BioScience articles from July 2003

BioScience archives from July 2003

Can sustainable mahogany stem from CITES science? (Editorial).
July 1, 2003... A day of reckoning approaches in the quest for sustainable management of tropical forests. On 15 November 2003, mahogany (Swietenia macrophylla King) will become subject to scientific "nondetriment" findings under the Convention on...

Letters.
July 1, 2003... Greater Potential for Renewable Biomass Energy. In "Renewable Energy: Potential and Current Issues" (BioScience 52: 1111-1119), Pimentel and colleagues conclude that a mix of renewable energy sources should be developed simultaneously with...

Pacific Salmon: setting ecologically defensible recovery goals. (Viewpoint).
July 1, 2003... Gende and colleagues (2002) provided a thorough summary of the existing knowledge of the ecological role of anadromous salmonid-derived marine nutrients in freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems. As they noted, many Pacific Northwest salmon...

The perfect windstorm study: what happens when millions of trees fall down in a forest wilderness? (Future).
July 1, 2003... The wind had seized the tree and ha, and ha, It held the shivering, the shaken limbs, Then bathed its body in the leaping lake. Wallace Stevens, "The Hand as a Being" Four years ago on the Fourth of July, a fierce wind and thunderstorm...

Ocean policymakers shift attention upstream. (Washington Watch).
July 1, 2003... Coastal waters are suffering from too much of a good thing. A National Research Council report recently concluded that nutrients are the largest pollution threat to the coastal waters of the United States. Nutrient overenrichment of coastal...

BEN: the biology branch of the national science digital library. (Eye on Education).
July 1, 2003... The Biosciences Education Network is "a one-stop shopping area for resources from all digital libraries of BEN partners," explains Yolanda George, deputy director of Education and Human Resources at the American Association for the Advancement...

Thirteen years of shifting top-down and bottom-up control. (Articles).
July 1, 2003... For 13 years, we studied the role of biotic interactions, including predation, herbivory, and interspecific competition, in a semiarid thorn scrub community in north-central Chile. Using a large-scale field manipulation, we monitored changes in...

Flows for floodplain forests: a successful riparian restoration. (Articles).
July 1, 2003... Throughout the 20th century, the Truckee River that flows from Lake Tahoe into the Nevada desert was progressively dammed and dewatered, which led to the collapse of its aquatic and riparian ecosystems. The federal designation of the endemic...

The costs and effectiveness of funding the conservation of Australian threatened Birds. (Forum).
July 1, 2003... A review of funding for conservation of threatened birds in Australia over the period 1993-2000 shows that most of the funds were spent on the taxa closest to extinction. Government conservation agencies provided the majority of funds, with 25...

Improving size estimates of open animal populations by incorporating information on age. (Biologist's Toolbox).
July 1, 2003... Around the world, a great deal of effort is expended each year to estimate the sizes of wild animal populations. Unfortunately, population size has proven to be one of the most intractable parameters to estimate. The capture--recapture...

Conserving ecosystems locally: a role for ecologists in land-use planning. (Professional Biologist).
July 1, 2003... Integration of ecological principles into private land-use planning is critical to preservation of biodiversity and functional ecosystems in the United States. Ecologists need to play an active role in shaping land-use decisions to meet those...

The integrity of US ecosystems. (Books).
July 1, 2003... The State of the Nation's Ecosystems: Measuring the Lands, Waters, and Living Resources of the United States. H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom. 2002.288...

Life from then until now. (Books).
July 1, 2003... The Story of Life. Richard Southwood. Oxford University Press, Oxford, United Kingdom, 2003. 272 pp., ilus. $28.00 (ISBN 0198525907 cloth). I have long looked for a book that describes life's record on Earth in a manner that covers...

Identifying Malagasy trees. (Books).
July 1, 2003... Generic Tree Flora of Madagascar. George E. Schatz (foreword in English by Peter R. Crane and Peter H. Raven; in French by Albert Randrianjafy and Philippe Morat). Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, United Kingdom, and Missouri Botanical Garden, St....

New titles. (Books).
July 1, 2003... Achieving Sustainable Freshwater Systems: A Web of Connections. Marjorie M. Holland, Elizabeth R. Blood, and Lawrence R. Schaffer, eds. Island Press, Washington, DC, 2003. 351 pp., illus. $30.00 (ISBN 1559639296 paper). Bat Ecology. Thomas...

AIBS seeks endorsements of IBRCS white paper on NEON. (AIBS News).
July 1, 2003... With the National Research Council study of the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) under way (see www.nationalacademies.org/neon) and the National Science Foundation's FY2004 budget request for NEON in the process of being...

AIBS submits comments on priorities for infrastructure projects at NSF to National Academies Committee. (AIBS News).
July 1, 2003... In response to a congressional request, the National Academies Committee on Setting Priorities for NSF-sponsored Large Research Facility Projects (hosted by the Board on Physics and Astronomy) is examining how the National Science Foundation...

NRC requests help identifying subfields in the Life Sciences. (AIBS News).
July 1, 2003... As regular readers of the AIBS Public Policy Report are aware, the National Research Council (NRC) is examining the methodology for assessment of research-doctorate programs. As part of this effort, NRC is developing a taxonomy of academic...

Wanted: AIBS/NCSE state evolution List Server managers. (AIBS News).
July 1, 2003... The AIBS/NCSE (National Center for Science Education) Evolution List Server Network in the United States and Canada allows scientists, teachers, and other parties interested in evolution education to be in touch with each other locally,...

AIBS 2004 annual meeting dates and theme announced; council meeting date set. (AIBS News).
July 1, 2003... The AIBS 2004 annual meeting will be held in Washington, DC, beginning at 7p.m. on Tuesday, 16 March, and ending at noon on Thursday, 18 March. The theme of the meeting is "Invasive Species: A Search for Solutions." The meeting will include...

Night lights. (Biobriefs).
July 1, 2003... The winking bioluminescence of fireflies signals summer romance. In the eastern two-thirds of North America, summer nights are lit by the flashes of firefly courtship. Each of the hundreds of firefly species has its own characteristic light...

Iridescent butterflies. (Biobriefs).
July 1, 2003... Deep-forest species of Heliconius butterflies use polarized light to attract mates, report Alison Sweeney and Sonke Johnsen, of Duke University, and Christopher Jiggins, of the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, in the 1 May issue of Nature....