Lab News & Views

Engaging in the Gulf

Former Leslie Lab member Katherine Siegel, now at research assistant with UC Santa Barbara’s Sustainable Fisheries group, authored this personal essay for Heather’s course on engaged environmental scholarship and communication. Read on to learn more about Katherine’s undergraduate research on the human and ecological dimensions of Mexican small-scale fisheries.  Arcángel sighed, pulled up his last […]

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Field Notes from Loreto

Loreto, June 2015 This year, 2015, was the first year that the Annual Chocolate Clam Festival in Loreto, Mexico included a bilingual Clam Biology tent as part of the festivities. The tent featured a large diagram of the clam life cycle with interesting facts about chocolate clams, and educational coloring pages for kids. The real […]

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Ecosystem services lens on tidal energy development

Heather and former Brown undergraduate Megan Palmer (Class of 2014) just published an article in Marine Technology Society Journal on the value of taking an ecosystem services approach to assessing the impacts of tidal energy development. The results are described here, and also were picked up by RI NPR!

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Field notes from Loreto

The Hidden Nature of Baja, January 2015 The wind was blowing hard out of the north already at 8 AM and was predicted to increase. We squeezed into an old white pick up truck that Sara had already loaded with our gear, and drove south. The peaks of the Sierra de la Giganta hugged us […]

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Rocky shore work in Ecosphere

Leslie Lab members published results from a multi year study at 18 rocky shore sites from Maine to New York state in Ecosphere this week. Mussels could be the perfect ‘sentinel’ species to signal the health of coastal ecosystems. But a new study of blue mussels in estuary ecosystems along 600 kilometers of coastline in […]

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Heather named Leopold Fellow

I am thrilled to have been selected as a 2015 Leopold Leadership Fellow! Not only is it a great honor to join the network of fellows; it also is really exciting to have the intellectual space to focus on a new dimension of my research. My quest this year is to explore different perspectives on marine conservation […]

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Diversifying conservation

In this age of ever increasing technological capacity and the global reach of economies, political institutions, and yes, disease and other environmental harms, we scientists do not have all the answers to the question every citizen asks: What shall we do? We do, however, know a lot that can help. In the comment published today in […]

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Why do conservation science?

In her Oct 8 blog post, Karen McLeod of COMPASS wrote, “Being a scientist is more than a job – it’s a way of thinking, a way of living, a way of interacting with the world. For some of you, it is the best job in the world!  Our passion is clearly important, and yet … we […]

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New paper on small-scale fishers’ adaptive strategies

Environmental anthropologist Dr. Leila Sievanen, formerly a Leslie Lab postdoc, just published an article in Maritime Studies based on research conducted with Heather and others in Baja California Sur, Mexico. Download the paper at the open access journal, Maritime Studies View the Mexico project blog to learn more about the larger project and related publications  Citation: Sievanen, […]

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Clean water supports the Bay’s many benefits

For her senior independent research in Marine Biology, Brown University undergraduate researcher Karen Cortes (Class of 2014) synthesized the water quality data available for Narragansett Bay. Her work highlights the importance of water quality for many of nature’s benefits, including food provision, recreation and coastal protection. She summarizes her findings in a two page brief as well as […]

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