NCEAS

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 National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, a core partner in a joint effort to streamline such research, presents DataONE, the Data Observation Network for Earth.

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.

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.