Displaying items by tag: threatened species

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey documented a family of peregrine falcons on the Bayonne Bridge. Port Authority

What city birds around the world have in common

This story was originally published by The Revelator.

Why do some bird species seem to flourish alongside humans, eating our crumbs and nesting in our backyards, while others prefer to live as far as possible from dense human populations?

Monte Neate-Clegg began to ponder the question while attending the American Ornithological Society’s 2019 conference in Anchorage, Alaska. “I was staying at an AirBnB and two of the birds I wanted to see in Anchorage, white-winged crossbills and boreal chickadees, were just in the yard,” said Neate-Clegg, at the time a Ph.D. student at the University of Utah. Although new and beautiful to him, the species are common in Anchorage and so omnipresent they’re typically ignored by residents.

“I started thinking, what is it that makes these ‘trash birds’ here, and not elsewhere?”

Neate-Clegg sounds sheepish about using the pejorative-sounding term “trash bird,” but it’s a phrase commonly used by birdwatchers to refer to species ubiquitous to a given location they cease to become interesting and can become irritating. Classic examples include pigeons in city centers and snack-stealing gulls on beaches.

One man’s trash bird is another’s research query. Neate-Clegg wondered if specific traits make certain species more able to thrive in cities around the world. After joining ornithologist Morgan Tingley at his lab at UCLA as a postdoctoral researcher in 2021, he proposed a lab-wide project in an attempt to answer the question.

The research drew on data providing clues which may eventually reveal a roadmap making our cities more bird friendly. 

The snail darter, which caused an epic battle around TVA plans to dam the Tellico River in the 1970s, was recently removed from the Endangered Species List. Jeremy Monroe/Tennessee Aquarium

The little fish that caused a maelstrom over a TVA dam project gets the last laugh

TELLICO — In a win for endangered species protected by federal law, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced this week the fabled snail darter’s recovery and removal from the Federal List of Threatened and Endangered Wildlife. 

Native to the Tennessee River watershed in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and Tennessee, the fish has long been an Endangered Species Act icon thanks to conservation efforts to save its habitat starting in the 1970s, when the Tennessee Valley Authority proposed construction of a dam on the Little Tennessee River. The snail darter (Percina tanasi) was central in the 1978 U.S. Supreme Court case Tennessee Valley Authority v. Hill, which solidified the scope of the then recently passed ESA. 

Aquatic ecologist Natalie Griffiths studies nutrients and contaminants in the Weber Branch watershed, which is in the Oak Ridge Environmental Research Park. Courtesy Carlos Jones/ORNL

ORNL research lands are an international ecological benchmark and diverse wonderland of trees, plants, mammals, reptiles and amphibians

Abby Bower is a science writer for Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is a hub for world-class science. The nearly 33,000-acre space surrounding the lab is less known, but also unique. The Oak Ridge Reservation (ORR) is a key hotspot for biodiversity in the Southeast and is home to more than 1,500 species of plants and animals.

At the intersection of Anderson and Roane counties is an important subset of the reservation — the Oak Ridge National Environmental Research Park, or NERP — a 20,000-acre ORNL research facility that has been internationally recognized by UNESCO as an official biosphere reserve unit.

“The National Environmental Research Park is a living laboratory and a major resource for conducting ecological studies,” said Evin Carter, an ORNL wildlife ecologist and director of the Southern Appalachian Man and the Biosphere Program, or SAMAB. The NERP has been a core part of SAMAB, which has focused on sustainable economic development and conserving biodiversity in Southern Appalachia since 1989.

With ORNL researchers and scientists from government agencies and academia using the NERP for diverse experiments each year, the park lives up to its status as a living laboratory.

It also lives up to its reputation as a biodiversity hotspot. As one of seven DOE-established environmental research parks reflecting North America’s major ecoregions, it represents the Eastern Deciduous Forest. The NERP comprises parts of this ecoregion that have been identified repeatedly as priorities for global biodiversity conservation, Carter said.

This designation means more than ever as climate change alters ecosystems and biodiversity declines worldwide. According to a landmark international report, on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, around one million plant and animal species are currently threatened with extinction.