July 26, 2018

Ecologists and evolutionary biologist have strived to understand the abundance and distribution of species – a key component needed for management and conservation. A special issue of the journal Remote Sensing is inviting manuscript submissions to advance the study of wildlife occurrence and distribution.

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May 9, 2018

Trees falling as fragile forests become cropland is a visual shorthand for the environmental costs exporting countries pay to meet lucrative global demands for food. Yet a new study reveals a counterintuitive truth: Importing food also damages homeland ecology.

In this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at Michigan State University (MSU) and their colleagues show that the decisions domestic farmers must make as imported food changes the crop market can damage the environment.

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May 7, 2018

The Mountain Sentinels collaborative network is working to understand the most important activities and the most significant barriers to success common across collaborative research projects worldwide. The group has developed a survey to gather insights from both researchers and practitioners with collaborative experience across all systems (not just mountains). 

The survey is offered in English, Spanish, Chinese and soon, French. It is estimated that the survey will take approximately 20 minutes.

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Sept. 12, 2017

Delta: A place where sediment carried downstream by a river enters the sea, forming a fan of sand or mud.

Although deltas make up just 1 percent of the world's land, they're home to more than half a billion people -- and to fertile ecosystems such as mangroves and marshes. Deltas also serve as economic hotspots. They support much of the world's fisheries and forest products, and are major food production areas for many nations.

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Sept. 8, 2017

Sand, spanning miles of beaches, carpeting vast oceans and deserts, is a visual metaphor for limitless resources. Yet researchers in this week’s journal Science seize another metaphor –  sand in an hourglass, marking time running out.
Sand is the literal foundation of urban development across the globe, a key ingredient of concrete, asphalt, glass, and electronics. It is cheap and easily extracted. Scientists in the United States and Germany say that easy access has bred a careless understanding of the true global costs of sand mining and consumption.

Sand mining across the world is being linked to coastal erosion, habitat destruction and the spread of invasive species. Standing pools of water created by sand mining become breeding sites for malaria-carrying mosquitoes. The negative consequences of mining are not felt at the point of consumption, but rather in poorer regions where sand is mined. Tempting profits from large-scale sand trade spawns organized crime and international conflict. There are indications that attempts at regulation have inspired more illegal and unscrupulous profiteering.

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July 13, 2017

While science usually gets recognized for churning up big answers, Michigan State University (MSU) researchers are mining the big questions.

Sustainability scholars across the globe have made the leap to embrace integrative and interdisciplinary research, yet where to best place that energy hadn’t been well defined. In the journal Ecology and Society, a focus for understanding and managing coupled human and natural systems is gaining clarity thanks to surveys that asked scholars what were the most important questions 

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March 9, 2017

A unified paradigm to meet growing global challenges has been recently recognized by the Ecological Society of America (ESA) as “the greatest contribution” to sustainability science that integrates ecological and social sciences.

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Feb. 18, 2017

Scientists studying a number of aspects of earth system governance are invited to submit abstracts fort he 2017 Lund Conference on Earth System Governance, which will be held Oct. 9-11, 2017 in Lund, Sweden. Abstracts are due March 15, 2017.

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Sept. 20, 2016

Boston and Baltimore. Miami and Minneapolis. Phoenix and Los Angeles. Fanned across the U.S. and in locations from coast to prairie to desert, what do these cities have in common? Perhaps how their human residents tend that icon of America, the urban lawn.

What's right outside our doors -- our lawns -- may be one of the best indicators of where cities and towns need to address sustainability, according to Peter Groffman of the City University of New York.

Groffman is one of 13 recipients of grants made in 2016 by the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems (CNH) program, which supports research that examines the complex interactions between human and natural systems. Total funding for 2016 CNH grants is $16.7 million.

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Sept. 2, 2016

A special issue entitled “Telecoupling: A New Frontier for Global Sustainability” is being planned for the interdisciplinary journal Ecology and Society. The special issue seeks to bring together the latest advances and applications in the field of telecoupling to tackling real-world sustainability issues across diverse systems and at local to global scales.

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