Archive for the ‘Global Climate Change’ Category

Are we at critical moss?

I’ve spent the last two weeks looking into moss conservation around the world– how are mosses faring? have we taken conservation action? do we need to? And I feel like the most common response I found in literature dated as recently as nine years ago was ‘We don’t have enough information to judge.’ This is […]

Regenerating a coral reef

In my last post I mentioned some of the challenges facing reefs and reef fish, particularly overexploitation and habitat degradation. Although these issues affect reef fish in different ways, they can work in tandem to intensify conservation problems. The good news is that we have better insight into how to lessen or even remove some […]

Fishing down the coral reef

Over the past week I’ve been looking into the challenges facing reef fishes and the environments they inhabit, and there are some very clear recurrent themes: overexploitation (on a number of levels), habitat degradation (for a variety of reasons), and climate change. These are all big issues and unfortunately some of them are probably not […]

Keeping the boreal forest in tune

As you’ve seen in my previous posts, there are some big issues facing boreal forests and the birds that live there both as summer migrants and year-round. These issues include habitat loss and fragmentation, as well as the impacts of climate change. Some researchers have suggested that we need to protect large areas of important […]

A swiftly changing forest

In my last post, I talked about the impacts of forest loss and fragmentation on boreal birds. These issues impact birds whether they are year-round residents or summer visitors, and the impacts can be pretty intense- Sauer et al. (2005) estimated that the boreal chickadee population experienced an annual decline of about 3.6% between 1966 […]

What flies in a northern forest?

In July I had the opportunity to attend the North American Congress on Conservation Biology in Madison, Wisconsin. In addition to having a blast in the cooler weather and meeting researchers doing amazing work, I also was reminded that the boreal forests of the world are huge- in fact, they are much, much bigger than […]

Combating the swamp of sadness

We know that wetlands around the world face big challenges: fragmentation, pollution, conversion, climate change, etc. But we also know that there are ways to combat these issues, and some of those options give us the chance to get directly involved in wetlands conservation. If you are looking for a way to participate, you’ve got […]

Carving out a piece of the pie

I started looking into research on wetland loss around the world and quickly discovered that a large portion of what’s been published is about the Gulf Coast, specifically Louisiana. I could write for days about the situation all around me, but I know that wetlands in many locations are in trouble, so I kept digging […]

A disappearing act

I spent the last few days at a conference in New Orleans about the changing Gulf Coast that brought together researchers, engineers, long-time residents, and a wide variety of other people. The point was to share information and viewpoints about what is happening along the coast over the short- and long-term. Sea-level rise and climate […]

Crowded eels

In my last post, I mentioned some of the big issues facing eel populations around the world: habitat fragmentation, overexploitation, climate change. We’re constantly gaining information on how these problems impact eels, and we’re also getting a better sense of how to mitigate some of the challenges. Once again, I’m largely looking at those eel […]