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The Wolverine and the Refrigerator

One of Marvel Comics' most popular characters, Wolverine, was born with the genetic mutation allowing him to recover rapidly from any injury. Combine that with the Canadian [sic] government's program to replace his skeleton with the indestructible metal adamantium, and you have one tough character. The character's eponymous creature is also one tough critter, one that thrives in frozen mountain habitats and has been reported to scare off grizzlies from their kills.
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Conserving Our Wild Border

From an important op-ed in the San Diego Union Tribune The southern border region is one of the most bio-diverse areas in the United States and a crossroads for many carnivores. Today, the area is more widely known for the highly charged border politics involving people than for how those politics may affects the bears, jaguars, mountain lions and other wildlife that make the area home.
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Almost, a Welcomed Surprise

The dustings from most previous storms, and atypical warm conditions, and storm paths that have gone around our southern Wisconsin farm, have left us in an extended “fall or spring-season-like trance”.  Fields of standing upright plant stalks blow and shake in the wind, brown, gray and straw colored. Finally, after much of the winter without winter-like conditions, Stone Prairie Farm is under a blanket of deep snow. Usually, the first heavy snows arch these stems to the ground.
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Historic Temperate Rainforest Agreement Down to the Fine Print

After 30 years of controversy that tore at the social fabric of Tasmania, the federal and Tasmanian governments of Australia finally signed the Tasmanian Forests Intergovernmental Agreement to provide support and funding that will help the timber industry transition out of native-forest logging and will protect the region’s high-conservation-value rainforests. In sum, the government will provide much-needed financial support for workers and contractors to cease logging native forests while it takes legal steps to protect these forests as formal reserves similar to national parks.
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Win-Win for Wind Energy and Wildlife Conservation

Wind energy offers the potential to reduce carbon emissions while increasing energy independence and bolstering economic development. I am a huge proponent of harnessing wind to power our lives but this form of energy development has a larger land footprint per Gigawatt (GW) than most other forms of energy production, making appropriate siting and mitigation particularly important (Figure 1).
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Bird Survey Suggests If You Plant It, They Will Come

The results of last month's annual Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge Bird Survey indicate that birds may colonize reforested areas much faster than experts had predicted. This year's surveyors spotted all five of the common native forest birds and four endangered forest birds within sections of the refuge that two short decades ago had been treeless areas dominated by non-native plants and animals. "I never thought I'd live to see this," said Jack Jeffrey, who coordinated this bird survey and was the refuge biologist from 1990-2008.

Restoring Pacific Salmon Makes Dollars and Sense

Pacific salmon are the iconic temperate rainforest species connecting ocean, freshwater, and terrestrial systems, and joining people to the great outdoors. They are a keystone species, on the menu of American bald eagles and grizzly bears of the Great Bear Rainforest, coastal wolves of Alaska and British Columbia, and millions of people that depend on healthy fish runs in the clean, cool water that salmon thrive in.
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Human Impacts on Natural Systems

As a conservation biologist, I study the ecological effects of wolves on food webs, focusing on their primary prey (elk) and the foods their prey eat (aspens). My work takes place in Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta, which has many bears in it. Doing wolf research provides essential lessons about the web of life and coexisting with bears.
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Geography of Hope

People sometimes ask me what they will learn by reading Heatstroke. Basically there are two key messages. One I've already highlighted in past blogs and in a recent op-ed. Simply put, the first message is this: we've got a problem.

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