August 2015

A recent national news program posed the question, "Will the residents of Kivalina, Alaska be the first climate change refugees in the U.S.?" The Inupiat Eskimo village on the west coast of Alaska is one of many communities facing challenges due to sea level rise and rapidly warming temperatures in the Arctic. Coping with these challenges can be difficult for remote villages that may not understand the potential threats they face. Three Alaska Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs) recently initiated a project to help the residents of Kivalina, and hundreds of other coastal communities...

When I recently returned from a hunting trip in Africa, I was immediately confronted with the debate over the killing of a lion by an American citizen on safari in Zimbabwe. This debate has engendered unprecedented anger, hatred, and vitriol towards both the participants of the hunt and the hunting community at large. It has also propagated disinformation about regulated hunting in foreign countries. Participants have been threatened with arrests, requests for extradition, death threats, public shunning, and loss of livelihood. My own experience has demonstrated that these...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently announced that beginning on September 1st, they will be accepting applications for working grasslands to be incorporated into the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), according to the Wildlife Management Institute.

The CRP-Grasslands initiative will provide participants who establish and maintain cover crops with annual rental payments up to 75 percent of the grazing value of the land. Cost-share assistance will also be provided for up to 50 percent of the cost for cover establishment and other practices such as additional fencing...

The Boone and Crockett Club recently published a trilogy of journals by Jack Ward Thomas, who served as chief of the U.S. Forest Service from 1993-96. Thomas' memoirs offer a rare, real-time peek behind the curtain of conservation leadership during a turbulent period marked by conflicts over spotted owl habitat, old-growth timber and the deaths of 14 wildland firefighters in 1994.

Equally featured in the trilogy are journals describing the hunting, horseback and wilderness experiences that shaped the values and vision of a field biologist who would go on to lead...

The extraction of natural gas from shale formations in Appalachia has become a contentious political and environmental issue partially due to concerns over habitat loss and the fragmentation and degradation of wildlife habitat. However to date, no study has examined the effects of Marcellus shale gas development on avian populations. Researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Pennsylvania Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit at Penn State University are developing new models to evaluate the impacts of this development on bird populations in the region.

The abundance...