The article ‘How to Invest in the Global Forests of the Future’ is a more popular version of a recent publication ‘Storing Carbon or Growing Forests‘ that appeared in the journal Land Use Policy in August 2022. Please contact the author (iwernick@rockefeller.edu) for copies of that article.
News
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.
eDNA and Oysters
Mark Stoeckle’s summer mentee, high school student Daisy Palaguachi, reports on her work in this poster “Yes, Virginia, There are Oysters in New York Harbor” describing use of aquatic environmental DNA to assess presence of oyster populations. Thanks to Jeanne Garbarino’s RockEDU summer program for introducing PHE to another excellent student.
Growing Cherries
The 18-page booklet “Growing Cherries and Thoughts About Other Fruits” relays Jesse Ausubel’s talk given at the Martha’s Vineyard Garden Club on 19 July 2022.
Loglet Lab 5 in development
Loglet Lab 4 is experiencing some difficulties, so users may receive errors on the more complex analysis. We apologize for the inconvenience and are working to alleviate the problems. Meanwhile, with the addition of Albert Strusberg to our team (David Burg, Jason Yung, Perrin Meyer), Loglet Lab 5 is under intensive development and should be available before the end of 2022. Stay tuned.
Salamander eDNA student project awarded top prize in 2022 GENIUS Olympiad
Mark Stoeckle’s mentee, Samara Davis, earned the Grand prize in Science at the Genius Olympiad, an international high school project competition about environment issues, with her project on censusing threatened salamanders with eDNA (slide deck). See the full list of awardees here. Samara’s 11-minute video is here.
eDNA work in progress
We post a Schematic of an eDNA metabarcoding protocol for marine fish.
We recently showed that current laboratory protocols optimize sensitivity and reproducibility, especially for more abundant fish populations (ICES J Mar Sci 2022). eDNA metabarcoding is generally considered a qualitative tool for relative abundance. We hope to help develop eDNA metabarcoding as a quantitative tool for absolute abundance (link to pdf work-in-progress).
eDNA Detection of Salamanders
PHE student Samara Davis will present her work with Mark Stoeckle on eDNA detection of threatened salamanders at Northeast Partners in Amphibian and Reptile Conservation Annual Meeting https://northeastparc.org, to be held in West Virginia in August.
eDNA degradation; 2nd National Workshop
PHE’s guest investigator David Thaler offers some stimulating ideas in a memo about ways of understanding and learning from degradation of aquatic eDNA. The title: How long has each particular species’ eDNA been outside the organism from which it came? Some thoughts on the possibility to obtain more information from eDNA analysis of water samples
Meanwhile, Jesse Ausubel and Mark Stoeckle are involved in the program for the 2nd US National Workshop on eDNA, 12-15 September in Southern California. PHE hosted the 1st US national meeting in 2018.