Synthesizing frontiers in modeling drought- and insect-induced tree mortality with climate change
Principal Investigator(s): William Anderegg, Jeffrey Hicke, and Rosie Fisher
Establishing an open-source animal-tracking analysis platform for archival geolocators
Principal Investigator(s): Eli Bridge, David Winkler, Eldar Rakhimberdiev, and Nathaniel Seavy
Global impacts of climate change on kelp forest ecosystems
Principal Investigator(s): Jarrett Byrnes, Sean Connell, and Mark Novak
Land use change and infectious diseases
Principal Investigator(s): Andrew Dobson, Nita Bharti, and Matt Bonds
Developing comprehensive management models for marine mammals
Principal Investigator(s): Leah Gerber
Dance with neighbors: What have we learned about species coexistence in tree communities from the global stem-mapped forest plots?
Principal Investigator(s): Fangliang He, Rick Condit, Stephen Hubbell, and Thorsten Wiegand
When is a mutualist a cheater? A synthesis of conceptual and data-based perspectives on the causes and consequences of variation in mutualist quality
Principal Investigator(s): Emily Jones and Maren Friesen
Warming food webs
Principal Investigator(s): Mary O'Connor and Hamish Greig
Synthesizing top-down and bottom-up approaches to ecological energetics
Principal Investigator(s): Jane Shevtsov
A standard assessment framework for ecosystem services
Principal Investigator(s): Dean Urban, Lydia Olander, and Pat Comer
Fungal pathogens and disease-induced extinction: Are fungal diseases different?
Principal Investigator(s): Jamie Voyles, Cheryl Briggs, and Marm Kilpatrick
The 
Lake Baikal, the Sacred Sea of Siberia
From the many millions who count on ocean fisheries for their livelihoods to the uncounted lives saved by intact coral reefs during the 2004 Asian tsunami, people all over the world depend upon healthy oceans. But how healthy are our oceans? A new measurement tool, the Ocean Health Index, answers that question for every coastal country in the world.
In response to the growing need for a way to easily access and analyze massive amounts of heterogeneous data in the fields of earth and environmental sciences, UC Santa Barbara’s 
Far more wild plant species may be responding to global warming than previous large-scale estimates have suggested. It follows a detailed NCEAS working group study, released in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study shows that many plant species, which appear to not be affected by warmer spring temperatures, are in fact responding as much to warmer winters.
Utilizing and synthesizing data from nearly 200 published articles, NCEAS researchers examined the effects of various environmental stressors on plant growth and decomposition, two crucial processes in any ecosystem. They measured the rate of species loss in different ecosystems, and found that where there was greater plant species loss, there was an increased negative impact on plant growth and an alteration in decomposition. The effects of biodiversity loss on biomass were similar to the effects from other environmental stressors, including global warming, pollution, and acid rain. 
An NCEAS working group found that experiments may dramatically underestimate how plants will respond to climate change in the future. Their findings, published in Nature, indicate that shifts in the timing of flowering and leafing in plants due to global warming appear to be much greater than estimated by warming experiments. As a result, species could change far more quickly than such studies suggest, possibly affecting water supplies, pollination of crops and ecosystems. 
Upon the second anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, a national panel of researchers offers a new model for understanding what happened in this disaster, how to think of such events in the future, and why existing tools were inadequate to fully predict what lay before them. The findings of the NCEAS' "Ecotoxicology of the gulf oil spill: A holistic framework for assessing impacts" working group are published in the May issue of BioScience. 
NCEAS researchers report in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment that almost 70 percent of the most damaging non-native forest insects and diseases currently afflicting U.S. forests arrive via imported live plants. Once introduced, some of these imported insects and disease organisms establish, and a fraction become major economic pests. The authors describe several possible means to increase bio-security, including intensified efforts at plant inspection stations, precautionary measures that restrict plants from entering the U.S. until risks have been assessed, expanding post-entry quarantines, developing better advance knowledge about pest insects and pathogens, and developing integrated systems approaches that depend on expanded partnerships between researchers and industry.
A new study published in Landscape Ecology evaluates the ways that spatial uncertainty, landscape characteristics, and genetic stochasticity interact to influence the strength and variability of conclusions about landscape-genetics relationships. 
"Learning From the Octopus: How Secrets from Nature Can Help Us Fight
Terrorist Attacks, Natural Disasters and Disease" explores security challenges we face, and shows us how we might learn to respond more effectively to the unknown threats lurking in our future. The main premise of the book is that natural organisms have learned to thrive in an unpredictable and risk filled planet without having the power to plan, predict, or try to perfect themselves.
We are pleased to announce a training workshop “Software Tools for Sensor Networks” sponsored by 
Graduate programs have placed an increasing emphasis on the importance of interdisciplinary education, but barriers to interdisciplinary training still remain. This article, published in BioScience, summarizes the lessons learned from a highly successful implementation of NCEAS' distributed graduate seminar in the new field of landscape genetics.
Infectious disease has recently joined poaching and habitat loss as a major threat to African apes. A study published in PLoS ONE explores both the risk of disease to African apes, and the status of potential interventions.
A new study published in BioScience questions claims that jellyfish are increasing worldwide, and suggests that such claims currently are not supported with any hard evidence or scientific analyses to date. Increased speculation and discrepancies about current and future jellyfish blooms by the media and in climate and science reports formed the motivation for this 