Conservation Science

This article was inspired by colleague David Guggenheim, president of Ocean Doctor, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, DC and dedicated to protecting and restoring our oceans through hands-on conservation.

With its ocean views, walking path, and ice plant-covered cliffs, many in Santa Cruz consider West Cliff Drive to be a jewel of the community. Now a couple of scientists want the community to help them restore native habitat to the coastal bluffs. They’ve started the non-profit West Cliff Ecosystem Restoration project to help organize the restoration. Last winter, volunteers with the group ripped out ice plant in a small bed near the entrance to Natural Bridges State Park.

All it takes is a license and a cutting rake to harvest rockweed anytime and anywhere along most of Maine's long coast. Other than in a large bay in far eastern Maine, there's no fisheries management plan for the common seaweed that grows along the shore. But work is now underway to develop a statewide plan to manage rockweed, which is processed in Maine into fertilizer, animal feed supplements, food and other products with an estimated value of $20 million a year.

What if you had to decide between feeding your family today and saving the environment for future generations? That's exactly the choice families along the stretch of river between Guatemala and Belize have to make. Switzer Fellow Dave Kramer of EcoLogic Development Fund is helping them find common ground to create a sustainable fishery that will serve everyone.

From denial of service attacks to server crashes to day-long disruptions of Google Drive, almost all organizations are familiar with threats to their information security. Given that digital information is more central than ever, it's worrisome that the history of data security is littered with failure. Organizations seeking to be better prepared for and more resilient in response to information threats may want to draw on a far larger and older source of lessons on information security — the 3.5 billion year history of life.

Over the years ecologists have shown how biological diversity benefits the health of small, natural communities. New analysis by ecologists at UC Santa Cruz demonstrates that even higher levels of biological diversity are necessary to maintain ecosystem health in larger landscapes over long periods of time. Read more