest fragments can boost production on nearby coffee farms by nearly 15 percent.
“The forest’s economic value may convince more […] Read More »
Case Study
By Douglas Fox
The afternoon doldrums hang heavy over Dzanga Bai. On the edge of this forest clearing in the Central African Republic, half a dozen researchers and Ba’Aka assistants perch on an elevated platform, sweating, swatting flies, and gazing through binoculars at the forest elephants below.
Ordinarily, this species of elephant (Loxo-donta […] Read More »
Innovations
By John Weier
For ecologists, seeing the forest for the trees is a constant dilemma. Satellite and airplane images provide an overall picture of the forest and its boundaries. But the aspects of the forest typically crucial to the health of the local denizens, such as the age, height and density of the trees, […] Read More »
Innovations
By Melissa Hendricks
Starting this year, the U.S. Coast Guard will require that ships entering U.S. waters have plans to rid their ballast water of invasive species or face fines of up to US$25,000 per day. The United Nations’ International Maritime Organization also recently adopted a policy that sets upper limits for the number […] Read More »
Feature
By Mark Jerome Walters
Summer 2004 (Vol. 5, No. 3)
In December 2003,the chickens at the Umsung-gun poultry facility, 70 kilometers south of Seoul, Korea, did not come home to roost. Twenty thousand had died of avian influenza.
So began the catastrophic outbreak of “bird flu” that recently swept across Asia. Although the virus […] Read More »
Feature
By Peter Ward
Summer 2004 (Vol. 5, No. 3)
In the mid-1960s, when I first began scuba diving in Puget Sound, the large inland seaway of Western Washington, I was attracted to the sandy undersea bottoms that made up some of the richest subtidal clam beds in the world.On any shallow scuba dive over […] Read More »
