ICYMI: Stan Gehrt on McGraw's
Coyote Research
Last week, about 30 McGraw members, team and guests enjoyed an update on the Urban Coyote Project, presented by Dr. Stan Gehrt, director of McGraw's Center for Wildlife Research.
Over the course of his talk, Dr. Gehrt dispelled some rumors about coyotes (they're nothing like the cartoon character that chased the Road Runner), showed the latest technologies in coyote research (a collar camera that gives a coyote's-eye view) and looked ahead to milestones in the ongoing Urban Coyote Project, now in its 17th year.
None of this is possible without the continued efforts of McGraw's members, whose support helps to enable this groundbreaking research.
It was all quite a lot to take in, so we recorded it for posterity.
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Outdoors Voices Heard in Florida's Legislature
By Ed Tamron/TRCP.org
Photo by Vincent Lammin/flickr
Earlier this month, more than 500 outdoors enthusiasts went to Tallahassee, Florida, to lobby state officials on a bill that would send water south to restore and renourish the Everglades.
One day after the meetings, the Florida Senate passed the bill. Now the companion bill must pass in the Florida House of Representatives, and advocates are confident knowing that our faces and stories will be in their minds when that time comes.
While final passage of the bill would be a huge win for Florida's recreational saltwater anglers, this is only the first step toward blocking toxic discharges from Lake Okeechobee and restoring the flow of clean fresh water to the Everglades and Florida Bay. There's more work to be done.
We can have all the science and gather all the numbers, but at the end of the day, this is what matters: Our voices, our stories, and our heartfelt passion have the power to sway politics, move mountains, and, yes, save one of the most treasured fisheries in the world.
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Plastic Debris Has Floated All the Way to the Arctic Ocean
By Chris Mooney/The Washington Post
Photo by Fiona Hunt/flickr
Drifts of floating plastic that humans have dumped into the world's oceans are flowing into the pristine waters of the Arctic as a result of a powerful system of currents that deposits waste in the icy seas east of Greenland and north of Scandinavia.
In 2013, as part of a seven-month circumnavigation of the Arctic Ocean, scientists aboard the research vessel Tara documented a profusion of tiny pieces of plastic in the Greenland and Barents seas, where the final limb of the Gulf Stream system delivers Atlantic waters northward. The researchers dub this region the "dead end for floating plastics" after their long surf of the world's oceans.
The researchers say this is just the beginning of the plastic migration to Arctic waters.
"It's only been about 60 years since we started using plastic industrially, and the usage and the production has been increasing ever since," said Carlos Duarte, one of the study's co-authors and director of the Red Sea Research Center at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. "So, most of the plastic that we have disposed in the ocean is still now in transit to the Arctic."
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Conservation
Can Support Economic Development
By Whitney Flanagan/TRCP.org
Photo by Geoff Parsons/flickr
In southern West Virginia, coal fueled the state's economy for generations. But in recent years, the industry has slowed, and local communities are struggling economically. By working directly with community members and local, state, and federal partners across the Appalachian region,
we're helping these communities transition
by demonstrating how conservation can also support economic development.
Through our
Working Forest Fund
, a dedicated source of bridge capital, we purchased more than 32,000 acres of privately owned forestland that was vulnerable to fragmentation and development in the southern part of the state. We are now working with the West Virginia Department of Natural Resources to co-manage the property as a sustainable working forest, safeguarding the timber economy and forestry-based jobs while providing habitat for reintroduced elk-which had not been seen in the region for almost 150 years. This property is now the state's largest conserved block of prime elk habitat, and it's open to the public as a wildlife management area.
The prospect of bringing elk back to West Virginia for both wildlife viewing and hunting purposes has triggered excitement across the region, not least for the tourism opportunities that could drive spending in the rural communities that need it most.
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Forest Advocates
Fear Agriculture Growth in Africa
By Emma Bryce/Anthropocene
Photo by Rod Waddington/flickr
In recent decades, the global agricultural market has been fixated on the rich, arable soils of Southeast Asia and South America, where commercial farming has wrought massive destruction on tropical forests. Now a new study finds that in Africa, where land and labor are cheaper, commercial agriculture is increasing, due to both regional and international forces. That's a worrying development, bringing with it the threat of intensive forest fragmentation.
Writing
in Environmental Research Letters
, the researchers note that the trend they've identified in their study also provides an incentive to start managing forest degradation in Africa before it spins out of control.
To conduct their survey, the Stanford University researchers focused on 25 sub-Saharan African countries which all had at least one percent of tropical forest cover. They analyzed country-level agricultural data from 1986 to 2013, to determine the extent and future risk of crop expansion into tropical forests.
The analysis showed that over this period, almost all commercial crops typically farmed in the region xpanded in the 25 countries. Interestingly, most of that occurred to meet the demand of African markets, not satisfy international exports.
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