Noam Ross's Page

I've heard the song "Waltzing Matilda" many times but I only learned today the meaning of the word billabong - a long lake formed by a river jumping its bed. (In America we call them oxbow lakes.) The billabongs of Australia's Kakadu National Park are the site of a revealing ecological phenomenon reported today…See More

Many ecological systems have tipping points - thresholds where small changes in impacts can have very large effects on on ecosystem functioning, often in a bad way.  Lakes, for example, might show little impact from nutrient pollution until a threshold level is reached, and then massive algal blooms form that choke off many other species growth.In the absence of knowledge of exactly how far one can push a…See More

I have an article up at GOOD magazine about the abandoned rural lands and how to manage them for ecosystem services:Brazil has had a declining rural population since 1990. Even as loggers and farmers cut and burn ancient rainforest in the south, emigrants leave northern farmlands fallow. In China, between just 2000 and 2008, the countryside lost 86 million people. The United Nations projects that the…See More

Over at Yale Environment 360, Richard Stone has an interesting article about ongoing work examining recent blooms of jellyfish populations.  Anecdotal evidence suggests that jellyfish populations have been on the rise, and it is possible that some marine systems are entering alternate stable states that are jellyfish- rather than…See More

This month's Conservation Letters has a Policy Perspective on the risks of relying REDD+ funding for conservation projects.  REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation, with the "+" standing for biodiversity and social benefits), is a mechanism for transferring funds to developing countries for forest preservation and restoration.  REDD+ financing is eventually supposed to flow primarily from the private…See More

Conservation Letters has an article about a situation in Borneo that illustrates how sudden, unpredictable events in ecology are not always bad.  In the past year, the island's forests have undergone an ecosystem-wide event known as "general flowering," where trees of many species produce seeds and fruit in massive amounts.  These events occur rarely (the last was 12 years ago), and in the years in…See More

Ecosystem Marketplace posted an interesting document today on Global Forest Carbon Financial Risk Management Best Practices.  Produced as part of a workshop of forest investors and lawyers, it outlines the risks in the forest carbon offset market and practices to manage…See More

The search for new biofuels has effectively created an entire new category of agriculture, along with which comes a host of new management risks.  The cycles of crop growth and failure may be less well known than those of more familiar food crops, and they may be affected by new…See More

Today the RiskMetrics Group ESG Blog highlights new research showing that companies with better environmental performance are viewed as lower risk in bond markets and pay a lower cost of borrowing. The researchers, Rob Bauer and Daniel Hann, won the Moskowitz Prize for research in socially responsible investing. I found this the most interesting finding....More HereSee More

In 1998, Dan Pauly et al. of the University of British Columbia publisheda classic paper called "Fishing Down Marine Food Webs." They reported that humans were steadily depleting oceans of the top predators in the food web and working our way down the food web as the fish ran out. Pauly measured a value called "Mean Tropic Level," (MTL), essentially the average place in the food web that our fish come from, finding that it had declined in fisheries globally since the 1970s. (For a more…See More

In a new paper in Ecological Economics, Mark Sagoff criticizes ecologists for trying to find general, broadly applicable values for ecosystem services. Real values, Sagoff argues, are "dispersed, contingent, particular, local, transitory, and embedded in institutions and practices." He cites an example of citrus growers in the San Joaquin valley of California. While pollinators have been held up by many ecologists as providers of a valuable ecosystem services, pollinators are a pest to these…See More