Mapping out solutions for marine conservation

Armed with field notes, aerial photos and GIS software, ecologists can piece together a pretty clear map of what’s what in the terrestrial world. But shift the scene offshore and the picture gets murky. Depths and distances make observation difficult. Tides, currents and migrating sea life keep oceans and coastal waters in flux.
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Putting a Value on the Environment

Americans would willingly pay a one-time fee of $24 to protect tropical rainforests. A national park in Indonesia increases the incomes of nearby farmers by up to 10 percent annually through improved water flow.Taxpayers in the Carolinas indicate it’s worth $139 per person to prevent declines in water quality in the Catawba River.
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Testing the Currents of Global Climate Change

When most of us think about global warming, we think about the whole world heating up. But over time, it is more likely that some regions will get warmer than others,while some might even get cooler. Some places will get drier, while others will get wetter.
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Netting New Insights on Turtle Declines

Sea turtles are among Earth’s oldest species. They’ve survived disasters, plagues and predators for more than 110 million years. Today, however, hundreds of thousands of them are accidentally snared in fishing gear and killed or maimed each year. All seven species are endangered or threatened.
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Tradeoffs to Growing Trees for Carbon Storage

Many scientists and policymakers believe that planting more trees,which remove and store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, can be an effective strategy for combating global warming.
But multi-institutional studies led by Robert Jackson, Nicholas Professor of Global Environmental Change at Duke University, suggest that local tradeoffs to growing big tree plantations could outweigh the benefits in some places.
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Addressing Disparities in Children’s Health

All babies deserve a healthy start in life. But in the American South, cases of premature birth and low birth weight, once on the wane, have risen in recent years especially among minorities.
Researchers at a new Duke University center, launched this year with a $7.74 million EPA grant, are working to understand this ominous shift and help reverse it. 
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Working Where Science and Policy Meet

Like the tides that ebb and flow across the ecosystems he studies, Rafe Sagarin is naturally pulled in two directions.
On one hand, he’s a dispassionate scientist, an old-school marine ecologist who uses basic observations of nature in his studies of species abundance and the long-term responses of intertidal communities to human impacts such as climate change.
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Benefits Flow from a Restored Urban ‘Swamp’

Three years after a massive restoration, a once heavily eroded and polluted stretch of wetlands along a North Carolina creek is once again showing signs of health and helping to reduce pollution, bacteria and sedimentation in drinking water supplies downstream.
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The Nicholas Environmental Notebook I:
12 things you should know about the environment

A 12-part series of commentaries on the state of the environment, designed to bring crucial environmental issues to the attention of the public and the decision makers who will shape policy for years to come. These commentaries were printed in The New York Times in 2004 and 2005 on the dates indicated.
A .pdf of the entire series is available here >

Click on the links below to read each commentary