Nathan Rott: Decline of Hunting Threatens Conservation→

NPR:

“A new survey by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service shows that today, only about 5 percent of Americans, 16 years old and older, actually hunt. That’s half of what it was 50 years ago and the decline is expected to accelerate over the next decade. Meanwhile other wildlife-centered activities, like birdwatching, hiking and photography, are rapidly growing, as American society and attitudes towards wildlife change. The shift is being welcomed by some who morally oppose the sport, but it’s also leading to a crisis.

State wildlife agencies and the country’s wildlife conservation system are heavily dependent on sportsmen for funding. Money generated from license fees and excise taxes on guns, ammunition and angling equipment provide about 60 percent of the funding for state wildlife agencies, which manage most of the wildlife in the U.S.

This user-play, user-pay funding system for wildlife conservation has been lauded and emulated around the world. It has been incredibly successful at restoring the populations of North American game animals, some of which were once hunted nearly to extinction. But with the slide in hunting participation expected to speed up in the next 10 years, widening funding shortfalls that already exist, there’s a growing sense of urgency in the wildlife conservation community to broaden that funding base. ”

Adam Hinterthuer: The Life of Steve Carpenter→

UW-Madison Center for Limnology

“It’s been nearly six months since Steve Carpenter officially stepped down as director of the UW–Madison Center for Limnology. Yet, despite updating his resume with the title “free-range scientist,” he is still trying to figure out how to not come in to the office. “One thing I’m working on is how to retire, which I have so far completely failed at,” says Carpenter, the Stephen Alfred Forbes Professor of Integrative Biology (formerly Zoology).

Case in point: He never did go bow hunting this season. Even though he bought his first bow and found enough time to practice to get comfortable from 50 yards, he didn’t put it to much use. “Some of it was rain, but why couldn’t I make more time? It wasn’t always rain,” he laments. The problem is there’s still so much science to do.

For example, Carpenter recently attended an event on the “roots of creativity and innovation in science” at the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) campus in Irvine, California. It was an invitation-only affair for NAS members like him and a select group of actors, poets, writers and filmmakers.

As with so much else in life, Carpenter found this combination of art and science too exciting to refuse. He has a hard time saying “no” to new ideas and collaborations, which probably helps explain his impressive career.”

A gifted scientist that has greatly increased our understanding of lakes.

Nina Leopold Bradley: Sense of Place→

The Aldo Leopold Foundation (previously published in The Leopold Outlook)

“Today I speak to you of my own experience, my own deep attachment to a particular place. This attachment happened over time, with my family, on a sand farm along the Wisconsin River – land that was neither grand nor dramatic, but mundane, humbled, and degraded. It seems to have happened by slow accrual, like the growth of a coral reef. I dwell in this place and am finally apart of this place...

On our sand farm along the Wisconsin River, I was able to get inside the scenery and the landscape. I became a living part of a living place. As we worked with family, friends, and neighbors, to restore health to the abused land, we were experiencing the slow sensitizing of people to land. We learned how to look, how to dwell and how to think about land. This was sick land but rich country for the growth of perception.

No one knew better than my father, Aldo Leopold, the joy of wild, unspoiled land. His love of wilderness was passionate and enduring. He had spent immense energy in protecting wilderness and trying to understand its dramatic complexity. He realized that wilderness was important in part so that we might retain the capacity to compare unspoiled land with lands more intensively altered by human economic activity. Leopold’s rationale for wilderness protection was not just recreational or scenic, but scientific, biological, political, economic and deeply aesthetic.”

Cody Nelson: Shorter Winters and Algal Populations→

NPR:

“A team led by University of Minnesota-Duluth researchers, that was the point: They want to know how shortening winters — and less ice cover on lakes — may increase the presence of harmful algae blooms and impact the fishery. Aside from people who ice fish, the general assumption is that not much happens in lakes during winter, said Andy Bramburger, a research associate from the U’s Duluth campus.

The biggest effect of climate change on lakes isn’t necessarily how warm it gets, but how cold it doesn’t get. These warmer winters are shorter, so more sunlight can reach the water earlier, jumpstarting algae production and affecting the lake’s biology.”

Bill Lindeke: Minnesota's Capitol versus Wisconsin's →

streetsMN:

“It’s time once again for the Minnesota legislative session, the annual period of time when laws are debated at length, stall out completely, and then get decided at the very last minute with no prior knowledge of what’s in them. For those who are into politics, it’s a fun time.

But I want to take today and discuss an open secret about the Minnesota state capitol located in Saint Paul, Minnesota: it’s terrible urbanism...

I always contrast the lifeless Minnesota State Capitol in my mind with the amazing example of the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison. Both buildings are beautiful, but the key difference is that the Wisconsin building is surrounded by vibrant urbanism. It is in every way the gold standard for how a state capitol and its surrounding government buildings can fit seamlessly into a walkable city.”

Sophie Yeo: Resilience to Climate Change→

Pacific Standard:

“Kodiak Island Borough is a remote community of around 14,000 people that spreads down the coast of the Alaska Peninsula and across 16 islands. It sits downwind from a cluster of active volcanoes, and its six villages are accessible only by boat or plane. It is home to 3,500 oversized bears.

It is also one of the safest places to live in the United States—at least when it comes to climate change. A recent survey of America’s 3,135 counties concluded that this inhospitable stretch of land is the most climate-resilient place in the entire nation...

The results shed light on the vast inequalities in how different parts of the U.S. will deal with such hazards. While places like Kodiak Island are expected to fare well, residents of areas like Appalachia, the southeast, and western Texas are on course to suffer far worse than the average American.”

Jeff Gillies: Lake Superior's Big Wave→

Environmental Monitor:

“A pair of lonesome data buoys bobbing off Michigan’s storm-whipped Lake Superior shore were suddenly the stars of the state this fall when they captured the largest waves ever measured on the Great Lakes.

The buoys, near Granite Island and Munising, each recorded 28.8-foot significant wave heights during a storm that caused hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage along the coast. The record wave height exceeded the previous 27.6-foot record set by a Michigan Tech buoy near Houghton, Mich., in 2012. To give some perspective on the rarity of these types of events, waves at the record-capturing buoys only climbed above 12 feet four times throughout 2015 and 2016.”

Laurel Wamsley: Free Transit Considered for Germans→

NPR:

“Germany is considering free public transit in its cities in order to curb car use, as it hurries to meet the European Union’s requirements for air quality. That proposal is put forth in a letter to from the German government to the EU’s Environment Commissioner. The free transit plan is part of a range of measures suggested in the letter, including low emission zones, incentives for electric cars, and technically retrofitting existing vehicles, Reuters reports.

”We are considering public transport free of charge in order to reduce the number of private cars,” the letter says, according to Agence France Presse. “Effectively fighting air pollution without any further unnecessary delays is of the highest priority for Germany.””

Cheryl Dybas: Large Rains Mean High Phosphorus Pollution→

National Science Foundation:

“While April showers might bring May flowers, they also contribute to toxic algae blooms, dead zones and declining water quality in U.S. lakes, reservoirs and coastal waters, a new study shows. In the Midwest, the problem is largely due to phosphorus, a key element in fertilizers that is carried off the land and into the water, where it grows algae as easily as it grows corn and soybeans.

Previous research had found that waterways receive most of their annual phosphorus load in only a dozen or two events each year, reports Steve Carpenter, director emeritus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Limnology and lead author of a new paper published online in the journal Limnology and Oceanography. The paper ties those phosphorus pulses to extreme rain events. In fact, Carpenter says, the bigger the rainstorm, the more phosphorus is flushed downstream.”

Linda Poon: Fox and Coyote Interactions in City→

The Atlantic

“In the wild and in the countryside, coyotes are not only bigger than red foxes, but they’re also higher up the food chain. They tend to push weaker competitors out of their territories and will even kill to protect access to limited food sources. So while red foxes exist in the same general area and may even establish homes at the periphery of where coyotes live, they rarely venture into the other predators’ domain.

In cities, though, it looks like they’re learning how to get along. That’s according to Drake’s latest study published in the journal PLOS One. Over the years, foxes and coyotes, like so many other wild species, have settled in the city, and they’re inevitably here to stay. Some animal species have adapted to thrive amid the human-dominated landscape of high-rises, fragmented green space, and heavy traffic. Now, at least in the case of these two wildlife predators, they may be changing their behavioral instincts to coexist with each other—thanks in part to the abundance of food.”

Jacques Leslie: Self-Driving Cars - Utopia or Dystopia?→

Yale360:

“Automated cars, often referred to as “autonomous vehicles” (AVs) — whose passengers determine their routes without having to drive them — are being widely developed and tested, and probably will be used commercially in controlled settings within a few years. Lyft, Uber, and others have introduced ride-sharing, in which customers agree to travel with strangers in return for reduced fares. Put all three concepts together in one vehicle, posit that within a few decades this shared EV-AV technology will take over the nation’s automobile fleet, and the outcome seems environmentally irresistible, verging on fantastical.

But it’s equally plausible that the vision may turn out to be a mirage. Automated vehicles may eventually be widely adopted, but if the fleet is not electrified using renewable energy, or car sharing fails to take off, greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution could actually increase. A study last year by University of California, Davis researchers projected that if vehicles are automated but not electrified or shared, greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector would go up 50 percent by 2050 compared to business as usual. But if shared, electrified, automated vehicles flourish, greenhouse gas emissions could plunge by 80 percent, the study concluded⁠.”

Kurt Kohlstedt: Taxes Shaping Architecture→

99% Invisible:

“Ever noticed how the bricks on newer British buildings are bigger, or stopped to appreciate hand-stenciled wallpaper, or enjoyed a sip from a fancy hollow-stemmed glass? If so, you may well be admiring a product of regulation and taxes as much aesthetic tastes. From basic materials to entire architectural styles, building codes and taxation strategies have had huge historical impacts on the built world as we know it...

Dutch canal houses are another classic example of how rules and regulations can shape structures. Taxed on their canal frontage rather than height or depth, these buildings grew in tall and thin. In turn, this typology evolved narrower staircases, necessitating exterior hoist systems to move furniture and goods into and out of upper floors.”

James A. Marcum: Thomas Kuhn's Paradigm Shift→

TLS:

“Thomas Kuhn’s influence on the academic and intellectual landscape in the second half of the twentieth century is undeniable. It spans the natural sciences, and the historical and philosophical disciplines that examine them, through to the fine arts and even to business. But what did Kuhn espouse? In brief, he popularized the notions of the paradigm and the paradigm shift. A paradigm for Kuhn is a bundle of puzzles, techniques, assumptions, standards and vocabulary that scientists endorse and employ to undertake their day-to-day activities and thereby make remarkable advances in understanding and explaining the natural world...

In 1962, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions – the book in which Kuhn set out his ideas on paradigms and scientific development – was published, as the final monograph in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. In 1964 he joined Princeton University’s history and philosophy of science programme; and in 1979, he left Princeton for the department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. In 1991, Kuhn became professor emeritus; and he died on June 17, 1996 in Cambridge, MA.

In Structure, Kuhn’s main aim was to criticize the widely accepted view – promoted by the Logical Positivists – that the accumulation of scientific knowledge across time is incremental and contiguous.”

Brad Dokken: Vehicle at Bottom of Lake?→

Brainerd Dispatch:

“Thompson, who aptly is nicknamed “Seal,” says Tri-State Diving does anywhere from 10 to 15 salvage operations in a typical winter. As of mid-January, the company already had pulled nine ATVs, vehicles or fish houses from lakes across the region, and more jobs await them when weather conditions improve. “It’s getting to be more and more because of how well we’re getting known and insurance companies calling us direct,” Thompson said. “‘Dirty Jobs’ put us on the map.”

Tri-State shoots photos or video of all of its retrieval jobs and posts the footage on Facebook, Thompson said, which also helps to spread the word. “Plus, there are a lot of the areas where conservation officers know the kind of work we do, and they refer (people) to us,” he said.

Tri-State uses a device called a SUVE (pronounced soo-vee)—which stands for Submerged Underwater Vehicle Extractor—for retrieving vehicles. In very basic terms, the SUVE is like a big teeter totter with a winch on the top to raise whatever’s submerged to the surface. Thompson has patents on both the apparatus and the teeter-totter concept it employs, he says. “It’s just two rails (the vehicle) rides up, and once it’s up on top and gets past center, we just bring it down on the ice,” Thompson said.”

Richard Conniff: Wildlife in an Urbanized World →

Yale360:

“we know almost nothing about what ecologist Meredith Holgerson at Portland State University calls “these cryptic changes happening” as humans occupy and alter a landscape. For her doctoral research at Yale University, she looked at the effects of suburbanization on wood frogs in 18 ponds in the prosperous Connecticut suburb of Madison. The area around the ponds had developed largely with two-acre zoning, allowing for survival of “pretty good red maple swamps and vernal ponds,” says David Skelly, a professor of ecology at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies who oversaw the research. But chemical analysis of the ponds demonstrated that, along with other changes, the wood frog larvae were getting as much as 70 percent of their nutrients from materials leaching out of septic systems. “It suggests,” says Holgerson, “that tadpoles and other pond organisms are made up of human waste.”

The consequences of that remain unknown. But it also suggests that we may change the entire nutrient flow of an ecosystem, cause eutrophication, or introduce hormone-disrupting drugs or other chemicals in our waste — and still imagine that we live in a relatively intact habitat. ”

Sarah DeWeerdt: Leaky Sewers a Source of Pollution→

Anthropocene:

““Wastewater treatment facilities are not equipped to remove many pharmaceutical compounds,” lead author Emma Rosi, an aquatic ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, a nonprofit research organization in Millbrook, NY, said in a press release. “We were interested in how stream microorganisms – which perform key ecosystem services like removing nutrients and breaking down leaf litter – respond to pharmaceutical pollution.” Rosi and her colleagues studied biofilms—complex assemblages of bacteria and algae that make rocks and leaves in streams slippery – in four waterways in and around Baltimore, Maryland.

The study sites represent an urban-to-suburban gradient of habitats, and they each harbor a different assemblage of microbes, the researchers found. The biggest differences were between Gwynns Run, the most urbanized stream with a documented history of sewage contamination, and Gwynnbrook, the least developed stream.

First, the researchers looked for six different drugs in the streams: acetaminophen, caffeine, sulfamethoxazole (an antibiotic), diphenhydramine (an antihistamine), amphetamine, and morphine. They detected all of the drugs in all four streams, with the highest concentrations in the most urbanized stream and the lowest concentrations in the least urbanized stream.”

Bill Donahue: Aging with Intention→

Outside:

Heinrich examining a raven’s skull. (Jesse Burke)

“In 1951, when Bernd was 11, his family wrangled passage to the U.S. and landed in western Maine. They planned to grow pota­toes. Instead they were taken in for a summer by a kind family, the Adamses, whose ramshackle farm was a mess, a melange of dogs and cows and chickens and broken tractor equipment. To Bernd, the place was paradise, as he writes in his 2007 memoir, The Snoring Bird, recalling the adventures he shared with the two eldest Adams kids, Jimmy and Billy. The boys built a raft out of barn wood and spent countless hours watching baby catfish and white-bellied dragonflies. The Adamses taught Bernd English. He killed a hummingbird with his slingshot. He ran around barefoot and shirtless.

Bernd Heinrich is now 77 years old and the author of 21 books. The vaunted biologist E. O. Wilson speaks of him as an equal, calling him “one of the most original and productive people I know” and “one of the best natural-history writers we have.” Runners also revere him, for his speed and for his 2002 book, Why We Run. “He was the first person of scientific stature to say that ultramarathoning is a natural pursuit for humans,” says Christopher McDougall, author of the 2009 bestseller Born to Run. “He did the research himself, in 100-plus-mile races.””

Fascinating story of Bernd Heinrich's interesting and productive life.

Mimi Kirk: A Rational Housing Solution→

The Atlantic:

“When Kol Peterson moved to Portland, Oregon, in 2010, affordable housing was a priority, as it was for many newcomers in this city’s booming real-estate market. He looked at two frequently discussed options for high-cost cities—tiny houses on wheels and communal living—but decided on another option: accessory dwelling units, or ADUs—also known as “granny flats,” or basement or garage apartments...

“By 2020, ADUs will take off in tens of cities,” he said. “This doesn’t mean there will be an explosion of them overnight, but the concept will become more popular in the next couple of years.”

Peterson recently wrote a book, Backdoor Revolution: The Definitive Guide to ADU Development, that walks potential ADU builders through the planning and construction process, and tackles the social, economic, and environmental issues that relate to such housing.”

Jake Walsh: Learning about Consequences of Non-indigenous Species→

UW - Center for Limnology

“For reasons we don’t yet completely understand, nutrients concentrations have been lower and beach conditions have actually been better since spiny water flea showed up in Lake Mendota. Somehow, there seem to be fewer nutrients available to cyanobacteria to feed really big blooms, which means we likely have as much control over preventing summer blooms now as we did before the invasion by reducing nutrient concentrations in the lake.

Getting to the bottom of these new findings can help us get more of something we enjoy in Lake Mendota – good water quality. Of course it’s unlikely that we’re done making mistakes, particularly when it comes to invasive species. Invasive zebra mussels were detected in Lake Mendota in 2015, six years after spiny water flea’s detection. We’re already learning more about both zebra mussels and Lake Mendota as they grow in abundance and transform the lake bottom.

But, like the spiny water flea, there’s still that silver lining – mistakes teach. If we continue to study lakes carefully over long periods of time, we can uncover more about how they work and use that information in positive ways. And, just maybe, we’ll not only learn from these mistakes but also learn how to stop making them.”

Andy Balaskovitz: Offshore Wind on the Great Lakes→

ENSIA:

“Eight miles north of Cleveland in Lake Erie, the Icebreaker Wind project is poised to become the first offshore wind project in the Great Lakes. The project, lured by LEEDCo, is owned by Icebreaker Wind Power through the Norway-based investor Fred. Olsen Renewables. Pending federal and state approval, developers anticipate construction will begin in 2020 on the six-turbine, 20.7 MW project.

Some renewable energy advocates hope Icebreaker will catalyze further Great Lakes offshore wind development by settling economic, environmental and regulatory concerns. Skeptics fear it could be a one-off demonstration that is unlikely to be scaled up. And opponents like the North American Platform Against Wind Power and others with concerns about aesthetics, renewable energy or potential impacts on wildlife worry it will lead to a flood of projects throughout the region.”