Climate vulnerability assessment for Pacific salmon and steelhead in the California Current Large Marine Ecosystem.

Major ecological realignments are already occurring in response to climate change. To be successful, conservation strategies now need to account for geographical patterns in traits sensitive to climate change, as well as climate threats to species-level diversity. As part of an effort to provide such information, we conducted a climate vulnerability assessment that included all anadromous Pacific salmon and steelhead (Oncorhynchus spp.) population units listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. Using an expert-based scoring system, we ranked 20 attributes for the 28 listed units and 5 additional units. Attributes captured biological sensitivity, or the strength of linkages between each listing unit and the present climate; climate exposure, or the magnitude of projected change in local environmental conditions; and adaptive capacity, or the ability to modify phenotypes to cope with new climatic conditions. Each listing unit was then assigned one of four vulnerability categories. Units ranked most vulnerable overall were Chinook (O. tshawytscha) in the California Central Valley, coho (O. kisutch) in California and southern Oregon, sockeye (O. nerka) in the Snake River Basin, and spring-run Chinook in the interior Columbia and Willamette River Basins. We identified units with similar vulnerability profiles using a hierarchical cluster analysis. Life history characteristics, especially freshwater and estuary residence times, interplayed with gradations in exposure from south to north and from coastal to interior regions to generate landscape-level patterns within each species. Nearly all listing units faced high exposures to projected increases in stream temperature, sea surface temperature, and ocean acidification, but other aspects of exposure peaked in particular regions. Anthropogenic factors, especially migration barriers, habitat degradation, and hatchery influence, have reduced the adaptive capacity of most steelhead and salmon populations. Enhancing adaptive capacity is essential to mitigate for the increasing threat of climate change. Collectively, these results provide a framework to support recovery planning that considers climate impacts on the majority of West Coast anadromous salmonids

The Global Environmental Novel And The Politics Of Food

Consumption drives both global capitalism and the lives of literary texts, which may be consumed in two senses: they are purchased and they are read. Most literally, consumption means ingesting food. To consume is also to use environmental resources. In this dissertation, I scrutinize the entanglement of these several modes of consumption. I focus on food systems in an emergent literary genre, the “global environmental novel”: the contemporary novel that illuminates the intertwining of globalization and the environment. Such fictions come from both global South and North. I discuss contemporary authors from South Africa (Zakes Mda and Zoë Wicomb), South Asia (Amitav Ghosh and Arundhati Roy), and the US (Ruth Ozeki), as well as predecessors from South Asia (Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay) and Ghana (Ama Ata Aidoo). Operating at the intersection of postcolonial studies, environmental humanities, and food studies, I situate novels in relation to social movements that invoke food, globalization, and environment. I also engage with ecofeminism, queer theory, modernist studies, and theories of the contemporary novel. The project explores the multifaceted social and environmental injustices, as well as possibilities for resistance, that are encapsulated or indexed by food. Food politics, I argue, are key to the global environmental novel: both in the realist sense that environmental justice struggles cluster around food, and in informing novelistic strategies to manage the scalar challenges of globalization and global environment. Such mammoth objects provoke a representational crisis: how can we picture (let alone save) something as large as the globe? To resort to abstraction or generalization is to universalize, to flatten out the unevenness of contributions and vulnerabilities to environmental catastrophe among different populations. To instead keep local particularity present while representing globality, global environmental novels synthesize the polyscalar facility of narrative fiction with the polyscalar nature of food politics. Food is immediate, somatic, quotidian, and intimate. Eating cultures and food access are also key to community and cultural identity. And food systems are expressions of power under global capitalism. Resonating across all these scales, food politics are an avenue to global yet specific narratives of entanglement between globalization and the environment

Noise levels and sources in the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary and the St. Lawrence River Estuary

Although ambient (background) noise in the ocean is a topic that has been widely studied since pre-World War II, the effects of noise on marine organisms has only been a focus of concern for the last 25 years. The main point of concern has been the potential of noise to affect the health and behavior of marine mammals. The Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary (SBNMS) is a site where the degradation of habitat due to increasing noise levels is a concern because it is a feeding ground and summer haven for numerous species of marine mammals. Ambient noise in the ocean is defined as “the part of the total noise background observed with an omnidirectional hydrophone.” It is an inherent characteristic of the medium having no specific point source. Ambient noise is comprised of a number of components that contribute to the “noise level” in varying degrees depending on where the noise is being measured. This report describes the current understanding of ambient noise and existing levels in the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary. (PDF contains 32 pages.