Polar Oceans in Peril and a Planet at Risk

The snow-covered lands and icy waters of these polar regions are, for many people, the purest examples of true wilderness left on this planet. While the Arctic has been home to indigenous peoples for millennia, Antarctica has only played host to visiting explorers and scientists. Both polar oceans are, however, home to distinctive wildlife that has adapted to the extreme environmental conditions, such as the Arctic's polar bears and the Antarctic's penguins. Polar waters provide rich feeding grounds that sustain large populations of seabirds and marine mammals, including the majority of the world's great whales.Indicators of our planet's health, the poles provide us with an early warning that we are compromising the Earth's ability to sustain life as we know it. It is already too late to avoid profound negative changes at the poles. But, we can limit further impacts by establishing boundaries that stop the commercial fishing fleets and the oil and gas industries from plundering and polluting these already-damaged ecosystems.The profound physical changes happening at the ends of the Earth are a wake-up call that we ignore at our peril. How we treat the Polar Oceans has major consequences for the planet as a whole. Our generation has a unique opportunity and responsibility to take action to bring us back from the brink of runaway climate change, and to protect some of the most fragile and essential ecosystems on Earth.There is a compelling body of scientific evidence that demonstrates that setting aside large areas of the ocean from industrial activities, such as fishing and oil and gas extraction, provides protection for valuable species and habitats, maintains important ecosystem functions and allows degraded areas to recover. This is even more important for the Polar Oceans, since the Arctic and Antarctic are warming faster than the rest of the globe and so are under increased stress.Creating marine reserves in the Polar Oceans will make them both more resilient to the impacts of climate change and will help prevent further, catastrophic climate change.Greenpeace is calling upon the United Nations and governments around the world to commit to a course of action to save the Arctic and Antarctic

The promise and peril of intensive-site-based ecological research: insights from the Hubbard Brook ecosystem study

Abstract. Ecological research is increasingly concentrated at particular locations or sites. This trend reflects a variety of advantages of intensive, site-based research, but also raises important questions about the nature of such spatially delimited research: how well does site based research represent broader areas, and does it constrain scientific discovery?We provide an overview of these issues with a particular focus on one prominent intensive research site: the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest (HBEF), New Hampshire, USA. Among the key features of intensive sites are: long-term, archived data sets that provide a context for new discoveries and the elucidation of ecological mechanisms; the capacity to constrain inputs and parameters, and to validate models of complex ecological processes; and the intellectual cross-fertilization among disciplines in ecological and environmental sciences. The feasibility of scaling up ecological observations from intensive sites depends upon both the phenomenon of interest and the characteristics of the site. An evaluation of deviation metrics for the HBEF illustrates that, in some respects, including sensitivity and recovery of streams and trees from acid deposition, this site is representative of the Northern Forest region, of which HBEF is a part. However, the mountainous terrain and lack of significant agricultural legacy make the HBEF among the least disturbed sites in the Northern Forest region. Its relatively cool, wet climate contributes to high stream flow compared to other sites. These similarities and differences between the HBEF and the region can profoundly influence ecological patterns and processes and potentially limit the generality of observations at this and other intensive sites. Indeed, the difficulty of scaling up may be greatest for ecological phenomena that are sensitive to historical disturbance and that exhibit the greatest spatiotemporal variation, such as denitrification in soils and the dynamics of bird communities. Our research shows that end member sites for some processes often provide important insights into the behavior of inherently heterogeneous ecological processes. In the current era of rapid environmental and biological change, key ecological responses at intensive sites will reflect both specific local drivers and regional trends

Bays in Peril: A Forecast for Freshwater Flows to Texas Estuaries

Takes a look at increasing water demands in Texas, and what would happen to the inflows to the seven major estuaries if existing water permits were fully used and wastewater reuse increased. Provides recommendations for action

The Extent and spatial scale of connectivity among reef fish populations: implications for marine protected areas designated for fisheries enhancement

Enthusiasm for the use of no-take marine protected areas (MPAs) as management tools for the protection and enhancement of coral reef fishes is widespread. However, evidence that such marine reserves actually enhance fishery yields is limited, primarily because of difficulties in quantifying the exchange of individuals—especially larvae—between local populations within and outside the protected area. Knowledge of the extent and spatial scale of this connectivity is of vital importance for the effective design and implementation of marine reserves intended as fishery management tools. We review our current understanding of connectivity among coral reef populations, including the role of important determining factors such as pelagic larval duration, larval behavior, and hydrodynamics. We also discuss artificial and natural tagging methods that potentially can be used to track movements of larvae between marine reserves and surrounding waters. To illustrate the application of such methods, we discuss ECONAR (Ecological CONnections Among Reefs), a new, regional-scale research project designed to measure the extent of connectivity among populations of coral reef fishes in the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System

Pollinators In Peril: A Systematic Status Review of North American and Hawaiian Native Bees

While the decline of European honeybees in the United States and beyond has been well publicized in recent years, the more than 4,000 species of native bees in North America and Hawaii have been much less documented. Although these native bees are not as well known as honeybees, they play a vital role in functioning ecosystems and also provide more than $3 billion dollars in fruit-pollination services each year just in the United States.For this first-of-its-kind analysis, the Center for Biological Diversity conducted a systematic review of the status of all 4,337 North American and Hawaiian native bees.For this report we assembled a list of all valid native bee species and their current conservation status as established by state, federal or independent researchers. We then conducted a comprehensive review of all literature on those species as well as records documenting their occurrence. From that research we identified those bees with sufficient data to assess their status, including current and historical range, behavioral observations and studies, arriving at the first comprehensive analysis of the status of North American and Hawaiian native bees.We also highlight five native solitary bee species that are seriously imperiled. These remarkable, underappreciated pollinators offer a snapshot of the threats driving the alarming declines in many native bee species — declines that must be reversed to save these irreplaceable native bees and the health of the ecosystems that depend on them

“Introduction: Oceanic Archives, Indigenous Epistempologies, and Transpacific American Studies”

Excerpt from Oceanic Archives, Indigenous Epistempologies, and Transpacific American Studies, edited by Yuan Shu, Otto Heim, and Kendall Johnso

Promises and Perils of Mining Software Package Ecosystem Data

The use of third-party packages is becoming increasingly popular and has led to the emergence of large software package ecosystems with a maze of inter-dependencies. Since the reliance on these ecosystems enables developers to reduce development effort and increase productivity, it has attracted the interest of researchers: understanding the infrastructure and dynamics of package ecosystems has given rise to approaches for better code reuse, automated updates, and the avoidance of vulnerabilities, to name a few examples. But the reality of these ecosystems also poses challenges to software engineering researchers, such as: How do we obtain the complete network of dependencies along with the corresponding versioning information? What are the boundaries of these package ecosystems? How do we consistently detect dependencies that are declared but not used? How do we consistently identify developers within a package ecosystem? How much of the ecosystem do we need to understand to analyse a single component? How well do our approaches generalise across different programming languages and package ecosystems? In this chapter, we review promises and perils of mining the rich data related to software package ecosystems available to software engineering researchers.Comment: Submitted as a Book Chapte