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Coral Whisperers captures a key moment in the history of coral reef science and of environmental conservation at large. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews,the book documents the physical, intellectual, and emotional plight of coral scientists and their painstaking deliberations as they struggle to understand and save corals from what many of these scientistshave come to see as the corals’inevitable catastrophic future on a rapidly warming and otherwise assaulted planet.We are here in the thick of contemporary coral science, and we can feel its urgency: the experts, who are witnessing massive coral death around the planet, both grieve for this death and must simultaneously narrate it. Yet despite the desperate realities confronting corals in the Anthropocene, coral scientists have not given up hope. Through their engaging narratives, corals emerge as a sign, a measure, and a way out of the imminent catastrophe facinglife on earth.

The United States government has spent billions of dollars this century to prepare the nation for bioterrorism, despite the extremely rare occurrence of biological attacks in modern American history. Germ Wars argues that bioterrorism has emerged as a prominent fear in the modern age through the production of new forms of microbial nature and changing practices of warfare. Revolutions in biological science have made visible a vast microscopic world in the last century, and in this same era we have watched the rise of a global war on terror. Though these movements appear to emerge separately, this book argues that they are deeply entwined. New scientific knowledge of microbes makes possible new mechanisms of war. The history of the work done to harness and control germs, whether to create weapons or to eliminate disease, is an important site for investigating how biological natures shape modern life. Germ Wars aims to convince students and scholars as well as policymakers and activists that the ways in which bioterrorism has been produced have consequences in how people live in this world of unspecifiable risks.

This edited volume offers a blueprint for using marine historical ecology to confront the challenges of ocean conservation in a rapidly changing world. Marine historical ecology developed out of the growing realization that societies have altered marine ecosystems for millennia. As this interdisciplinary field has deepened our understanding of oceans past, so too has it become increasingly relevant to conservation, management, and policy. In this book, we focus on four critical challenges that confront marine conservation: (1) recovering endangered species; (2) conserving fisheries; (3) restoring ecosystems; and (4) engaging the public. Using insights from marine historical ecology, the book's contributors advance science-based conservation solutions and highlight practical ways to enable their uptake in the policy and conservation realm. Each chapter showcases practical examples of how historical data can be used in the conservation of marine ecosystems, drawing on real-world and theoretical examples. By focusing preferentially on stories of recovery and applied solutions, we hope this volume will embolden readers with new ideas and tools to restore ocean environments and resilient coastal communities.

Phylogeography of California examines the evolution of ancient, recent, native, and migratory taxa to elucidate the major and minor evolutionary events that shaped the distribution, radiation, and speciation of the biota of California. This work examines and interprets the evolutionary history of the biota in California in a geological context, and it also examines any subsequent patterns in regional diversity that have emerged across combined phylogenies. Indeed, a number of phylogeographic patterns have emerged: some previously identified are expanded, and some new patterns are recognized. A survey of the phylogeography of the flora and fauna of California’s diverse biota is provided by major organismal groups and provides a context in which to ask further questions about evolutionary diversification in an area oddly defined by both physical and political boundaries. Life history characteristics such as dispersal ability at each life stage; generation time; reproductive ability; and ecological characteristics such as degree of habitat specialization, competition, predation, mode of propagule dispersal, and availability of habitat or migration corridors all play an important role in the various outcomes for respective clades. The challenge of phylogeographic studies is to assess changes in population structure of once largely distributed populations or expansion from ancestral propagules into present-day population structures shaped by geological and geographical processes. Ultimately, summarizing the phylogeography of California provides a context for landscape-level conservation efforts throughout the biogeographic provinces that roughly define the state of California.