Coastal & Marine Conservation

With tens of thousands of people displaced and many billions of dollars in estimated damages from the impacts of Hurricane Harvey, an environmental group on Tuesday filed a formal request on Tuesday to discover why the Trump administration recently decided to lift flood zone restrictions designed to mitigate these kinds of costly disasters.

The health of dolphin populations worldwide depends on sustained access to robust food sources. A new report by UC Santa Barbara researchers and colleagues at UC San Diego and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration looks at three different dolphin species, studying what they eat and how they divide ocean resources and space — important information for conservation and management. The team’s findings appear in the journal PLOS ONE.

Healthy oceans are essential to human survival and prosperity, yet oceans are severely impacted worldwide by anthropogenic threats including overfishing, climate change, industrialization, pollution, and habitat destruction. Marine protected areas (MPAs) have been implemented around the world and are effective conservation tools that can mitigate some of these threats and build resilience when designed and managed well.

A notification system that alerts authorities when fishing vessels that are believed to be operating illegally arrive in port is being developed by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). Australia’s national science agency explained that the web-based reporting tool identifies and ranks vessels across the globe based on a list of behaviors associated with illegal, unregulated and unreported (IUU) fishing. It uses data collected by satellites to monitor and report vessels behaving suspiciously.

Reducing the complexity of research on ocean ecosystems does not mean dumbing down your science, it means delivering science in a series of short chapters. If you can get the readers hooked, and don’t confuse them, you can tell a complex story. But that takes work and training that many scientists don’t have, writes Fellow Linwood Pendleton.

How did 24 diverse countries, including Russia, China, and the United States, come to agree to protect 1.55 million km2 of the Southern Ocean, more than 70% of which will be closed to commercial fishing? How did the US and Russia find common ground in the Southern Ocean, when it has been so difficult in other diplomatic arenas? Fellow Cassandra Brooks has an interesting answer.

Climate-driven disturbances are having profound impacts on coastal ecosystems, with many crucial habitat-forming species in sharp decline. However, among these degraded biomes, examples of resilience are emerging. For this episode of BioScience Talks, we're joined by Dr. Jennifer O'Leary, a California Sea Grant Marine Biologist based at California Polytechnic State University, and Dr. Fiorenza Micheli, from Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University.