Publications

Update – Shellfish resilience project

Dr. Heather Leslie presented the Final Report on the 2019 Shellfish Resilience Project to the Joint Shellfish Committee of the Towns of Damariscotta and Newcastle on Jan 2, 2020. This presentation followed on an earlier presentation by Dr. Kara Pellowe, postdoc in the Leslie lab, in September 2019. Kara’s presentation was reported in the local […]

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Ocean Health Index in the news

Heather was interviewed by Jenny Siefert of the Ocean Health Index team for a recent piece on the Ocean Health Index. The OHI was developed almost a decade ago through a collaboration convened at NCEAS, and has since been used in diverse countries and contexts to track the health of the ocean and progress of […]

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Value of ecosystem-based management

Heather recently authored an invited commentary for Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. She reflected of the significance of a recent research article on ecosystem-based management efforts in the Chesapeake Bay. Heather noted that marine ecosystem-based management (EBM) is not a singular approach, but rather a framework for managing people’s […]

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Local knowledge of fish and fishermen

Congratulations to Kara on publishing her first marine conservation science paper! You can download the PLOS ONE paper from our Publications page. This paper builds on the international, multi institutional collaborative that Heather has led for the last decade, related to the human and environmental dimensions of small-scale fisheries. Learn more at the project website, […]

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New paper on intertidal alternate states

Menge, B. A., M. Bracken, J. Lubchenco, and H. M. Leslie. 2017. Alternative state? Experimentally-induced Fucus canopy persists 38 years in an Ascophyllum-dominated community. Ecosphere, doi: 10.1002/ecs2.1725. Experimental tests of the hypothesis that ecological communities can exist in “multiple stable states” are rare, and some argue, impossible, because of the unlikelihood that any system will […]

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Fishermen’s decisions shaped by both climate, community distinctions

Our team of social-ecological systems scholars just published a paper in World Bank Economic Review showing that fishermen’s decisions are shaped by differences in both natural and social environments. We discovered the community with stronger fishing rights exerted more control over fishermen’s decisions than communities with weaker rights, and did so in a way consistent with the impacts of climate […]

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Ecosystem-based management in practice

The director of the University of Maine Darling Marine Center says ecosystem-based approaches to restore ocean health provide a flexible framework for marine management and allow scientists and stakeholders to move beyond reactive and piecemeal solutions. “Ecosystem-based management (EBM) accounts for the diverse connections between people and oceans and the trade-offs inherent in managing for […]

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A new geography of social-ecological sustainability

Meeting human needs while sustaining ecosystems and the benefits they provide is a global challenge. Coastal marine systems present a particularly important case, given that >50% of the world’s population lives within 100 km of the coast and fisheries are the primary source of protein for >1 billion people worldwide. Our integrative analysis here yields […]

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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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