Conservation Science

The prime culprit in all this is the green crab. And as Brian Beal explains, green crab populations can be hard to control. He's professor of marine ecology at the University of Maine in Machias. "Nobody really eats them and that's the problem," Beal says. "They're just so highly fecund, they have lots of eggs, there's no real predator that can keep them in check." Listen to the full story

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A citizen science project to study nesting populations of common backyard songbirds started recently as campus researchers began visiting the yards of 60 volunteer families across western Massachusetts for the "Neighborhood Nestwatch" project.

For millennia, Colorado's Yampa River Valley has followed the rhythms of wildlife mating and migration, the habits of elk and grouse and bear. The arrival of ranching in the 1880s altered the pattern a little, but radical change didn't occur until the last half of the 20th century. That's when the big ranches began to be broken up into small ranchettes and vacation-home lots, the kind of low-density exurban sprawl responsible for habitat fragmentation across the West.

Laws alone do not save wildlife. The Endangered Species Act (ESA), one of the most effective environmental policies written in the past century, has pulled dozens of species back from the brink of extinction and holds out a lifeline for many others.

"This set of studies from around the world is a wake-up call," said Rebecca Shaw, a climate scientist and associate vice president for Environmental Defense Fund. "The truth is that we have been struggling to conserve the nature we depend on for clean air and clean water without climate change. These studies show it is going to get harder and more costly to conserve nature in the future.

Moreover, adds ecologist Shaye Wolf of the Center for Biological Diversity in San Francisco, this analysis doesn’t account for additional factors, such as whether a migrating species’ food will exist in its newfound home or whether the animal will confront new or more aggressive predators and competitors. Still, accounting for species dispersal impacts “represents an important new contribution to evaluating whether animals will be able to keep pace with climate change,” she says. Read the full story

We'd probably like to think that clean, safe food goes hand in hand with pristine nature, with lots of wildlife and clean water. But in the part of California that grows a lot of the country's lettuce and spinach, these two goals have come into conflict. Environmental advocates say a single-minded focus on food safety has forced growers of salad greens to strip vegetation from around their fields, harming wildlife and polluting streams and rivers.

Preserving The World's Big Cats: The big, wild cats of the world aren't faring well. Humans and developments cover land they used to roam. Can we share the planet, or is the battle for preservation one we are always fighting? Biological corridors are one new effort at preservation; from Mexico to Argentina for jaguars and through the Indo–Himalayan region for tigers. How do these corridors work? Dr. Alan Rabinowitz has worked with warring armies, government officials and local civilians to set land aside for these animals.