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Variability in Needle Morphology and Water Status of Pinus cembroides across an Elevational Gradient in the Davis Mountains of west Texas, USA
Published: Journal of the Torrey Botanical Society 134(2), 2007, pp. 281-288 The pinyon pines are a widely distributed group of site generalist species that dominate many of the middle to upper elevation semi-arid regions of North America. We investigated the physiological and morphological...Native Land Tenure, Conservation, and Development in a Pseudo-Democracy: Sabah, Malaysia
Published: Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 34, no 3-4, pp. 474-497 This article explores the interacting politics of native customary law, conservation, and rural development in Sabah, Malaysia. Drawing on the specific details of native property rights in a rural community and state...A Hierarchical Approach for Scaling Forest Inventory and Fuels Data from Local to Landscape Scales in the Davis Mountains, Texas, USA
Published: March 12, 2007, Forest Ecology and Management 244 (2007) 1–15 This study combined hierarchical cluster analysis and classification and regression tree algorithms to quantify vegetation and fuel characteristics and to generate spatially explicit vegetation and fuels maps for forest...Environmental Controls on Dominance and Diversity of Woody Plant Species in a Madrean, Sky Island ecosystem, Arizona, USA
Published online: 13 January 2007, Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007 The Sky Island archipelagos of the Sierra Madre Occidental contain diverse, highly endemic, and topographically complex ecosystems, yet the local and landscape-scale controls on woody plant dominance and diversity...Drought Response of Two Mexican Oak Species, Quercus laceyi and Q. sideroxyla (Fagaceae), in Relation to Elevational Position
Published: American Journal of Botany 94(5): 809–818. 2007. To investigate the relationship between the altitudinal distribution of Quercus laceyi and Q. sideroxyla and their physiological responses to drought, we measured relative water content, water potentials, photosynthesis, stomatal...Switzerland Tops 2008 Environmental Scorecard at World Economic Forum
Switzerland tops the global list of countries ranked by environmental performance according to the 2008 Environmental Performance Index (EPI) produced by a team of environmental experts at Yale University and Columbia University.
Agriculture Changing Chemistry of Mississippi River
Midwestern farming has injected the equivalent of five Connecticut Rivers and more carbon dioxide annually into the Mississippi River during the past 50 years, according to a study published today in Nature by researchers at Yale and Louisiana State universities.
Plans to Cap Greenhouse Gases Target Fossil Fuels at Their Source
It’s rare when scientists, economists, policy wonks, environmentalists, corporate CEOs, the American public and members of Congress from both parties all want to paddle the ship of state in the same general direction. Just such a blue-moon consensus has formed around the issue of global climate change. With one key exception – President George W. Bush – parties on all sides, including a number of energy companies, agree that the United States must regulate greenhouse gases, especially the carbon dioxide (CO2) that accounts for about 85 percent of such emissions each year.
Kroon Hall Rainwater Harvesting System to Save Half-Million Gallons a Year
To qualify for a platinum rating – the highest set by the U. S. Green Building Council – Kroon Hall must produce nearly as much energy as it consumes through features such as solar panels, solar water heaters, natural light and ventilation. Of the underground features, the most exciting may be...Dean's Message: Green By Design
By Dean James Gustave Speth, from the Fall 2007 issue of Environment: Yale magazine. All of us concerned about the environment’s future have known for a long time that we should be doing more in the area of designing positive solutions. Stopping destructive projects requires lawyers and...
Science of Sustainability Focus of Hawaii Gathering
Marian Chertow [profile], center, associate professor of industrial environmental management at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, discussed her research in industrial ecology at a gathering of Hawaiian business leaders and 40 Yale alumni at the Pacific Club in Honolulu. The...Punctuating Which Equilibrium? Understanding Thermostatic Policy Dynamics in Pacific Northwest Forestry
A key theme among seminal contributions to policy studies, including Baumgartner and Jones (1993; 2002), Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith (1993), andHall (1989; 1993), is that “external perturbations” outside of the policy subsystem, characterized by some type of societal upheaval, are critical for...Can Non-State Global Governance be Legitimate? An Analytical Framework
In the absence of effective national and intergovernmental regulation to ameliorate global environmental and social problems, ‘‘private’’ alternatives have proliferated, including selfregulation, corporate social responsibility, and public–private partnerships. Of the alternatives,...Turnover in an Amphibian Metacommunity: The Role of Local and Regional Factors
Ecologists have long realized that stable species richness values can mask rapid turnover in species composition. Because turnover occurs as a consequence of both local and regional processes, understanding the responsible factors provides insight on processes influencing community structure at...Amphibian Species Richness Across Environmental Gradients
These results enable us to identify the factors associated with the patterns of amphibian species richness on complex environmental gradients, and pose hypotheses concerning the mechanisms responsible. There was a clear effect of annual variation in hydroperiod on species richness; the number of...The Energy Benefit of Stainless Steel Recycling
The energy used to produce austenitic stainless steel was quantified throughout its entire life cycle for three scenarios: (1) current global operations, (2) 100% recycling, and (3) use of only virgin materials. Data are representative of global average operations in the early 2000s. The primary...Evolutionary Responses to Climate Change
In their paper Malcolm et al. (2006) use climate-warming scenarios to estimate up to 43% loss of species within biodiversity hotspots. This prediction is based on a climate-envelope approach that assumes the distribution, and hence extinction, probability of every species is predicted by climate...
New Environmental Anthropolgy Textbook Published
Faculty members Michael R. Dove and Carol Carpenter have just published a textbook on Environmental Anthropology, which they developed over the past half-dozen years in their advanced seminars with F&ES students, and which constitutes the basis of their new course in the undergraduate...Sampling Strategies for Natural Resources and the Environment
Written by renowned experts in the field, Sampling Strategies for Natural Resources and the Environment covers the sampling techniques used in ecology, forestry, environmental science, and natural resources. The book presents methods to estimate aggregate characteristics on a per unit area basis as well as on an elemental basis. In addition to common sampling designs such as simple random sampling and list sampling, the authors explore more specialized designs for sampling vegetation, including randomized branch sampling and 3P sampling.Understanding and Reaching Family Forest Owners: Lessons from Social Marketing Research
Social marketing—the use of commercial marketing techniques to effect positive social change—is a promising means by which to develop more effective and efficient outreach, policies, and services for family forest owners.The Philosophy of Qi, The Record of Great Doubts
Kaibara Ekken (1630-1714) was a prominent Japanese scholar who spread Neo-Confucian ideas and moral teachings throughout Japan. He was also known as the "Aristotle of Japan" for his studies of the natural world. Of his many writings, The Record of Great Doubts is the culmination of a lifetime of...
Students Blogging from Bali
Twenty-two students from Yale F&ES are currently attending the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), in Bali, Indonesia. Their travel to the conference was made possible by a generous gift from Sandra and Jim Leitner. Stay up to date, through the F&ES blog.The Ailing Invader
The nature of biological invasions prompts researchers to focus on questions of great importance: How far will a nonnative species go? How fast? And what are the consequences to native species? To crops? To us? This perspective had crystallized long before Charles Elton wrote his classic treatise...
The Students, the Habitat—Even the Menu is Diverse
Take a trip to Yale-Myers Forest for the second installment of a three part series on Technical Skills Modules at F&ES.
Understanding Cities as Ecosystems
Tromping around at the edge of an athletic field on a sticky day at the end of August, approximately 30 members of F&ES’ incoming class whacked away at clumps of bittersweet, phragmites, purple loosestrife and other invasive vegetation, clearing space for planting native species and augmenting ongoing efforts to restore New Haven’s Beaver Ponds Park. Situated in the city’s northwest corner and linking ethnically diverse neighborhoods, the 109-acre park, like many wetlands, was long treated as useless—drained, graded, filled and developed.
