How do organizational members socially construct the shared meaning of a mandated change in the external environment? The opportunity to address this question presented itself when President Barack Obama set forth a goal for American community colleges to increase the number of students completing certificates and degrees by 5 million...
Carbon dioxide emissions greatly affect the carbon chemistry mechanisms within the ocean. Carbon absorbed by the ocean, drops the pH level and creates an environment that is acidic. Acidic conditions prevent calcification mechanisms in coralline algae, and hinder their ability to establish within the intertidal. Coralline algae display structural relevance...
Latinos are the fastest growing minority group in the U.S. and are expected to be 25% of the population by the year 2050. Latinos also are more vulnerable and at higher risk for poor health outcomes including diabetes and other chronic health ailments than Anglos. Many of the serious effects...
The problems facing our nation's public schools today cannot
be divorced from our enthusiasm for technology and the positive
relationship we believe it shares with our perception of progress.
Based on the second law of thermodynamics, the law of entropy,
author Jeremy Rifkin argues that the development of increasingly
"efficient"...
The importance of seagrasses (families Posidoniaceae, Zosteraceae, Hydrocharitaceae and Cymodoceaceae) to estuarine communities is widely accepted and this, combined with their continued decline throughout the world, have resulted in a need to better understand the factors affecting their growth and reproduction. Conservation and restoration of seagrasses will require an understanding...
Sandy beaches and dunes cover approximately one-third of the world’s ice-free coastlines and provide ecosystem services including coastal protection, recreation, wildlife habitat, and carbon sequestration. These dynamic interface habitats are variably shaped by wind, waves, sedimentary processes, and vegetation feedbacks. Positive biophysical feedbacks lead to the formation of vegetated coastal...
As global atmospheric carbon emissions continue to rise, scientists and land managers are increasingly looking to natural ecosystems to sequester and store carbon to buffer the impacts of climate change. Despite their small geographic size, many coastal ecosystems such as salt marshes, seagrass meadows, and mangroves sequester large amounts of...
Microfinance has been extolled by donor agencies, development practitioners and policy makers as a tool for alleviating poverty and empowering women. Yet little systematic research has been done to assess the conditions and extent to which microfinance programs accomplish these goals. This essay provides an assessment of that research. Based...
Ecological communities are connected in space and time through the transfer of energy, materials, and organisms, together known as ecological subsidies. These ecological subsidies can have substantial effects on community structure, function, and services, especially when the connections are between communities with contrasting productivity. At the ocean-land interface, low productivity...
Biological invasions and climate change represent two preeminent threats to ecological communities and biodiversity, altering the distribution and abundance of species, disrupting existing species interactions and forming unprecedented ones, and creating novel ecological communities. Many of the most successful invasive species are also ecosystem engineers, species that physically modify the...
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Sally D. Hacker
Biological invasions and climate change represent two preeminent