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This chapter examines the use of Christian scripture by some who doubt the reality, anthropogenesis, or seriousness of climate change. It offers an overview of public opinion surveys and social scientific research on the relationship between religion and climate attitudes in the United States, with a focus on evangelical Christianity as the largest and generally most skeptical religious group. Surveying uses of the Bible by evangelical climate skeptics, the chapter demonstrates various ways in which skeptics—including pastors, policymakers, scholars, and others—draw from scripture to cast doubt on climate science and to advocate against climate action. It outlines the logic behind those uses, explores the limits and contradictions of such logic, and highlights political affinities that may motivate skeptics to interpret and deploy scripture in these ways.

Terrestrial ecosystems play a critical role in the global carbon cycle but have highly uncertain future dynamics. Ecosystem modelling that includes the scaling-up of underlying mechanistic ecological processes has the potential to improve the accuracy of future projections, while retaining key process-level detail. Over the past two decades, multiple modelling advances have been made to meet this challenge, including the Ecosystem Demography (ED) model and its derivatives including ED2 and FATES. Here, we present the global evaluation of the Ecosystem Demography model (ED v3.0), which likes its predecessors features the formal scaling of physiological processes of individual-based vegetation dynamics to ecosystem scales, together with integrated submodules of soil biogeochemistry and soil hydrology, while retaining explicit tracking of vegetation 3-D structure. This new version builds on previous versions and provides the first global calibration and evaluation, global tracking of the effects of climate and land-use change on vegetation 3-D structure, new spin-up process and input datasets, as well as numerous other advances. Model evaluation was performed with respect to a set of important benchmarking datasets, and model estimates were within observational constraints for multiple key variables including: (i) global patterns of dominant plant functional types (broadleaf vs evergreen); (ii) spatial distribution, seasonal cycle, and interannual trends of global Gross Primary Production (GPP); (iii) global interannual variability of Net Biome Production (NBP); and (iv) global patterns of vertical structure including leaf area and canopy height. With this global model version, it is now possible to simulate vegetation dynamics from local to global scales and from seconds to centuries, with a consistent mechanistic modelling framework amendable to data from multiple traditional and new remote sensing sources, including lidar.

The United States STEM workforce has yet to reflect the demographics of the larger population. This discrepancy begins at the base of the STEM pipeline with a significant lack of minority STEM K-12 teachers to serve as mentors and role models to minority students. Research has shown that minority students’ exposure to same-race teachers increased academic output and education attainment up to 32%. Unfortunately, minority teachers face a revolving-door effect: the cycle of increased recruitment countered by a high turnover amongst minority teachers compared to their white counterparts. Minority teachers who leave the profession consistently cite negative teaching environments, discrimination, and lack of support as the main drivers of their decision to quit teaching. The Maryland state legislature recently passed the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future Act, which attempts to address teacher recruitment and retention more comprehensively. Here, we go beyond the Blueprint’s baseline tools to recommend targeted strategies to recruit and retain minority STEM K-12 teachers in Maryland. Through the creation of a robust peer mentorship pipeline between new and experienced teachers, prioritization of school staff diversity and inclusion training, and the promotion of teacher autonomy, we will increase minority student education attainment and encourage the growth of a diverse STEM workforce in Maryland.

The protection and restoration of nature are critical for climate change mitigation. As such, many international initiatives have been launched to champion the implementation of nature-based climate solutions (NBCS) while supporting other societal goals. Given global momentum, it is critical that policymakers proactively define successful NBCS activities to avoid perverse incentives and harmful land-use change. We argue that effective NBCS will support clear goals and make transparent the relative costs and benefits to climate, biodiversity, and human livelihood. To do this, NBCS must be designed based on the best geospatial science and implemented alongside empowered local communities. Specifically, NBCS should be accompanied by strong benefit-sharing mechanisms that involve procedural equity. Further, where changes in land management and land-use are required, land restoration should be accompanied by financial incentives that make such restoration profitable. Carbon markets could be expanded to include land-based carbon, and auction proceeds or tax revenues could be utilized to fund restoration on private land where landowners may be required to forego other profits over the short term. NBCS will help the global community advance important societal goals if policymakers can be specific about where national goals will be implemented and who will be empowered to make decisions about their design.

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) is thought to be highly sensitive to climatic and oceanographic changes. Modelling infers that the WAIS likely had a very dynamic history throughout the Neogene to the present. A complete collapse of the WAIS would result in a global sea level rise of 3.3 to 4.3 m, yet there is large uncertainty on predicting its future behavior and its contribution to sea level rise. Geological constraints on the past behavior of the WAIS are relatively sparse and mainly based on records from the Ross Sea sector. In particular, records of time intervals with climatic conditions similar to those expected for the near and distant future, such as the Pliocene, are needed. Deglaciation of the WAIS in the Amundsen Sea sector is hypothesized to have triggered WAIS collapses during past warm times. Drill records from the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) Expedition 379 provide continuous late Miocene to Pleistocene sediment sequences from a drift on the continental rise, allowing the assessment of sedimentation processes from cold and warm times. In particular Site U1532 recovered an expanded sequence of Pliocene lithofacies with an excellent paleomagnetic record allowing for very high-resolution, sub-orbital scale climate change studies of the previously sparsely sampled eastern Pacific sector of the West Antarctic margin. At both Sites U1532 and U1533, sediments characterized by high microfossil content and high abundance of ice-rafted debris alternate with laminated terrigenous muds and are interpreted to result from cyclic deposition under interglacial and glacial conditions, respectively. Deep-sea channels likely mark the pathways of terrigenous detritus that was transported downslope from the Amundsen Sea shelf via turbidity currents or other gravitational transport processes predominantly during glacial periods. The association of lithological facies predominantly reflects an interplay of these downslope and contouritic sediment transport processes as well as phases of increased pelagic and hemipelagic sediment input. Correlation of the seismic stratigraphy at the drill sites on the rise with that of the continental shelf of the Amundsen Sea Embayment allowed us to identify massive prograding sequences that expanded the outer shelf seaward by about 80 km by frequent advances of grounded ice across the shelf mainly during Pliocene times. The preservation of buried grounding zone wedges visible in seismic profiles from the shelf is explained by (hemi)pelagic sedimentation during prolonged periods of ice retreat. This can be correlated with an extended warm middle Pliocene period chronologically constrained by the drill records. The contrast between sediments deposited under cold and warm climate conditions indicates that this WAIS sector was highly dynamic in the Pliocene.

Given the recent availability of high-resolution data on both current forest carbon stocks and restoration potential, the next geospatial and computational challenge is to utilize this data to iden...

Members of the U.S. Climate Alliance, a coalition of 24 states committed to achieving the emissions reductions outlined in the 2015 Paris Agreement, are considering policy options for inclusion of ...

Climate mitigation planning requires accurate information on forest carbon dynamics. Forest carbon monitoring and modeling systems need to step beyond the traditional Monitoring, Reporting, and Ver...

In support of the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Leadership Commitments, the University of Maryland College Park (UMD) has established a goal to become climate neutral by 2050. W...

Fifth generation (5G) wireless networks promise to provide faster and more expansive data connectivity, exceeding thresholds from previous fourth generation (4G) technology. The deployment of 5G infrastructure requires allocating additional frequencies in radio bands at 24 gigahertz (GHz), potentially contaminating neighboring remote sensing bands used for weather forecasting and prediction. The current U.S. out-of-band emissions limit at 24 GHz of -20 dBW per 200 MHz is projected to degrade meteorological forecast accuracy by up to 30%, reducing the hurricane forecast lead time by 2 to 3 days, and endangering thousands of additional lives. Under the Weather Research and Forecasting Innovation Act of 2017 (Pub.L 115-25), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) must develop more accurate and timely severe weather forecasts in order to protect life and property and reduce economic risk; however, the potential out-of-band interference from the roll out of 5G threatens this aim. Given U.S. economic reliance on accurate weather prediction (estimated to be in the trillions of dollars), we propose that Congress mandate stricter noise restrictions to adequately meet requirements of the Pub.L 115-25, while minimizing disruption to 5G deployment.

For many, conservation is more a personal calling than a job. Therefore, preparing a personal mission statement early in career development is an essential first step toward professional effectiveness. Traditional undergraduate education in conservation should provide understanding of the biological and physical sciences, while graduate education should contribute specialized experience in research or professional practice. As conservation science has expanded, there is also new opportunity to contribute through the social sciences. Professional organizations are now more active in recruiting women and minorities, so individuals in underrepresented groups may contribute to conservation practice. At all times, however, the overarching goal is to transition from being a student of an academic subject to becoming a citizen of professional culture through collaboration and participation with established conservation scientists.

Ecosystem-based management (EBM), formerly called ecosystem management, employs management approaches for entire systems rather than merely system components like timber or wildlife, and considers humans an integral part of the ecosystem to be explicitly addressed in management strategies. Decision-making is informed by adaptive management, in which management actions are executed as experiments to both enhance system performance and acquire reliable knowledge about system behavior. Management objectives are achieved, whenever possible, using ecosystem processes (for example, fire) and in collaboration with human “stakeholders” vested in the health of the ecosystem. EBM is employed in conservation biology to correct limitations of management efforts targeted to only a few species or limited areas, but needs further clarification of its distinctions to offer more effective contributions to biodiversity conservation.

Populations are coexisting individuals of the same species living in the same area at the same time. Populations may subdivide into spatially distinct subunits comprising a metapopulation, where different subunits experience varying probabilities of extinction. As habitat loss and fragmentation have progressively contributed to population subdivision and increased extinction probability, metapopulation theory has received increasing attention in conservation biology and remains an area of active study and management application. To estimate extinction probability of populations generally, conservation biologists determine the size of minimum viable populations and employ population viability analysis, using analytical and simulation models to estimate the likelihood of population persistence. As some species recover from endangered status, these may transition to conservation reliant species, whose populations still need ongoing management intervention to persist.

Aquatic environments are among Earth’s most species-diverse ecosystems, yet remain under-protected. Rivers face multiple threats, the most systemic being alteration of streamflow through human withdrawals or impediments by dams. Dam removal, once rare, is an increasingly used technique to restore stream flows. Marine populations are most threatened by overharvest, with more than 60% of commercial stocks classified as overfished or collapsed. Bycatch, the inadvertent capture of animals when fishing for something else, threatens non-target species, with losses to marine mammals alone between 300,000 and 600,000 individuals annually. Time and area closures, fishing effort reduction and gear modification can reduce bycatch mortality. Marine reserves produce increasing fish populations under “no-take” management as well as in commercial catches if harvest areas within the reserve are limited.

Economics influences conservation because it offers a way of valuing biodiversity and ecosystem services and a means for conservationists to make decisions for allocating their own resources to address threats to biodiversity. Ecosystem services are often public goods not easily valued in traditional markets. Cost-benefit Analysis, Hedonic Valuation Models, and Stated Preference Methods are adaptations of traditional economic approaches to capture conservation value. Integrated Conservation and Development Projects (ICDPs) are used in the Majority World to involve people in economic development attained through enhanced sustainability of their natural environment. Conservation biologists today must make economic activity a reflection of nature’s value rather than a determinant of it, and incorporate conservation as a normal part of economic activity rather than an external restraint that reduces its benefits.

Ethics and values have been foundational to conservation biology as a mission-driven discipline dedicated to a moral imperative –preserving global biodiversity. Value-based policies limit conservation success more than biological knowledge, so conservation biologists must establish the intrinsic value of nature in conservation efforts. Many conservationists have employed moral extensionism – the application of mortal standing to non-human entities – to establish nature’s value, expressed through positions based on Biophilia, Deep Ecology, the Land Ethic, Animal Rights, and others. In contrast, religious traditions establish intrinsic value through divine revelation, providing powerful arguments for biodiversity conservation expressed in a proliferation of faith-based organizations (FBOs) in conservation. Using these and other sources, conservationists must mature in their expression of ethical reasons for saving biodiversity to make conservation goals culturally persuasive

Habitats are sites having appropriate levels of biotic and abiotic features required for a species’ survival and reproduction, and so are vital elements of species conservation. Habitat loss, fragmentation, isolation (increasing distance between similar habitat types) and degradation are threats to habitat conservation. Contemporary tools for conserving habitat for threatened species include species-specific habitat suitability models (HSMs), “GAP” analysis (relating species’ distribution to distribution of protected areas), Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) technology employing laser scanning to measure habitat attributes, and dispersal models relating movement of individual organisms to relative “connectedness” of habitat patches. Human alteration of habitats cannot be eliminated, but can be mitigated through site-specific restrictions on human occupancy and disturbance, methods of resource extraction, and treatment of habitat following disturbance.

Biodiversity refers to the structural and functional variety of life at genetic, population, community, and ecosystem levels. Biodiversity is the core value of conservation biology, and preventing biodiversity loss is the discipline’s mission. Such loss is a systemic outcome of human use and occupancy of land and disruptions of ecological processes. Various systemic strategies of protection including direct legislation, regulation of trade in endangered species, and establishment of protected areas for endangered species have had significant but incomplete success. Protection-oriented approaches employ systematic prioritization of sites by treating site-specific threat of loss, ecological uniqueness, and opportunity for acquisition as primary determinants of priority. In contrast, management-oriented approaches emphasize maintenance of gene flow, creation of resources for habitat and niche specialization, and maintaining effective population sizes.

Conservation biology emerged in the 1970s and 1980s from older, more established applied biological sciences in response to increasing rates of extinction and threats to global biodiversity. Described as “a science of scarcity and abundance” applying biological principles to prevent the extinction of species, conservation biology grew rapidly in membership and influence following its inception. Foundational ideas of conservation are much older, drawn from philosophical and religious traditions emphasizing the intrinsic value of nature. Manifested historically as expression of privilege, nature appreciation, and preservation of landscape, conservation biology today is moving away from the idea of protecting nature from people to protecting nature for people, as extractive reserves, integrated development, and rights of indigenous people have become increasingly emphasized in and integral to conservation effort.

Many scientists today argue for designating the present age as a new geologic epoch – the Anthropocene –characterized by unprecedented current effects of humans on climate, land use, and geologic processes. Today less than 25% of the Earth’s ice-free surface is uninhabited (“wild”) landscape. The rest is either densely occupied or highly modified by humans. Such anthropogenic biomes or “anthromes” may themselves be home to “novel ecosystems” containing species assemblages never previously observed. Urban areas represent the most novel anthromes of all, yet may be sites where the future of biodiversity conservation is determined. Today conservationists must help create a “responsible Anthropocene” where human influence is more beneficent toward nature, not only to prevent extinction of species but the extinction of experience between humans and nature.

Conservation biology is a discipline that is empowered by legal support for accomplishing its mission of global biodiversity conservation, with such support rooted in legal frameworks grounded in ethical rights, utilitarian interests, and equal distribution of risks. Two US environmental laws, the National Environmental Policy Act (1970) and the US Endangered Species Act (1973) reframed biodiversity conservation in the US, and provided models used by other nations. The Stockholm Conference of 1972 and the adoption of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES) in 1973 engaged international support in new, systemic, and collaborative associations to achieve conservation. From these foundations, conservationists today must become more astute in understanding conservation law to make research effective in achieving conservation goals.

Global climate change poses a fundamentally different threat to biodiversity conservation than any other. Meta-analyses of species’ distribution studies demonstrate a “diagnostic fingerprint” of climate effects on species worldwide, characterized by advancement of spring events, range shifts, changes in local abundance, interactions across trophic levels, and climate-related extinctions. In some cases entire ecosystems, such as cloud forests and coral reefs, have been locally eliminated by warming temperatures. Conservation biologists are now using integrated vulnerability assessments (IVAs) assessing species exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity to climate change to estimate their risk of extinction from it as well as models of species-specific “bioclimate envelopes” to determine climate vulnerability. Both science and policy-based strategies will be needed to reduce effects of climate change and prevent losses to global biodiversity.

Afforestation and reforestation have the potential to provide effective climate mitigation through forest carbon sequestration. Strategic reforestation activities, which account for both carbon sequestration potential (CSP) and economic opportunity, can provide attractive options for policymakers who must manage competing social and environmental goals. In particular, forest carbon pricing can incentivize reforestation on private land, but this may require landholders to forego other profits. Here, we utilize an ambitious geospatial approach to quantify economic opportunities for reforestation in the state of Maryland (USA) based on high-resolution remoting sensing, ecosystem modeling, and economic analysis. Our results identify spatially-explicit areas of economic opportunity where the potential revenue from forest carbon outcompetes the expected profit of existing cropland at the hectare scale. Specifically, we find that under a baseline economic scenario of $20 per ton of carbon (5% rental rate) and decadal average crop profitability, a transition to forest on agricultural land would be more profitable than 23.2% of cropland in Maryland under a 20 year land-use commitment. Accounting for variations in carbon and crop pricing, 5.5%–55.4% of cropland would be immediately outcompeted by expected forest carbon revenue, with the potential for an additional 0.5%–10.6% of outcompeted cropland within 20 years. Under the baseline economic scenario, an annual allocation of $5.8 million towards a carbon rental program could protect 6.93 Tg C (3.4% of the state’s total remaining CSP) on reforested croplands. This moderate yearly cost is equal to 9.7% of Maryland’s average annual auction proceeds from participation in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (between 2014 and 2018), and 19.3% of the average annual subsidy payments for corn, soy, and wheat allocated over the same period. This methodological approach may be useful for state governments, not-for-profit organizations, or regional climate initiatives interested in identifying strategic areas for reforestation.

The inclusion of forest carbon in climate change mitigation planning requires the development of models able to project potential future carbon stocks—a step beyond traditional monitoring, reporting and verification frameworks. Here, we updated and expanded a high-resolution forest carbon modelling approach previously developed for the state of Maryland to 11 states in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) domain, which includes Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont. In this study, we employ an updated version of the Ecosystem Demography (ED) model, an improved lidar initialization strategy, and an expanded calibration/validation approach. High resolution (90 m) wall-to-wall maps of present aboveground carbon, aboveground carbon sequestration potential, aboveground carbon sequestration potential gap (CSPG), and time to reach sequestration potential were produced over the RGGI domain where airborne lidar data were available, including 100% of eight states, 62% of Maine, 12% of New Jersey, and 0.65% of New York. For the eight states with complete data, an area of 228 552 km2, the contemporary forest aboveground carbon stock is estimated to be 1134 Tg C, and the forest aboveground CSPG is estimated to be larger at >1770 Tg C. Importantly, these estimates of the potential for added aboveground carbon sequestration in forests are spatially resolved, are further partitioned between continued growth of existing trees and new afforested/reforested areas, and include time estimates for realization. They are also assessed for sensitivity to potential changes in vegetation productivity and disturbance rate in response to climate change. The results from this study are intended as input into regional, state, and local planning efforts that consider future climate mitigation in forests along with other land-use considerations.

Large-scale airborne lidar data collections can be used to generate high-resolution forest aboveground biomass maps at the state level and beyond as demonstrated in early phases of NASA’s Carbon Monitoring System program. While products like aboveground biomass maps derived from these leaf-off lidar datasets each can meet state- or substate-level measurement requirements individually, combining them over multiple jurisdictions does not guarantee the consistency required in forest carbon planning, trading and reporting schemes. In this study, we refine a multi-state level forest carbon monitoring framework that addresses these spatial inconsistencies caused by variability in data quality and modeling techniques. This work is built upon our long term efforts to link airborne lidar, National Agricultural Imagery Program imagery and USDA Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis plot measurements for high-resolution forest aboveground biomass mapping. Compared with machine learning algorithms (r 2 = 0.38, bias = −2.3, RMSE = 45.2 Mg ha−1), the use of a linear model is not only able to maintain a good prediction accuracy of aboveground biomass density (r 2 = 0.32, bias = 4.0, RMSE = 49.4 Mg ha−1) but largely mitigates problems related to variability in data quality. Our latest effort has led to the generation of a consistent 30 m pixel forest aboveground carbon map covering 11 states in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative region of the USA. Such an approach can directly contribute to the formation of a cohesive forest carbon accounting system at national and even international levels, especially via future integrations with NASA’s spaceborne lidar missions.

NASA Carbon Monitoring System projects NNX12AN07G, NNX14AP12G, and 80NSSC17K0710; National Science Foundation Grant No. DGE1322106

Hydrologically isolated forest pools, both vernal and permanent, are receiving increased attention in conservation because they often provide fishless habitats for forest-dwelling amphibians, reducing risk of predation to eggs and larvae. However, clarifying conservation value of such pools requires determination of whether the species they contribute to local biodiversity are unique or also present in other nearby wetlands such as freshwater marshes. We compared composition of amphibian communities in clustered pools to that of both spatially isolated pools and freshwater marshes in Illinois (USA) from 2008 to 2010 to determine (1) effects of clustering on community structure, species richness, and occupancy dynamics; (2) unique contributions of forest pools (six clustered and three isolated pools) to amphibian diversity compared to marshes (n = 6); and (3) species-specific probabilities of occupancy by wetland type. Amphibian communities differed among wetland categories, with community similarity in the same year reduced 38% by differences between marshes, clustered pools, and isolated pools. Species richness was similar in clustered pools and marshes, but lower in isolated pools. Clustered pools contributed more species (n = 10) than marshes (n = 7) or isolated pools (n = 4). Anuran species had higher probability of greater relative abundance and salamanders had greater probability of encounter at clustered pools than at isolated pools, and probabilities of species-specific site occupancy were lowest at isolated pools. Wildlife managers in Midwest USA can better understand species-specific occupancy dynamics of amphibians in different wetland categories through this analysis and can optimize local amphibian species richness through conservation of clusters of forest pools.