Archive for the "S. L. Pimm" Category

  • Species at the Brink – An interview with Stuart Pimm on NPR

    Stuart Pimm tracks extinction, from Madagascar to the Amazon to South Florida, and maybe your backyard. Out in the world where Cuban crocodiles and Indian tarantulas, Caspian seals and Florida panthers are in trouble. He tracks species one-by-one — panther by panther, antbird by antbird — in the Everglades and Brazilian rain forest. And he tracks the big picture — where, he warns, a quarter, maybe half, of the world’s species could be gone in a century. Maybe half!

  • A Conversation With Stuart L. Pimm Asking ‘Why Do Species Go Extinct?’

    Alex di Suvero for The New York Times ‘I realized that extinction was something that as a scientist, I could study. I could ask, Why do species go extinct?’ - Stuart L. Pimm function getSharePasskey() { return \\'ex=1383541200&en=8fc1cdb2508d800a&ei=5124\\';} function getShareURL() { return encodeURIComponent(\\'http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/04/science/04conv.html\\'); } function getShareHeadline() { return encodeURIComponent(\\'Asking ‘Why Do Species Go Extinct?’\\'); } function getShareDescription() { return encodeURIComponent(\\'Stuart L. Pimm has made one of the grimmest topics on earth — extinction — his specialty.\\'); } function getShareKeywords() { return encodeURIComponent(\\'Endangered and Extinct

  • Alpine ‘Boulder Bunny’ Imperiled by Global Warming

    SAN FRANCISCO— Conservation groups filed two lawsuits today seeking protection of the American pika, whose survival is imperiled by global warming. The groups went to state court seeking protection of the pika under the California Endangered Species Act and to a federal court seeking protection under the federal Endangered Species Act. more >

  • Oil development may destroy richest part of the Amazon rainforest

    688,000 square kilometers (170 million acres) of the western Amazon is under concession for oil and gas development, according to a new study published in the August 13 edition of the open-access journal PLoS ONE. The results suggest the region, which is considered by scientists to be the most biodiverse on the planet and is home to some of the world's last uncontacted indigenous groups, is at great risk of environmental degradation. Tracking some 180 oil and gas projects operated across Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and western Brazil, researchers from Save America's Forests, Land Is Life, and Duke

  • Nobel Prize Winning Climate and Conservation Scientists Call Visionary Plan to Protect Vast Canadian Boreal Forest Unprecedented

    SEATTLE, July 21 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- As news spreads of Ontario's commitment to protect over 55 million acres of Canada's Boreal Forest, an area the size of the United Kingdom, leading international scientists and conservationists are expressing their strong support for Premier Dalton McGuinty's science-based leadership. More

  • Study: Species math wrong

    Species already listed as endangered may be racing toward extinction 100 times faster than originally thought, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder. Author Brett Melbourne says today's extinction-risk models have drastically underestimated the speed at which endangered species will perish. "It's a mathematical misdiagnosis," said Melbourne, an assistant professor in the ecology and evolutionary biology department at CU-Boulder.  More

  • Conservation Groups Plan Legal Action to Prevent the Extinction of the Cape Sable Seaside Sparrow

    WASHINGTON, DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, Jun. 30 -/E-Wire/-- The Center for Biological Diversity, Florida Biodiversity Project, and Natural Resources Defense Council today notified the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that they will challenge the agency’s failure to adequately protect the critical habitat of the highly endangered Cape Sable seaside sparrow.  Read full press release

  • Tomorrow’s Elders

    By Tim Drake www.primitivepursuits.net Research suggests that young people who spend time in nature grow up to have a greater awareness of environmental issues, yet Richard Louv points out in Last Child in the woods that children of this generation are spending far less time in nature.   David Orr puts it simply:  “The ecological crisis is in every way a crisis of education.”  Despite evidence that ecological literacy and time spent outdoors is critical, the National Environmental Education & Training Foundation reports that, “U.S. environmental and

  • Cape Sable seaside sparrow’s fate tied to its Everglades habitat

    For such a drab looking creature, the Cape Sable seaside sparrow has sure had a colorful history. Its name seems bigger than its bulk. It has survived fire, flood and human meddling, yet its numbers have dwindled drastically in recent years. Now, the fate of this scruffy little puff of feathers depends on the restoration of the Everglades, the only place on the planet it can be found. More....

  • Tropical Bugs: Squashed by Global Warming?

     It's fashionable to fret about how climate change will harm polar bears and penguins. But scientists now predict that, at least among insects, global warming will take its biggest toll in the tropics--home to more than half the world's species. Climate change models agree that temperatures will increase more near the poles than near the equator. Where it's currently chilly, a couple of degrees of initial warming could launch a positive feedback loop: as snow and ice melt, they can't reflect heat from the earth, which then warms even more. Because tropical warming will be less extreme, scientists sometimes suppose that

  • ENVIRONMENT: “Doctor” Nature in Danger

    Caribbean snail (Conus geographus). Credit:Kerry Matz CAPE TOWN, South Africa, May 3 (Tierramérica) - "When we harm nature, we are harming ourselves," says Aaron Bernstein, a doctor at Harvard Medical School and one of the authors of the upcoming book "Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity". "Few people realise that our health is directly tied to the health of the natural world," Bernstein told Tierramérica Bernstein and Harvard colleague Eric Chivian wrote and edited contributions from more than 100 leading

  • Policy And Geography Shape Tropical Parks’ Success In Stemming Deforestation, New Paper Finds

    DURHAM, N.C. th Tropical moist forests are home to a majority of the Earth's terrestrial species, yet human activities such as logging, road building and agriculture destroy between one and two million square kilometers of these vital habitats every decade. But a new paper by a trio of Duke University researchers, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offers cause for cautious optimism th with a major caveat.

  • Watching the detectives

    Protected areas don’t always protect as well as they should, study reveals Conservation projects often hinge on areas of land being given protection, but little is known about how well many protected areas actually do their job. Studying four of the world’s major moist tropical forests, a group of Duke University researchers led by Stuart Pimm found that inaccessibility can be a tree’s best friend. Protected areas within the Amazon and

  • A scientist asks: What has the New Media done for me?

    Stuart Pimm The “old media” — the main way I communicate my ideas and results has served me very well, thank you very much. With colleagues, I write my papers, they are reviewed, modified, submitted again, and published — typically a couple of years after we first obtained the key results. It’s a complicated game. For some, there’s an urgent need to see their results in print quickly. Frankly, most science can wait a bit. The main issue is fame. Getting cited is important — in fact, it can be

  • CBS NEWS/60 MINUTES’ MIKE WALLACE CHALLENGES THE WORLD’S GREATEST MINDS TO PREDICT THE FUTURE

    As the press release for Mike’s book “The Way We Will Be 50 Years From Today” puts it: what will our lives by like in half a century? How advanced will technology have become? How will the world be better and how will it be worse? These are just some of the intriguing questions legendary CBS newsman Mike Wallace puts to 60 of some of the world’s brightest, imaginative and forward-thinking individuals in the world —including more than 15 winners of the Nobel and other equivalent prizes in the many sciences the Nobels do not cover. 2006 Heineken Prize winner for

  • Online chat, on Guns, Germs, and Steel with Stuart Pimm and Frank Stasio

    Dear DukeReads members,Thank you for joining DukeReads' fifth online chat, on Guns, Germs, and Steel with Stuart Pimm and Frank Stasio. It is great that so many of you participated. If you would like to watch a video from the session, please click http://quicktime.oit.duke.edu/news/dukereads_pimm.mov (If the video does not load, try pasting the link directly into your web browser. Please note that you will need QuickTime installed on your computer to watch the

  • No Room at the Top

    Climate change forces birds to live at higher and higher altitudes—until there’s nowhere to go ©Laure Neish/iStock.com By Eric Wagner January-March (Vol. 9, No. 1) Sekercioglu, C.H. et al. 2008. Climate change, elevational range shifts, and bird extinctions. Conservation Biology 22(1):140-150. Harris, G. and S.L. Pimm. 2008. Range size and extinction risk in forest birds. Conservation Biology 22(1):163-171. In Conservation Magazine's Journal

  • A Response to the Great Green Land Grab

  • An Intro to A Scientist Audits the Earth

  • Five Questions with Conservation Biologist Stuart Pimm

     Individual actions can reverse some global trends By Stuart Pimm I participate in the Great Backyard Bird Count and winter bird counting for Cornell’s Laboratory of Ornithology. Is this kind of information helpful in determining habitat availability, changes in habitat and biodiversity? Are there other “citizen science” opportunities to monitor animals and their habitats? More

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