Area of Research: Forests, Farms and Materials
Jesse Ausubel to receive 2022 Nierenberg Prize
Jesse Ausubel will be honored with the 2022 Nierenberg Prize for Science in the Public Interest. This award is presented annually by Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego and the Nierenberg Family to honor the memory of William A. Nierenberg, an esteemed physicist and national science leader who served Scripps Oceanography as director for two decades. Previous awardees include atmospheric scientist Warren Washington, biochemist and Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna, filmmaker Sir David Attenborough, and primatologist Dame Jane Goodall, among others.
Another prize for salamander eDNA
Samara Davis’ poster on “Detection of Threatened Pool-Breeding Amphibians with eDNA Analysis” for the Northeast Partners in Reptile and Amphibian Conservation conference won top prize for undergraduate presentation—nice recognition for a high school student! PHE’s Mark Stoeckle advises Samara.
Iddo on resource demands of renewables
PHE senior research associate Iddo Wernick publishes an op-ed in RealClear Science: Green Technologies Have a Glaring Problem of Scale
Podcast with Jesse Ausubel
Jesse reflects on decarbonization, dematerialization, land-sparing, industrial ecology, industrialization of the oceans, biological traces of fishes and of Leonardo Da Vinci, and the Seven Deadly Sins in an 83″ podcast with Robert Bryce, author of Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: and A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations.
The Podcast is also on YouTube where you get to see who sings Take Me Out to the Ballgame.
Plant and Animal Diversity Is Declining, But What About Microbial Diversity?
Plant and animal diversity is declining, but what about microbial diversity?
Spurred by PHE Guest Investigator and microbiologist David Thaler’s publication, “Is global microbial biodiversity increasing, decreasing, or staying the same?” , David and Jesse Ausubel co-author a 900-word essay raising the question of what’s happening to microbes in RealClear Science.
Quantifying forest change in the European Union
Quantifying forest change in the European Union
Iddo Wernick, our long-time collaborator Pekka Kauppi, and other forestry experts published Quantifying forest change in the European Union in Nature vol 592 pages E13–E14 (2021). The authors argue that net carbon stored in the EU continues to increase as forest volume accumulates faster than additions to (and fluctuations in) the annual harvest.
For some of our earlier forest work, see PNAS publishes Forests paper and Quandaries of forest area, volume, biomass, and carbon explored with the forest identity.