dukenvironment S p r i n g 2 0 0 3A n E nv i ro n m e n t f o r S o l u t i o n s

N I C H O L A S S C H O O L O F T H E E N V I R O N M E N T A N D E A R T H S C I E N C E S

species in troubleSeeking out the ‘Hottest of the Hot Spots’

AdministrationWilliam H. Schlesinger, DeanRichard B. Forward Jr., Chair, Division of Coastal Systems Science & Policy Peter K. Haff, Chair, Division of Earth & Ocean SciencesCurtis J. Richardson, Chair, Division of Environmental Sciences & PolicyMichael K. Orbach, Director, Duke University Marine LaboratoryPeggy Dean Glenn, Associate Dean, External AffairsJames Haggard, Associate Dean, Finance and AdministrationLaura Turcotte, Administrative Assistant to the Dean

Office of External AffairsPeggy Dean Glenn, Associate DeanScottee Cantrell, Director of CommunicationsAnita Brown, Director of AdvancementKrista Bofill, Director of Alumni Affairs and the Annual FundEric Miller, Director of Foundation and Corporate RelationsCarol Dahm, Assistant Director of Alumni Affairs and the Annual FundRita M. Baur, Office Manager and Director of Special Events

Board of VisitorsSimon B. Rich Jr., Edenton, NC (Chair)Marshall Field V, Old Mountain Company, Chicago, IL (Vice Chair)Lawrence B. Benenson, The Benenson Capital Company, New York, NYRichard H. Bierly, Morehead City, NC (Ex Officio)Ann Douglas Cornell, Wallace Genetic Foundation, Washington, DCTimothy J. Creem, Bridgton, MEMichael C. Farrar, US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, DCF. Daniel Gabel Jr., Hagedorn & Company, New York, NYHarvey Goldman, Syska Hennessy Group Inc., New York, NYLyons Gray, Downtown Winston-Salem Partnership, Winston-Salem, NCGilbert M. Grosvenor, National Geographic Society, Washington, DCJohn S. Hahn, Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw, Washington, DCRichard G. Heintzelman, Janney Montgomery Scott, Allentown, PAGeorge C. Hixon, Hixon Properties Inc., San Antonio, TXChristian R. Holmes IV, Shell Center for Sustainability, Houston, TXRichard E. Hug, Environmental Elements Corporation, Baltimore, MD

(Emeritus)Thomas C. Jorling, International Paper, Stamford, CTSally S. Kleberg, Kleberg/ESPY Interests, New York, NYJuanita M. Kreps, Duke University, Durham, NC (Emerita)James B. Miller, USDA Forest Service, Washington, DC (Ex Officio)Bettye Martin Musham, GEAR Holdings Inc., New York, NYJ.K. Nicholas, Northpoint Domain, Boston, MAPatrick F. Noonan, The Conservation Fund, Arlington, VAElizabeth B. Reid, Bedford Hills, NY (Emerita)John C. Reid, Curtis Reid Enterprises, LLC, Larchmont, NYDouglass F. Rohrman, Lord, Bissell & Brook, Chicago, IL Truman T. Semans, Brown Investment Advisory and Trust Company,

Baltimore, MD (Emeritus)Truman T. Semans Jr., GLOBE-USA, Charlotte, NCBartow S. Shaw Jr., American Forest Management Inc., Sumter, SCThomas A. Shepherd, MFG Inc., Fort Collins, CORonald J. Slinn, Slinn & Associates, Princeton, NJ (Emeritus)Wayne F. Wilbanks, Wilbanks, Smith & Thomas Asset Management, LLC,

Norfork, VA (Ex Officio)Robert L. Wood, Dow Chemical Co., Midland, MIGeorge M. Woodwell, The Woods Hole Research Center, Woods Hole, MA

Marine Lab Advisory BoardWayne F. Wilbanks, Wilbanks, Smith & Thomas Asset Management, LLC,

Norfolk, VA (Chair)Elsa Ayers, Greensboro, NC (Vice Chair)James H.P. Bailey Jr., Cape Lookout Marine Inc., Atlantic Beach, NC Richard H. Bierly, Morehead City, NCCharles F. Blanchard, Blanchard, Jenkins, Miller & Lewis PA, Raleigh, NC David S. Brody, Kinston, NC F. Nelson Blount Crisp, Blount & Crisp, Greenville, NCHugh Cullman, Beaufort, NCSylvia A. Earle, Deep Ocean Exploration & Research, Oakland, CA Robert W. Estill, Raleigh, NCJohn T. Garbutt Jr., Durham, NCCecil Goodnight, Wake Forest, NCC. Howard Hardesty Jr., Vero Beach, FLRobert G. Hardy, Cornerstone Ventures LP, Houston, TX Mary Price Taylor Harrison, Raleigh, NC Susan Hudson, Wilson, NCSandra Taylor Kaupe, Palm Beach, FLWilliam A. Lane Jr., The Dunspaugh-Dalton Foundation Inc., Coral Gables, FL Henry O. Lineberger Jr., Raleigh, NCJ. Thomas McMurray, Washington, DCStephen E. Roady, Earthjustice, Washington, DCKatherine Goodman Stern, Greensboro, NC Elizabeth Thrower, Vero Beach, FL, and Nantucket, MAStephen A. Wainwright, Duke University, Durham, NC

Alumni CouncilJames B. Miller, USDA Forest Service, Washington, DC (President)William E.S. Cleveland, Shreveport, LAD. Jefferson Dye, Jefferson Dye & Associates, LLC, New Orleans, LAPeter C. Griffith, Goddard Spaceflight Center, Greenbelt, MDLynne Hawkes, MEM '88, Natural Resource Ecology, Alumni CouncilRobert Beerits Lyon Jr., The Link Oil Company, Tulsa, OKDaniel Markewitz, Daniel B. Warnell School of Forest Resources,

Athens, GANancy Ragland Perkins, Office of Sen. Judd Gregg (NH), Washington, DCJames A. Spangler, Spangler Environmental Consultants Inc., Raleigh, NCLori A. Sutter, NOAA Coastal Services Center, Charleston, SCMichael Dechter, MEM '03, Resource Economics and Policy

(Student Ex Officio)Alexis Kingham, MEM '04, Coastal Environmental Management

(Student Ex Officio)

Editorial BoardJudson (Judd) Edeburn, Resource Manager, Duke Forest Peter K. Haff, Chair, Division of Earth & Ocean SciencesPatrick N. Halpin, Assistant Professor of the Practice of Landscape EcologyLynne Hawkes, MEM '88, Natural Resource Ecology, Alumni CouncilKaren Kirchof, Director of Career ServicesRandall A. Kramer, Professor of Resource and Environmental EconomicsMichael K. Orbach, Director of the Duke University Marine Laboratory,

and Professor of the Practice of Marine Affairs and PolicyCynthia Peters, Director of Enrollment ServicesDonna Picard, Staff Assistant, Office of the DeanClair Twigg, MEM '03, Water & Air ResourcesRachel Strader, MEM '04, Coastal Environmental Management

dukenvironment is a publication of the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences at Duke University.

dukenvironment Contents

2 Species in TroubleStuart Pimm and His Students Seek Out the ‘Hottest of the Hot Spots’ in Their Efforts to Stem Global Loss of Biodiversity

12 Loggerhead Crisis Brewing?Surprising Study Results Show More Females Than Males Hatching in Northern Population

15 Secret Life of WavesDuke Researchers Are Finding That the Waves We Never See May Play a Big Role in Shaping the Planet

6 The Log: School News

18 Forum: Dean’s Page

19 Action: Student NewsLiving a Double Life: For Six Months of the Year, Grad Student Luke Dollar Trades Number Crunching in Durham for a Chance to Track the Elusive Fossa in Madagascar

22 Scope: Faculty & Staff Notes

25 Sightings: Alumni News

28 Nature & Nurture: Campaign & Annual Fund News

32 Monitor: Upcoming Events

Produced by the Office of Creative Services & Publications,Duke University Health System, MCOC 3206Copyright © Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, 2003

Photography contributed by Scott Taylor, Scott Taylor Photography, Beaufort, N.C.;Luke Dollar, Nicholas School; Jim Wallace and Chris Hildreth, Duke University Photography;Judson Edeburn, Office of The Duke Forest; Lisa Dellwo Schlesinger, Durham, N.C.; Stuart Pimm, Nicholas School;Col. Bob Powell; and Jimmy Wood, Jimmy Wood Photography, Sumter, S.C.

As he bustles through the Nicholas School’s corridors carrying papers and files,or hunches over his computer doingsophisticated modeling, or begins yetanother trouble-shooting, problem-solvingtrip with his students to Southern Africa,Brazil, Southeast Asia, Central America,Florida’s Everglades, or Washington, D.C.,Stuart Pimm telegraphs the feeling that he’s in the right place at the right time.

“I think Duke affords such a wonderfulopportunity,” said Pimm, the school’speripatetic Doris Duke Chair ofConservation Ecology. “I’m in the Schoolof the Environment, and that’s very muchthe way I want it to be. We’re not just interested in doing science for science’ssake,” he said in one of several interviews.“The hottest of the hot spots are the placeswe work. We are looking for places that aretough and difficult, where we, as hopefullysmart scientists, can bring some importantideas to the table.”

Pimm is sitting in his high-ceilingedoffice, a converted sunroom whereNicholas School students used to gather.Students still parade in and out, onlythey’re now his own graduate students, anumber of whom have followed him toDuke from Columbia University, someeven from his previous years at the

University of Tennessee. On Pimm’s officewall, across from a potted palm tree thatthrives in the ample light, is a special worldmap. It highlights places, mostly in the tropics,where species are considered to be in trouble,mostly from the actions of humans. These,he says, are the “hot spots” — “not just theplaces where species are born, but alsowhere species are dying.”

His Nicholas School Web site (http://www.env.duke.edu/faculty/bios/pimm.html)notes that his expertise “lies in speciesextinctions and what can be done to prevent them.” He likewise “studies the lossof tropical forests and its consequences tobiodiversity.” You can read lots more abouthis approach to population biology in his2001 book, The World According to Pimm, pub-lished a year before he arrived at Duke. Its285 pages take readers on a worldwide hotspot tour and also measure the world’sassets. Readers may be startled by how manyassets are being diverted to human use.

His book’s final page, “About theAuthor,” notes that he’s written more than150 scientific papers, numerous articles forgeneral audiences, and a total of threebooks. It also notes his extensive mediaexposure. For many scientists, “being an

advocate is really a dirty word,” he said. ButPimm believes that talking to reporters aswell as politicians is a crucial part of hisefforts to save the natural world fromdeforestation and land conversion, over-hunting and overfishing, excessive extrac-tion of water resources and air and waterpollution. “Am I being an advocate when Igo to Capitol Hill and talk to the media?The answer is no!” he exclaims in hisDerbyshire, England accent. “I think theseverity of the ecological crises that we facerequires us to do that.”

Pimm hails from “the countryside of AllCreatures Great and Small,” he said. “It was awonderful place to grow up as a naturalist,with lots of hiking trails. His parentsincluded camping in every holiday. And“my interests in the outdoors, which Ishared with my parents, really came throughwatching birds,” he said. Sick at home onhis 12th birthday, Pimm viewed a televisionshow on birdwatching. When he got better,

he sleuthed out birds with a classmate and“was completely hooked,” he said.

His youthful hobby grew into a lifelongavocation as he was introduced to ecologyduring undergraduate years at OxfordUniversity and graduate school at

C O V E R S T O R Y

by Monte Basgall

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species in troubleStuart Pimm and His Students Seek Out the ‘Hottest of the Hot Spots’ in Their Efforts to Stem Global Loss of Biodiversity

“The idea is to use elephants to choose corridors that are not only politically but ecologically viable”

New Mexico State University. He choseNew Mexico for graduate study because twosummers in Afghanistan had piqued aninterest in desert ecology. After graduatinghe was ready for research experiences in avariety of settings — be they deserts, moun-tains or remote tropical rain forests — aslong as they were pristine. I felt as an ecologist that was where I would learn how nature should work,” he said. “So I definitely remember thinking I wouldnever go to Hawai`i, because it had been so severely damaged.”

Although tourists may think otherwise,Hawai`i has been so ecologically manipulatedby humans that much of the original ecologyhas been extirpated. But, at a crucialmoment, he went there anyway, as anextension of a research project studyingorganizational patterns of southwesternU.S. hummingbird communities. A fellowresearcher told him of several species ofHawaiian honeycreepers that were organ-ized the same way. So Pimm went toHawai`i, and it changed his life.

Back in the 1970s, “I don’t think we hada word yet for ‘conservation biology,’” hesaid. “Conservationists were advocates,something other people did.” But inHawai`i “I realized that 50 years from nowpeople would not look back on my papersin Science and Nature. They would say, ‘Pimmyou were on duty in Hawai`i when thosespecies went extinct. You let it happen!’

It touched on ethical and religious concerns, the idea that as a scientist notonly did I have a responsibility, but thatthere was something I could do about it.”The Society of Conservation Biology wasfinally founded in the early 1980s. “Fromthat meeting on, I knew what I was,” he said.

After previous stints on the faculties ofClemson and Texas Tech universities,Pimm went to the University of Tennessee,Knoxville in 1982 as an assistant professorin the department of ecology and evolu-tionary biology. He would stay in Knoxvillefor 17 years, rising to full professor andseeing his department reorganized as anecology department in its own right. But inthe end, Pimm was getting restless.

“I really wanted to work in a moreexplicitly interdisciplinary group, recognizingthat we also had to speak the language of economics, had to understand social sciences, had to have remote sensing skills,and had to understand the geological back-ground of the areas we are working in,” he says.So Pimm relocated to Columbia Universityin 1999 as a professor of ecology at theCenter for Research and Conservation,taking some of his graduate students withhim. “I expected to stay at Columbia for along time,” he said. “My reasons for coming to the Nicholas School have anenormous amount to do with how attractivethe program here is.”

Last summer, Pimm’s group was for-mally introduced to the Nicholas School atan outdoor barbecue, his internationalteam of graduate students blinking in thebright sunlight. “It’s an incredible mix,” hesays. “I have some students from Columbia.I have some who went from Tennessee to Columbia and are now here. One man and his family moved three times inthree years.”

Mariana Vale has been working withPimm for two years and is now beginning adoctoral research project in the BrazilianAmazon. “I love working with Stuart,” shesaid. “He’s always been very supportive ofme, and he’s an amazing scientist. He’s myendless resource for everything.” A nativeof Rio de Janeiro who finished her master’sdegree when Pimm was at Columbia, Valeis starting to study how human alterationsto the Amazon’s delicate environment areaffecting the distribution and conservationof perching birds.

“He has one of the most incredibleminds that I've ever encountered,” saidLuke Dollar, who studies the fearsomefossa, Madagascar’s major predator (seeAction/Student News, page 19), as well as usesremote sensing to document changes inthat environmentally beleaguered nation.

“He does so many different things, andhe does them all much better than the nextguy. He’s never had a graduate student he’snot been in the field with. He’s not so

photo captions are from left to right, top to bottom: 1. Jaguar in water 2. and 3. Deforestation in North Sumatra 4. Madagascar buzzard (Buteo brachypterus) 5. Stuart Pimm in his Nicholas School office 6. Rain forest frog 7. Slash and burn agriculture

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much a boss or a teacher as he is an academic father figure.”

Dalia Conde, another doctoral studentwho followed Pimm to Duke fromColumbia, said “I’m really happy to workwith him because I think he is open aboutworking with international students andunderstanding different cultures.” Anative of Mexico City, Conde spent previous years doing conservation projectsfor a non-government organization(NGO) in Mexico.

She and another Pimm Group inter-national doctoral student, FernandoColchero, recently joined an experiencedteam that captures and attaches radio col-lars to jaguars. With the collars, they cantrack the jaguars by satellite along junglecorridors in the Yucatan Peninsula. “Oneof the most exciting things is to have eyecontact with a wild animal such as a jaguarin a tree in its natural ecosystem,” Condesaid. “When we went on the jaguar capturehe (Pimm) stayed with us the whole timeto see how well we were doing on our work project.”

Conde will soon go to southern Africato do elephant-related research. She willvisit a “peace park” within several contiguousnations to search for ecologically friendlycorridors that the pachyderms can negotiate without interfering with orbeing harmed by humans. “The idea is touse elephants to choose corridors that are

not only politically but ecologicallyviable,” she said.

Elephant conservation is a specialchallenge, says Pimm, who spends enoughtime in Africa to teach at the University ofPretoria. (He isn’t paid a salary, but someof his expenses are covered.) “If you gettheir management right, you have elephants. If you get it really right, youhave far too many,” he quips, “and theydestroy the habitat.” On his first dayteaching his Applied Population Ecologyclass at Duke, Pimm was still jet laggedfrom attending the World Summit onSustainable Development in Johannesburg.So he showed the students a “very opin-ionated, very controversial” movie on theproblems of elephant-human relations.“At the end, I said, ‘Two weeks from now I want you to tell me what your solutionis.’” he said.

Pimm and his students pick such “sentinel” species to address broad issuesof people versus animals and preservationversus environment in the growing numbers of places that they work. Besides

elephants in South Africa, jaguars inMexico, birds in the Amazon, and fossasin Madagascar, there are sooty terns onthe Dry Tortugas off south Florida. “Untilabout seven or eight years ago my programwas largely U.S.-based,” he said. “Then Ibegan to realize that just working in therichest country in the world was not the

right way to do conservation. So I beganlooking for opportunities to work internationally.”

Pimm says he uses birds “as a windowinto what is happening to the rest of theenvironment, and with other kinds ofspecies. We really look at whole ecosys-tems, but we tend to do this through thewindow of studying birds, because weknow birds so well.”

A major sentinel species he studies inFlorida’s Everglades is the small, brownCape Sable Sparrow, which he describes as“about as uncharismatic and unlovely abird as you can imagine. The work that wedo involves the fact that poor water man-agement decisions have caused the sparrowto be flooded out of part of its range, andburned out of another part where it’s toodry.” Pimm might “not mention its namefor hours” as he meets with officials withthe U.S. Army Corps of Engineers,National Park Service and U.S. Fish andWildlife Service. “What we may talk aboutare the issues of restoring Florida’s naturalecosystem dynamics,” he said. “If they getthose right, the sparrow will come back.”

Pimm’s goals include building a “reallygood” conservation biology program at theNicholas School, and training an interna-tional cadre of specialists, both PhDs andMasters of Environmental Management(MEMs), to address complex problems invarious countries. A major conference heorganized with Intel founder Gordon E.Moore and Harvard biologist Edward O.Wilson produced a paper, “DefyingNature’s End,” that recognized the “needto train a lot more people to tackle theseissues,” he said. “Just like politics is local,

C O V E R S T O R Y

Pimm and his students pick such “sentinel”species to address broadissues of people versus animals and preservation versus environment

conservation is local. So a great part ofwhat I do involves being with my group indifferent parts of the world and showingthat they’re working with the local communities. In all the places we work, we have immediate, direct ties to the policy makers and managers.”

While the Nicholas School’s MEMprogram “is clearly the best professionalmasters program in environmental sci-ences in the country, its students are pre-dominantly young American women andmen,” he said. “We need to have studentscoming in from other countries to gettraining and go back to their countries.”

“That can’t happen without some serious scholarship support,” stressedPimm, who recalls a recent Christmas cardbearing a $2,500 check for his program.Donations that size have historically keptthe Pimm Group going, he said. “We willprobably raise $50,000 this year, thebiggest grants of which might be $5,000.That’s something I’d like to change.” TheNicholas School has “a wonderful groupof fund-raisers,” he says. “I’d like to buildup an endowment for getting students intothese areas each year, so that we don’t haveto live such a hand-to-mouth existence.”

All these goals explain why Pimmalways seems to be bustling. “There will bemany days this year when I’ll be up beforedawn out in the field,” he said. “Therewill be other days when I’ll be in front ofcongressmen trying to get the messageacross.” An ecological theoretician early in his academic career, he also logs plentyof time in front of a computer keyboard“as far from the forests and the jungles asyou can imagine.” Both Pimm and his

students relish the specialized technicalhelp available at Duke, such as the remotesensing expertise of Dean Urban, associateprofessor of landscape ecology, andPatrick Halpin, assistant professor of the practice of landscape ecology. “The Nicholas School offers a wonderfulopportunity for us to pick up a broadrange of necessary skills,” he said.

It is perhaps no surprise, then, that it took him five years to write The WorldAccording to Pimm. Describing himself as “a measurer of biodiversity,” Pimm saidthe book is in part a way of explainingwhat he does. After initially envisioning a book for scientists, “I realized that thestate of the planet is a hugely importantsubject that every educated person oughtto know about,” he said. Then he toldhimself that “auditing the planet is about as dull a subject as you could possibly imagine.

“Yet it isn’t dull,” he finally decided.“We have the most amazing adventures whilewe’re doing it all over the world.” So heended up “telling it as an adventure story.”

Pimm’s book appropriately beginsaboard a helicopter, where he is beingwhisked up the precipitous, vertigo-inducing slopes of the Hawaiian volcanoHaleakala to reach a cold and rainyresearch camp at 6,000 feet. Readers laterlearn the pros and cons of working in anAmazon rain forest. The cons range from“the thundershowers that drench you inminutes” to “the shots against yellow fever;the nauseating taste of the Lariam pillsthat ward off malaria; the threat of leishmaniasis; and the ghastliness of itstreatment if you contract it.”

With the entertainment also comessome stark math.

Earth now has six billion humans.Land that covers an eighth of it generates99 percent of our food. Humans alreadyuse up about 40 percent of the globalproduction of plant material. Most of theplants we use come from tropical placeswhere forests are shrinking by 10 percentper decade. About 90 percent of theocean is a “biological desert,” and we useup one third of the annual productionfrom the remaining 10.

There are probably 10 million kinds ofanimals and plants, about 10 of whichshould go extinct each year according topast “natural” attrition rates. Extinctionsare now accelerating to between 1,000 and10,000 times the natural rate.

Monte Basgall is a senior writer with Duke’s Officeof News and Communications and specializes inscience coverage.

web sites to note

Review of The World According to Pimm:http://www.env.duke.edu/faculty/pimm/pimmlabhtml/world.html

Research Group Web site:http://www.env.duke.edu/faculty/pimm/

Stuart Pimm’s Bio:http://www.env.duke.edu/faculty/bios/pimm.html

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photo captions are from left to right, top to bottom: 8. Pimm in the halls of the Levine Science Research Center 9. Rain forest frog 10. Aerial of Madagascar plateau 11. Indonesian deforestation 12. Rain forest frog 13. Deforestation 14. Rain forest 15. White-throated Spadebill (Platyrinchus mystaceus) 16. Lesser Woodcreeper (Lepidocolaptesfuscus) 17. Sooty Tern (Sterna fuscata) Photos 2-4, 6&7, 9-14 by Luke Dollar; photos 5 & 8 by Jim Wallace, Duke Photography; photos 15 & 16 by Stuart Pimm; and photo 17 by Col. Bob Powell

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S C H O O L N E W S the logSoon Midcareer Professionals Can Go Online to Get MEM Degree

Even though it might advance them up thecareer ladder, environmental professionalsmay find it too daunting a task to leave a job and family to go back to school for a master’s degree or for a certificate pro-gram. Now, through a “first of its kind”program at the Nicholas School, they canget what they need largely while sitting attheir home computers.

Beginning this fall, the NicholasSchool will begin taking applications for the Duke Environmental Leadership(DEL) Program, which will offer a varietyof online and site-based educational

opportunitiesfor midcareerprofessionalswith an emphasison interdisci-plinary themes,strategicapproaches toenvironmentalmanagement,communicationand effectiveleadership.

The programwill revolvearound the 30-credit Master ofEnvironmentalManagementoption (DEL-MEM), but the

school also will offer a variety of 10-creditcertificate programs and one-to three-credit short courses. Classes are scheduledto begin in mid-2004.

“Accessibility is one of the mostdaunting challenges to mid-career environmental training,” said Norman L.Christensen Jr., DEL executive director.“Through the DEL program the NicholasSchool will offer its comprehensive environmental management program tothose potential students who may not beable to spend two years in residence to geta degree and will provide continuing education for those that can’t leave hometo get it.”

Admission to the 30-credit DEL-MEM program will be based on under-graduate performance, GRE scores andwork experience. Five years of relevantwork experience is a prerequisite for theprogram. Students will be expected tocomplete a one-week orientation sessionat the Duke campus; a series of three-credit core and focused modular coursesor short courses; and a masters projectthat should allow students to pursue problems directly related to their currentemployment, said Sara Ashenburg, directorof continuing and executive education.

Proposed modular core courses —available in written and electronic formats— include Ecosystems Science andManagement, Environmental and NaturalResource Economics, EnvironmentalPolicy and Law and Program Managementfor Environmental Professionals.

With the exception of the orientationcourse, core courses and the masters project, all DEL courses will be availablefor single course enrollment by studentswith an appropriate bachelor’s degree andwho meet any course pre-requisites,Ashenburg said. Students enrolling inthree courses (10 credits) in particularfocal areas will qualify for certificates.Certificate areas might include conservationbiology, water quality assessment or natural resource economics.

The DEL faculty team includesChristensen, professor of ecology andformer dean of the Nicholas School,Patrick Halpin, assistant professor of the practice of landscape ecology, RobertHealy, professor of resource economics,Randall Kramer, professor of resourceeconomics, Lynn Maguire, associate professor of the practice of environmentalscience and policy, and Dean Urban,associate professor of landscape ecology.

The program is supported by an$800,000 grant from the Henry LuceFoundation.

For enrollment information, contact the DEL program office at (919) 613-8063 or del@duke.edu.

web sites to note

Rob Jackson’s op-ed:http://www.env.duke.edu/news/jackson-saddamshivers.html

Orbach’s Revelle presentation:http://www.env.duke.edu/news/FreedomoftheSeas.pdf

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Check out Rob’s Jackson’s Op-EdIn an op-ed for the News & Observer in Raleigh, Rob Jackson talks about what war in Iraqand an ice storm in North Carolina have in common. Jackson, associate professor of biology, is director of Duke University’s Program in Ecology in the Nicholas School of theEnvironment and Earth Sciences and author of the new book The Earth Remains Forever. You can read “Give Saddam the shivers and save, too” online at http://www.env.duke.edu/news/jackson-saddamshivers.html

web sites to note

Check out the program Web site athttp://www.env.duke.edu/del.

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Camille Heaton MEM’98 poses for DEL brochure

Former CEO Tackles Teaching for the FirstTime; Seeks Solutions to Questions aboutEnergy and the Environment

Former CEO Simon Rich has never stoodat the head of a classroom before, butwhen he was asked to teach a course in theNicholas School on energy and the environment, a topic he’s been ponderingsince he began his own career, he couldn’tresist the challenge of taking what he sees as some critical concerns before Duke students.

Over the years, as Rich has gainedexperience in agriculture and energyproducts, he has grown increasingly awareof and concerned about the limits on oiland gas production and what those limitsmight mean to a country whose food chainis so dependent on petroleum products.Rich began his career as manager of afamily commercial farm and last served aschairman of Louis Dreyfus Natural Gas.

“I began to understand the lack of sus-tainability of our global energy program,”he said. “But I didn’t have the answers.”

Teaching offered him an opportunityto continue a search for them. “It isintriguing, because I thought if I couldprompt people to ask the questions —people a lot smarter than I am and a lotyounger than I am — hopefully we willcome up with answers,” he said.

Tackling questions about energy andthe environment this spring semester are15 graduate students from the NicholasSchool’s Masters in EnvironmentalManagement program, Duke Law School,and Fuqua School of Business, and threeDuke undergraduates.

Rich is very pleased with the mix of the class because he feels the diversity ofthe students will add to the richness of the debate.

“I purposely picked the time periodfor the class to be three hours at one sit-ting because what I want to do is introducethem to what I’m calling catalysts — topicswhere you can take one side or the otherof the issue,” he said. “I’ve broken theclass up into small groups and very fre-quently they are going to be giving presen-tations that will trigger discussions.”

Guest speakers have included MattSimmons, president of Simmons & Co.International, who discussed “Oil & Gas:The Supply Demands Facts”; RonnieIrani, executive vice president ofDominion Exploration, who discussed“Finding Oil and Gas”; and Susan Ruth,director of the environmental division ofCERA (Cambridge Energy ResearchAssociates), whose presentation followedthe week after Nicholas School DeanWilliam H. Schlesinger’s; both talked onaspects of climate change.

“The course itself is going to follow therise of what I’m calling the petroleuminterval in our history as humans,” said

Rich. “And the object is to bringeverybody face-to-face with the factthat the petroleum interval has beena very short one in our history, andit’s going to be over while these stu-dents are in the prime of their lives.”

Rich said he hopes to expose the stu-dents to issues they haven’t thought about,and he wants them to leave the class askingquestions as they continue on their educa-tional and career tracks. “As I told themin their first class, the answer probably lies in the creation of an entirely new paradigm. I think we need one as we comeout of the end of this petroleum intervalto survive as a human society. It’s a bigvision, but that’s what I’ve challengedthem with.”

Rich, who is chair of the NicholasSchool Board of Visitors, said he thinksboard members and others who are notnecessarily in the academic world wouldbenefit from the rigors of preparing toteach a class. “It will make them appreciatewhat the academic world goes through. But,I also think they’ll learn at the same time,plus they have a lot to teach, to impart.”

S C H O O L N E W S

Read Orbach’s Revelle presentation onlineMichael K. Orbach, professor of the practice of marine affairs and policy and director of theDuke University Marine Laboratory, presented the 2002 Roger Revelle Memorial Lecture inNovember 2002, “Beyond the Freedom of the Seas: Ocean Policy for the Third Millennium.”The lecture is sponsored by the National Academy of Science’s Ocean Studies Board. Youcan read his report in PDF format. Go to http://www.env.duke.edu/news/FreedomoftheSeas.pdf

web sites to note

Hear Simon Rich talk about his new class-room venture athttp://www.env.duke.edu/dukenviron-ment/spring2003/richaudio.html

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S C H O O L N E W S the logSecond Environmental Leadership ForumBrings Together More Than 65Organizations and Individuals to TalkAbout Disasters

Dow Chemical, IBM, OccidentalPermian, the Texas Medical Center andthe International Red Cross were amongthe 65 organizations and individuals gathered at Duke Universityon Nov. 20-21 to explore“Dealing With Disasters:Prediction, Prevention and Response.”

This was the second in aseries of EnvironmentalLeadership Forums spon-sored by AIG Environmental,the Duke Center forEnvironmental Solutions,the DukeUniversitySchool of Law,The FuquaSchool ofBusiness andthe NicholasSchool of theEnvironmentand EarthSciences.Funding was provided by The StarrFoundation, which makes possible a num-ber of educational programs at Duke.

The forum’s seven sessions includedan opening overview, three sessions focus-ing on disaster prediction, prevention andresponse, two sessions focusing on chemi-cal facilities and ecosecurity, and a closing

summary session. It considered disastersthat are accidental and/or “natural” as well as those that are purposeful, such asterrorist acts.

Norman L. Christensen, foundingdean of the Nicholas School and a mem-ber of the U.S. Nuclear Waste TechnicalReview Board, dissected the 1976 failure of

the Teton Dam, citingmissed signals, arbitrarycost containment, andfailure to communicate as contributing factors.Christensen made thepoint that a disaster israrely a single event, butrather the cumulativeresult of a series of sys-temic failures. William H.

Schlesinger, deanof the NicholasSchool, describedsome of the correlationsbetween humandisease transmis-sion rates andglobal changes insea surface tem-perature.

Keynote speakers were Richard A.Meserve, chairman of the U.S. NuclearRegulatory Commission, and Michael D.Brown, deputy director of the FederalEmergency Management Agency, whodescribed the lessons learned from theWorld Trade Center disaster.

Issues and questions discussed included:• What have we learned from recent natural

and human-caused disasters that canhelp in dealing with future disasters?

• What are the roles of science, law andbusiness in predicting, preventing andresponding to disasters?

• How should we define leadershipregarding disaster prediction, prevention and response?

• What new models are needed?• What is the role of information

disclosure in preventing and mitigatingdisaster impacts?

• How much regulation is too much?

The next Environmental LeadershipForum is being planned for March 8 and 9, 2004, and will focus on the manyissues surrounding energy production and use. For information on how yourcompany can be included, contact Laura Turcotte at (919) 613-8081 or ljturco@duke.edu.

web sites to note

Column by Nicholas Board Member:http://www.env.duke.edu/news/rohrman.html

http://www.frontiersinecology.org/

Duke’s Annual reporthttp://www.yearinreview.duke.edu/

w w w.Read New Column by Nicholas Board Member Doug RohrmanBoard Member Doug Rohrman looks at wetlands and the law in the Ecological Society ofAmerica’s new magazine Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. You can read it in PDF format at http://www.env.duke.edu/news/rohrman.html. Preview the magazine online athttp://www.frontiersinecology.org/. Rohrman will have a regular column in each issue.

web sites to note

Check out the forum Web site for a completelist of speakers and topicshttp://www.env.duke/forum02

Video of forum sessions is available on theagenda page athttp://www.env.duke.edu/forum02/agenda.html

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John Koskinen, Deputy Mayor and CityAdministrator,Washington, D.C.

(from left) Ken Cornell, AIG Environmental;William H. Schlesinger, Dean,Nicholas School; Richard Meserve, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission;and Douglas Breeden, Dean, Fuqua School

S C H O O L N E W S

Schlesinger Notes Evidence of Global Warming on Antarctica TripNicholas School Dean William H. Schlesinger and his wife, LisaDellwo Schlesinger, represented Duke University on an AlumniAffairs excursion to Antarctica in mid-January. Schlesinger wasinvited to speak on issues of global environmental change, including ozone depletion, global warming, and their impacts on Antarctic ecosystems.

Embarking from Ushuaia, Argentina, on Jan. 15, the excursion first visited the Falkland Islands before continuing to explore the Antarctic Peninsula to 65° S latitude. Traveling on the MS Hanseatic, the Schlesingers were host to 10 Duke alumniamong more than 150 passengers aboard.

The group recorded seven species of penguins, some seen inrookeries of up to a million birds, and a variety of whales and sealsthat frequent waters of the Southern Ocean. One of the mostadvanced “ice-class” vessels in the world, the 400-foot Hanseaticeasily plied iceberg-filled waters of the Antarctic Sound and negotiated 40-foot waves in the crossing of Drake Passage.

While marveling at the pristineconditions at their Zodiac (inflatableboat) landing sites, Schlesinger notedsome unsettling indications of humanimpact even in these most southernlands. Using hand-held instruments,he found that ultraviolet light com-prised 6.4 percent of the total inBuenos Aires, but more than 9.1 per-cent in the Falkland Islands, whichclearly feel the impact of the “ozonehole” over the South Pole.

Huge icebergs derived from lastspring’s breakup of the Larsen-B ice shelfwere a constant reminder that humanactivity in the temperate zone extendsglobal warming to even the most remotereaches of the planet, he said.

Duke’s Annual Report is Now Online OnlyIf you want a glimpse of Duke during the year 2002, Duke’s annual report is now an onlinepublication. Be sure and click on the environment section under school reports. The inter-active publication has links to all the schools as well as headlines during the year. Go tohttp://www.yearinreview.duke.edu/

Five Join the Nicholas School Board of VisitorsThe Nicholas School Board of Visitors welcomes five new members to its ranks:

Ann Douglas Cornell is a 1975 graduateof Duke’s Trinity College and vice presidentof the Wallace Genetic Foundation inWashington, D.C. She has a special interestin pesticides and children’s environmentalhealth issues and has been instrumental inassisting the Nicholas School’s Children’sEnvironmental Health Initiative.

Michael C. Farrar of Washington, D.C.,rejoins the board after a two-year absence. In a career that spans private industry andgovernment service, he has held high-rank-ing environmental positions in the pulp,paper and forestry industry, including itsnational trade associations and a well-known company and at the U.S.Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).During EPA’s start-up, he was instrumentalin banning DDT from the U.S. market.He is currently a judge with the U.S.

Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s AtomicSafety and Licensing Board.

John S. Hahn is a partner at MayerBrown Rowe & Maw in Washington, D.C.,specializing in environmental law. He is a1974 graduate of Duke’s Trinity College andreceived his law degree from Yale. His specialenvironmental interests include habitat con-servation, brownfield development, coastaland flood plain development, and science inregulatory decision-making.

Lyons Gray, after representing the 39thDistrict in the North Carolina GeneralAssembly for 14 years, is president of theDowntown Winston-Salem (North Carolina)Partnership and chairman of the EPA

Environmental Finance Advisory Board. Hisdaughter, Charlotte Gray, is a 1999 graduateof the Nicholas School’s MEM program.

Robert L. Wood is a business grouppresident for Dow Chemical Co. withresponsibility for five business units:polyurethanes, epoxy products and interme-diates, propylene oxide assets, polyurethanessystems, and automotive. While based inIndianapolis as vice president of marketingfor DowBrands Household Products in 1989,he served as senior deputy mayor and chiefoperating officer for the city of Indianapolis.He was a featured speaker at Duke’s firstEnvironmental Leadership Forum.

Lisa Dellwo Schlesinger photos

Cornell Farrar Hahn Gray Wood

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Duke Students Launch Campus GreeningEffort With Talk By Architect

Internationally renowned architect WilliamMcDonough encouraged Duke to embarkon a plan to go beyond the current standards and become a leader in greeninitiatives in a Feb. 27 talk kicking off theDuke University Greening Initiative.

“Duke has a unique opportunity in thiscountry right now,” McDonough told theaudience of 400 gathered in GeneenAuditorium at Fuqua School of Business.Hailed by Time Magazine in 1999 as a “Herofor the Planet,” McDonough is foundingprincipal of William McDonough andPartners, a team of some 40 architectspracticing ecologically, socially and economically intelligent architecture in the United States and abroad.

McDonough’s talk was the first majorevent of the Duke Greening Initiative, thebrainchild of undergraduates Justin Segalland Anthony Vitarelli. Their group, which

includes graduate students from theNicholas School and Fuqua, aims to pro-duce a series of projects that will encourageDuke to become a national leader in sustainability and green building projects.

Segall and Vitarelli began a greenbuilding effort in August as part of a publicpolicy class on “Enterprising Leadership.”As part of their studies they met with university administrators and asked themto adopt the Leadership in Energy andEnvironmental Design (LEED) standardsdeveloped by the U.S. Green BuildingCouncil in all Duke building and renova-tion projects.

In November, with encouragementfrom their adviser, Simon Rich, chair ofthe Nicholas School’s Board of Visitors,Segall and Vitarelli enlisted students in theMasters of Environmental Managementprogram to take the project beyond build-ing standards. The project then becamethe Duke University Greening Initiative.

The graduate students have startedresearching which other universities aremeeting LEED standards and developingcampus greening programs, and hope tosee some students take on the greeningeffort as part of their masters projects.

“We want Duke to make greening partof the natural order of life on campus: we want organic foods available on campus,recycled products used in the bathrooms,buses to run on biodeisel fuels, and ‘green’in the curriculum,” said Mandy Schmitt, a joint degree student in environment and law and a member of the group’s executive committee.

S C H O O L N E W S the log

ParksWatch Gathers Directors for FirstConference in Guatemala

ParksWatch, a program of the NicholasSchool’s Center for Tropical Conservation(CTC), held its first conference at TikalNational Park in Peten, Guatemala, inDecember.

ParksWatch is a watchdog and monitor-ing organization that conducts on-the-ground inspection of national parks and equivalent protected areas in LatinAmerica. It operates through partnershipswith individuals and organizations in eachtarget country.

This conference was the first opportu-nity for ParksWatch directors from each ofthe five projects (Brazil, Guatemala,Mexico, Peru and Venezuela) to work withCTC-based staff to develop consistent protocols for conducting park inspectionsand processing the resulting information.

The five-day conference included presentations by each of the organization’sin-country partners, a methodology workshop, a presentation by ParksWatchfounder and CTC co-director, JohnTerborgh, and a field trip to Laguna delTigre National Park. It was made possible

by The Gordon and Betty MooreFoundation.

As of January 2003, ParksWatch hasaudited 35 protected areas.

web sites to note

Schlesinger’s op-edshttp://www.env.duke.edu/news/bill-airqual.htmlhttp://www.env.duke.edu/news/westnile-schlesinger.htmlhttp://www.env.duke.edu/news/schlesinger-eyes.html

w w w.Don’t Miss Dean Schlesinger’s Op-eds and SpeechCheck out Dean William H. Schlesinger op-ed “Relaxed standards threaten N.C. air qualityEPA decision could undermine effectiveness of what state has done,” which appeared in theCharlotte Observer in November, at http://www.env.duke.edu/news/bill-airqual.html

“For Warming Up to Disaster — West Nile virus is only a wake-up call,” which appeared in theChicago Tribune early last fall, go to http://www.env.duke.edu/news/westnile-schlesinger.htmlAnd, if you missed his speech “Eyes Wide Shut” to the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolinaabout stewardship of the earth, go to http://www.env.duke.edu/news/schlesinger-eyes.html.

web sites to note

Keep up with the Duke University GreeningInitiative online athttp://www.duke.edu/greening

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web sites to note

Find out more about ParksWatch athttp://www.parkswatch.org

Check out the Center for TropicalConservation athttp://www.duke.edu/web/ctc/

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William McDonough

Ice Storm Marks Second Time in Six Years That Major Weather Event Damages Duke Forest

In his 24 years at Duke University, Judson Edeburn has seenDuke Forest sustain only two major weather-related events thatcaused substantial forestwide damage, and both happened inthe past six years.

The early winter ice storm that began coating the trees andpower lines in the Triangle area on Dec. 4, 2002 snapped thetops off of middle-aged pine trees with a bang and brokelimbs over a large part of the almost 8,000-acre Duke Forest,closing all sections to the public through February. Cleanupcosts will run at least $55,000 not including staff time, saidEdeburn, Duke Forest resource manager.

When Hurricane Fran roared over Durham in the earlyhours of Sept. 6, 1996, it uprooted hardwoods and blew downevery tree in pockets of the Forest, closing the Forest acrossDurham and Orange counties for up to six months and causingsome $200,000 in damages, said Edeburn.

“We’ve never seen anything like this in the Forest — two severeweather events that cause substantial damage — that I know of fromthe people I’ve talked to. To have two such events in six years isunusual. A tornado hit a portion of the Hillsboro Division of theForest in 1993, but damage was confined to a small area.”

Unlike Fran, which blew down hardwoods, the ice stormwreaked the most havoc among small pines, 15 to 30 years of age,over a wide area. The younger trees, six to nine inches in diameterand three to 10 years old, were flexible enough to bend withoutbreaking, said Edeburn. Most trees older than 30 were generallystrong enough to withstand the weight of the ice, though some verylarge trees snapped or were uprooted.

“But those trees in the middle range are growing vigorously andhave a lot of green needles and surface area for the ice to build up.They snapped leaving snags 15 to 30 feet high throughout theForest,” said Edeburn.

In stands of trees in two of the Forest’s five divisions — theBlackwood and Durham divisions — up to 40 to 50 percent of thetrees were damaged and the entire stands may have to be cut down,he said.

Ironically, the ice storm offers the potential for new and con-tinued research. Edeburn said that this spring a Master of Forestrystudent will begin a survey of the species and size of trees thatreceived the most damage to determine if there is a correlation.

On another front, researchers at the Forest’s FACE (Free AirCarbon Dioxide Enrichment) site in Orange County, which lost30 percent of the tree tops in its circle towers, hope that the dam-age will add a new angle to the research. The FACE experiment isunique in that it provides a large-scale, long-term experiment ofhow forests will respond to the atmosphere of the future. The icestorm damage will now afford researchers a chance to look at whathappens when the tree cover is damaged, said Ram Oren, FACEco-principal investigator.

The Nicholas School was saddened by theloss of Maggie Katharine Schneider, aDuke Marine Lab undergraduate, who diedfrom injuries in a Thanksgiving weekendcar wreck.

Schneider, a junior biology major fromSt. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada, wasreturning to Beaufort from Nags Head onNov. 30 with two other Duke juniors,Megan Leigh Mobley of Olive, Mont., andMelissa Madeline Smith of Sanford,Maine, when the car they were riding in washit head-on by a pickup truck. Schneider,who never regained consciousness, died onDec. 4.

The three friends, all attending the fallterm at the Duke Marine Lab, had spenttheir Thanksgiving break at Nags Head vis-iting Schneider’s grandparents. The othertwo students were not seriously injured.

A memorial service, attended bySchneider’s parents and brother, was heldin Duke Chapel Dec. 10. Her friends gath-ered and celebrated her life talking aboutwhat a vibrant and energetic personSchneider was and about the joy shebrought to their lives. Maggie Katharine Schneider

School Saddened at Death of Marine Lab Undergraduate

S C H O O L N E W S

Judson Edeburn photos

12dukenvironment

Marine biologist Larry Crowder standsbeside a round concrete tub in the DukeMarine Lab’s turtle ranch. Ten small loggerhead turtles, each splashing in abrightly colored surplus Easter basket, vigorously flap their front fins and opentheir mouths hoping to be fed.

Crowder points to spots of fingernailpolish on their shells that let him knowthese turtles hatched on a beach inGeorgia. Over the course of this past summer, volunteers caught 500 baby loggerheads for Crowder as the hatchlingsemerged from their nests on four beachesin the Carolinas and Georgia. They werepacked in wet beach sand and quicklytransported by Crowder’s research team to the ranch on the Beaufort, N.C., campus for one of the largest-scale projects of its kind aimed at preserving the threatened turtles.

Crowder and Jeanette Wyneken fromFlorida Atlantic University (FAU), whostudied another 700 turtles that hatched

on six beaches as far south as Miami, aregathering information about how manymales and females are hatching in thenorthern and southern loggerhead turtlesubpopulations.

Their early results show a surprisinglysmall percentage of males among the turtles that Crowder’s team collected inthe Carolinas and Georgia, which mayhave serious implications for the future of the entire Southeastern population.(The Florida population alone makes upabout a third of the world’s total logger-head population.)

The researchers expected that themales would dominate in the north, andinstead they found that the “girls” had theadvantage: for every two males there werethree females.

“The results we have seen so far are surprising and even alarming,” said Crowder, who is Stephen TothProfessor of Marine Biology in theNicholas School.

The project to study the gender ratiosbegan in earnest last summer (2002)under Crowder’s direction at the DukeMarine Lab, and under Wyneken’s direc-tion at FAU in Boca Raton and the MoteMarine Laboratory in Sarasota, Fla. It ispart of a three-year research study fundedmainly by a $350,000 grant from theU.S. Environmental Protection Agency.This is the first time so many loggerheadhatchlings have been raised and studied so intensely.

They began by enlisting volunteer turtle watchers who monitored the nestsalong the Atlantic, checked nest tempera-tures and alerted the research teams whenthe 2-inch hatchlings were getting ready tomake a break for the ocean.

Once the calls started rolling in thatthe baby turtles were on the move, theresearch teams hit the road to collect thehatchlings and bring them to their tempo-rary homes at the three research facilities.At Beaufort the turtles were housed in a

by Scottee Cantrell

S T U D Y

Loggerhead Crisis Brewing? Surprising Study Results Show More Females Than Males Hatching in Northern Population

1 2 3 4

Scott Taylor photos

1., 2., and 3. Laparoscopies were conducted to determine each turtle's gender: Jeanette Wyneken, Florida Atlantic University, is in scrubs

converted fish shed in several water-filledtanks. Since no one had ever raised thismany turtles, the teams were kept busy figuring out how much and what to feedthem, Crowder said. In Beaufort, they gota menu of mostly shrimp, laced with extravitamins and minerals.

The hatchlings grew rapidly, and atabout three months, they were big enoughfor a small surgical procedure to deter-mine their gender. Wyneken conductedthe laparoscopies, which involved makinga small incision and briefly inserting a tinyscope to examine the babies’ gonads.

“These turtles have very small gonadsat this age and are difficult to identify,”said Wyneken, an expert on sea turtleanatomy and turtle conservation and an FAU assistant professor of biologicalsciences. “By relying on several differentcriteria, we were able to get the information.”

The babies, as big as your hand at thatpoint, took two weeks to recover, and thenwere ferried out from shore to begin their

lives at sea in the warm waters of the GulfStream. The Beaufort turtles hitched aride on a Coast Guard cutter to make the25-mile journey.

The charismatic adult loggerhead is areddish brown reptile with powerful jawsand a head as big as a log. As adults, theyweigh between 150 and 400 pounds andsport shells that are as long as a yardstickor bigger. They swim the Atlantic with fiveother species of sea turtles and enjoyhanging out in fairly shallow coastal watersto eat crabs and mollusks. Shallow watercan be a dangerous place for these turtles,which were classified as threatened in 1978 in the United States. In the past,commercial fishermen trawling for shrimphave inadvertently caught and drowned loggerheads.

People and beach development areamong the turtle’s biggest threats. The30-year-old female turtles returning tothe beaches where they were born to dig a nest and lay hundreds of eggs may find

beach renourishment or developmenthave made their beaches unsuitable.Hatchlings, blinded by artificial lighting,may head toward death instead of thewater. It’s a tough life. Only one in 1,000 of the hatchlings will live longenough to reproduce.

As a result of research by Crowder and other scientists, the National MarineFisheries Service now requires commercialfishermen to install devices called turtleexcluder devices (TEDs) on their nets,which allow the smaller turtles to escape.These seem to have reduced the numberof juvenile and young adult loggerheaddeaths, Crowder said.

In fact, the TEDs and other conservationmeasures appear to have helped reverse thedecline of the adult female loggerheadpopulation between Jacksonville, Fla., and Miami. This subpopulation is nowincreasing by 4 percent annually.

While this is good news for the south-ern turtles, the northern turtles aren’t as

5 6 7 8

4., 5., 6., 7.Turtles were deployed from a Coast Guard cutter into the Gulf Stream; Marine Lab research technician Jim Wicker is wearing a red suit and white cap 8. Some 500 hatchlings were raisedat the Duke Marine Lab

fortunate. The loggerhead numbers fromJacksonville through North Carolina arestill dropping at about 2 percent annually,said Crowder. When you combine this factwith the surprising results of the genderstudy, it is cause for major concern.

As strange as it may seem, it is the nesttemperature that determines whether aboy or a girl turtle hatches out of the egg.Scientists have believed that if the nest isno warmer than 84 degrees Fahrenheit —as you would expect in the Carolinas andGeorgia — then most of babies will beboys. If the temperature is warmer — suchas you might find on the Florida beaches— you get girls.

Based on this theory, Crowder said, heand Wyneken expected to find that thenorthern beaches provided more males tomate with the southern females thathatched on the Florida beaches.

When Wyneken started putting togetherthe results from the laparoscopies, shefound just what she expected from thesouthern population: the hatchlings were85 percent female and 15 percent males.

But she got a shock when the numbersstarted rolling in from the northerngroup: initial findings showed that thefemales outnumbered the males 60 percent to 40 percent.

“What we’re seeing is very few malesbeing produced in the north,” said

Crowder. “So the situation is we have alarge and recovering adult loggerheadpopulation in the south that is increasingat 4 percent a year but is producing almost90 percent females. And we have a north-ern population that is still in decline and

isn’t producing nearly the percentage of males as we thought it was.

“So if we lose this northern subpopu-lation, which is still in decline despite allwe’ve done, it has potential ramificationsfor the entire regional population.”

“There may simply not be enoughmales,” said Wyneken. “Additionally, the genetic diversity that this northerngroup contributes to both the northernand southern subpopulations should notbe lost.”

Crowder and Wyneken are just begin-ning to sort through all the implicationsand questions that these results raise. Theyhope to bring another round of baby loggerheads to the Beaufort and Floridafacilities this summer to start building onthe data they are now compiling.

“By seeing those really skewed sex ratios,we may be looking at a crisis that is notgoing to show up for 20 years when therearen’t enough males to go around,” Wynekensaid. “Or we may be looking at a reallyinteresting mating system — if it is normal— to have one male for every 10 females.”So, they need to verify their results.

Crowder said that there are severalavenues that this type of research can take.

One possibility, Crowder said, is “we’llhave to start thinking about global warm-ing and climate change. There are a wholestring of other possibilities that we aregoing to consider.”

Scottee Cantrell is director of communications forthe Nicholas School. Monte Basgall, Duke Newsand Communications, contributed to this article.

S T U D Y

web sites to note

Video on Turtle Project:http://www.env.duke.edu/news/crowdermovie.html

Larry Crowder Bio:http://www.env.duke.edu/faculty/bios/crowder.html

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“By seeing those really skewed sex ratios, we may be looking at a crisis that is notgoing to show up for 20 years when there aren’t enough males to go around”

14dukenvironment

9 10 11 12

9. Hatchling project coordinator, Jesse Marsh, takes one of many measurements on a baby loggerhead in Beaufort 10.Yuka Higashino, a student in the Marine Lab summer program, holds hatchling 11. Hatchling 12. Larry Crowder, Duke Marine Lab, shows off baby loggerheads

Waves help definethe ocean. They mark the boundary

between land and sea, shape the beach andwarn of approaching storms. But, beyond theswells familiar to beachcombers and surfers,other, less visible waves also give form to thesea. Offshore and deepwater waves sweep upsand and other forms of sediment as theychurn with the tide. Now, Duke scientists aretaking a closer look at this interplay betweensand and sea. In two separate labs, researchersare exploring the relationship between offshore waves, the shoreline and the continental slopes. In the process, they areturning up some surprising clues to coastalsedimentation patterns that have not beenwell understood up to now.

Work by a team including geologistLincoln Pratson found that “internal” orunderwater waves — in addition to earth-quakes — play a role in forming the inexpli-cably shallow gradient of continental slopesin ocean basins. Also based in the NicholasSchool’s Earth and Ocean Sciences Division,A. Brad Murray analyzes wave angles andsediment transport, but from the nearshoreperspective. Rather than relying on tradi-tional simulation models, he’s brought a newtool to the field. Using the principles ofchaos theory and nonlinear dynamics,Murray and his team discovered that theycould explain shoreline changes based on theangle between offshore waves and the beach.

While Murray’swork takes him just beyondbreaking waves, Pratson’s takes him far out tosea, to the continental margin. A Columbia-trained geologist, Pratson spent much of his career studying the evolution of the submarine seascape that marks the transitionfrom shallow to deep water. Once the edge of the continent’s waterfront, the margin’splains give way to a gradual slope. There,Pratson said, a thick accumulation of sediment contains “the most complete recordof the earth’s history.” In addition to holdingclues to the earth’s past, the slope also feedsits future by storing and recycling the ocean’svital nutrients. Much of Pratson’s work hasrevolved around the role of sedimentaryprocesses that shape this important underwater terrain.

“One of the things I’m interested in isthe stability of the continental slope and whatcontrols it,” he said. “And a big indicator ofits stability is its gradient.”

The quest to understand this deep-sealandscape has some practical implications.Oil companies involved in offshore drillingneed to know whether the shelf and thewaters above can support their structures.And instability, in particular landslides andearthquakes, can have devastating conse-quences. The 1998 tsunami that killed 3,000people in Papua New Guinea was most likelygenerated by a submarine landslide.

Butultimately, the

slope research was driven by“scientific curiosity,” Pratson said. “Theslope should be on the order of 10 degreessteeper than it is. The question then becomes— why is it so low?”

There was quite a bit of evidence sup-porting the existing theory — that underwaterearthquakes and avalanches knock sedimentdown and keep the slopes from becomingsteep, Pratson said. That is one reason therole of underwater waves and tides had notbeen explored in the past. Still, the avalanchetheory fails to fully answer the question ofwhy the slopes are so gradual, he said.

Submarine avalanches will lower theangle of the continental slope, Pratson said.“However, they generally require that thecontinental slope achieve a steep gradientbefore it becomes unstable and avalanches.On average, the slope of the continentalslope is much less than this critical or thresh-old angle.”

That unanswered question has alwaysintrigued Dr. David Cacchione, a consultantand former U. S. Geological Survey scientist.Cacchione met Pratson when the two workedon the STRATAFORM (Strata Formation on Margins) project. This Office of NavalResearch collaboration brought together scientists in the mid-1990s to study the evolution of sedimentary deposits in thecontinental margin. While not the main

Duke Researchers Are Finding That the Waves We Never See May Play a Big Role in Shaping the Planet

secret life of wavesby Tinker Ready

R E S E A R C H

focus ofhis career research,

the impact of internal waveson the continental slope has always

intrigued Cacchione, who was the leadauthor on a paper the researchers publishedlast year in the journal Science.

“I’ve done sort of back of the envelopecalculations on this for years,” he said. “I’vealways had this idea that the slope is somehowin equilibrium with the shear and the energyin the internal tides.”

The STRATAFORM project brought thetwo scientists together, but it also made theresearch possible in another way. Data collected for STRATAFORM allowed themto further explore the impact of tide-driveninternal waves on the slope. What they foundwas that, under the right conditions, internalwaves have the capacity to keep sedimentfrom settling on the slopes at a steeper angle.

“When the slope is very low — less than acouple of degrees — the energy of internalwaves basically gets reflected up,” Pratsonsaid. “If the slope is very steep, then theinternal wave energy is deflected back out into the ocean. But when the continental slopeis at an order of 2 to 4 degrees, the internalwaves break and create a bore that moves upthe slope surface.”

The relationship between wave angle andslope, “could be a coincidence,” Pratsonsaid. But, at the very least, it suggests that thisis a mechanism that should be considered asa factor in the formations of the slopes.

While Pratson did much of his work onthe computer, the third co-author of thepaper, Andrea Ogston of the University ofWashington in Seattle, was the one who gother feet wet. She collected data on internalwave motions from buoy-bound instrumentsthat reached to the bottom of their California

study site.Her observations confirmed the researcher’s theoretical work.

In a sense, new data allowed Pratson’steam to do its work. For Brad Murray, it wasa new approach to modeling that led him tohis cutting-edge research. Murray’s workfocuses on the applications of chaos andcomplex systems theory to geology. Theapproach is based on the tendency of complicated systems with seemingly irregularbehavior to develop from simple interactions.Complex systems theory applies to a range of scientific endeavors, as evidenced by thefaculty who staff the Duke Center forNonlinear and Complex Systems. They come from math, physics, engineering andneurology, to name a few.

Prior to turning his attention to the sea,Murray used complex systems theory to studyriver and landscape pattern formations. So he was not part of the shoreline changecrowd when he turned his attention to thebeach. But when it comes to systems, youcan’t find many that get more nonlinear or complex than the processes that driveshoreline change.

Traditionally, coastal scientists and engineers use numerical simulation-stylemodeling to analyze shoreline change. Withthat approach, they try to create formulasthat mimic natural systems as accurately aspossible, including all the details of theprocesses and inputs that might impact thesystem, Murray said.

“I come from outside this particularcommunity,” Murray said. “I studied patterns on the earth’s surface looking forsimple explanations for these complex patterns. We try to throw out all the detail

and find outwhat are the possible

simple interactions that would cause this orthat to happen.” Many researchers in thecoastal science don’t believe you can learnmuch without those details, he said. ButMurray saw his approach to modeling as anew way of solving an old puzzle. It also lendsitself particularly well to shoreline change.Instead of studying change in an isolated surfzone for a short period of time, Murray’smodel was designed to consider long-range,large-scale change.

Working as a team that included graduatestudent Andrew Ashton and then-visitingscientist Olivier Arnoult of the École NormalSupérieure, the work began not on thebeach, but as a physical insight in Murray’shead. Laying in bed on vacation, Murray saidhe realized that there must be a fundamentalinstability in alongshore sediment transport.From that, he deduced that waves in deepwater approaching the shoreline from highangles (between the wave crests and theshoreline) would make bumps grow. Theseare the same waves that break on the beach,but “at different stages of their journey,”Murray said. They have not yet hit shallowwater, where they refract, or bend when they“feel the bottom.” Murray said.

“If the wave crests are parallel to shore,there can't be any transport, and if wavecrests in deep water are perpendicular toshore, they don't even move toward theshore, so approximately nothing happens,”he said. “Moving away from either extreme,the transport increases, until you reach amaximum somewhere in the middle.”

Drawing a line from sediment transportpatterns to the angle between the wave and

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1. A. Brad Murray 2. &3. Satellite images showing naturally occurring large-scale shoreline features:The Sea of Azov, Ukraine; and the Carolina Coast, USA 4. As a result of the basic instability, shoreline perturbations grow in the presence of high-angle waves

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theshore allowedthe team to create a computer model thatwould explore shoreline change ofover hundreds of miles and thousands of years.

“It turns out that rich, complex, fascinatingbehaviors come from that relationship.” He said. “If you start with a shoreline that ismore or less straight and has small bumps onit, everyone assumes that these bumps wouldbe smoothed. But that’s not true when thewaves approach shore at high angle.”

His simulations found that, eventually,these high angle waves can create “flying spits”and various other landforms, including capessimilar to those spanning most of the coast ofthe Carolinas. He also found that sandycoastlines continually reshape themselves,and that changes on one beach can impactdistant beaches.

“The details of how they interact andwhat you end up with probably depend onthe wave climate,” he said.

From that, an immediate, practicalapplication emerged from the work. Waveangles may very well help explain why some“hot spots” along the beach erode so readily, he said.

These simulations are not designed to describe what a specific stretch of beachlooks like. Instead, the computer work takes“a much longer term and abstract view ofthings,” Murray said. Still, it turned out the team’s hypothetical scenarios stronglyresemble actual coastal morphology and patterns of change. That suggests their findings are relevant to shoreline behavior innature and adds credence to their modeling

approach.The team pub-

lished their findings in the journal Nature last year.

Murray may work in the realm of theabstract, but he doesn’t spend all his time inthe lab. “I get out to the beach as much as Ican,” he said. “In general you don’t discoveranything new when you’re sitting at yourcomputer. You’re not likely to come up withany new ideas unless you are looking at thenatural system.”

Rob Holman, a professor of oceanic and atmospheric sciences at Oregon StateUniversity, first learned of the Duke professor’s work when Murray was doing hispost-doctoral work at Scripps Institution ofOceanography in La Jolla, Calif. Holman isconsidered a key researcher in the area of beach processes and large-scale coastalbehavior.

“In many ways this is a new frontier inscience and no one really knows how to proceed,” Holman said. “Brad is one of thenew generation striking out to attack thesedifficult problems.”

Both Murray and Pratson are testingtheir findings in larger arenas. Pratson’steam is working on a global analysis lookingat the continental slope and the characteristicangle of internal waves. They are also lookingat the role internal waves may play in nutrient storage and climate modulation.

“I think what we are going to get out ofthis type of thing is a better understanding of the ocean and the evolution of these bedsand how one interacts with the other,”Pratson said.

Murrayalso seems poised toanswer some important ques-tions. The shoreline change researchcommunity “is realizing that the larger scaleand longer term stuff is important. It’s sci-entifically interesting, but it’s not clear howyou study it,” Murray said.

Bill Birkemeier of the U.S. Army Corpsof Engineers is the head of the agency’s FieldResearch Facility in Duck, on the OuterBanks in North Carolina. He agrees withMurray that researchers should — literally —take a longer look at shoreline change.

“We’re still working on a basic under-standing of small scale, but many of ourrequirements require predictive capabilitiesfor many miles and our models don’t handlebig scales very well, ” he said. “I think(Murray) is going to have an impact on thisfield. He already has.”

Tinker Ready is a health and science writer based inCambridge, Mass. Her work has appeared in NatureMedicine, The Boston Phoenix, the Utne Reader, the LosAngeles Times, The Boston Globe, Esquire, and Parents.

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web sites to note

Brad Murray Bio:http://www.env.duke.edu/bios/murray.html

Lincoln Pratson Bio:http://www.env.duke.edu/bios/pratson.html

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1. Lincoln Pratson 2. An image of the continental slope off of the East Coast of the United States 3. A breaking internal wave in the laboratory 4. A depiction of internal-wave energy impacting the sea bed (middle panel) or reflecting away from it (top and bottom panels)

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D E A N ’ S P A G E forum

Forget Politics:Environmental Scientists Need to Speak Up and Be Heard

by William H.Schlesinger

Much of the public thinksacademic scientists arefuzzy-haired (or bald-headed) geeks,

happy in window-less laboratories, discover-ing things that most people don’t under-stand, and publishing their findings in deepprose that can’t be read by anyone outside ofthe ivory tower. We may not understandtheir science but we expect their methods tobe pure and honest. And, so long as thesescientists work on questions such as the ageof the universe, we do not expect their find-ings to affect the political process, at leastanytime soon.

But, for environmental scientists, dailyreality is quite different. The subject usuallyis a problem—the health of the environ-ment—for which the public and policy mak-ers want a solution. The public expects thebest opinions that science can offer on howto avoid direct risks to humans or to the nat-ural ecosystems that sustain life on Earth.The debate about what to do—the costs andbenefits of actions—is often acrimonious.

How far should environmental scientistsventure outside the laboratory to offer anopinion about what should be done aboutenvironmental problems?

For one, I am on record as an activist.When our research speaks to an issue, Ibelieve that academics should make everyeffort to translate their findings, and theirbest interpretation of the state of the science,so that the public can understand it. We haveevery right to speak out against a toxic impactto our environment, just as we would expecta physician to speak against a carcinogenicsubstance that might contaminate our food.Indeed, when taxpayer money has supportedour research investigations, one can arguethat we have the responsibility to go publicwith our findings.

Within the current political environmentin the United States, during the past fewmonths, I have been accused of being “parti-san” when I have spoken out on globalwarming, air pollution, or logging in ournational forests. Far from it! Academics arenot responsible for the clear differencesbetween the political parties in their supportof environmental issues. It is these differ-

ences, rather than factual, public statementsby environmental scientists, that have politi-cized the debate on environmental policy.

So long as environmental scientists haveno conflict of interest in the outcome of anissue, we should be vocal in what ourresearch says about human environmentalimpacts. Subsequent debate about what to domay be political, but it should be informedby our science. And if we are asked what todo about a problem, we have a right to speakout without feeling that we have compro-mised the integrity of our science.

In my first year as dean of the NicholasSchool, I added a section to the form onwhich faculty report their accomplishmentseach year. The form now asks them to listtheir efforts in public outreach, education,and media. I hope to see the entries in thissection grow. We have information that thepublic needs to know, and we have the rightand responsibility to convey it.

Schlesinger is dean of the Nicholas School andJames B. Duke Professor of Biogeochemistry

Dressed in his Sunday best and fresh from singing tenor inDuke’s Chapel Choir, Luke Dollar doesn’t look much like a fieldbiologist. The floppy fringe of hair around his clean-shaven faceis neatly combed, he doesn’t exude strange jungle odors, andnothing about his amiable grin suggests tropical diseases, pith helmets, or man-eating crocodiles.

But Dollar, it seems, lives a double life. When the doctoralstudent in ecology is in Durham, work with adviser Stuart Pimmin the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciencesmeans chugging through data and sipping wine on Sunday afternoons with the rest of Pimm’s group — a tight-knit crew helovingly calls “The Family.”

For six months of the year, though, Dollar’s life takes him toMadagascar, an island off the coast of southern Africa and hometo some of the strangest and least-understood animals on Earth.At the field station he and Pimm established in the Ankarafantsikadry forest, Dollar is principal investigator for several projects,including a groundbreaking study of Madagascar’s largest predatorand a systematic survey of Malagasy conservation efforts. It’s aworld away from Durham, and by the time he reaches the station,

Dollar’s ties and fine food are long gone, traded for wildlife-themed t-shirts and a steady diet of rice and beans.

Not that he’s complaining. Dollar estimates he has traveled toMadagascar “10 or 11 times,” and he relishes each opportunity tostep outside the Western mainstream.

“Living there teaches you what you really need to survive, to behappy,” he said. “It’s not things-based. We take a lot for granted.”

Dollar, a 1995 Duke graduate, made his first trip to the islandnation in the Indian Ocean when he was still an undergraduate.He spent the summer before his senior year working on a DukePrimate Center project in the southeastern Ranomafana rain forest. On that trip, he studied lemurs — cuddly vegetarian ancestors of monkeys and apes. But he found his true calling aftera mysterious signal from a long-dead transmitting collar led himto wisps of lemur fur, a mangled radio collar, and very little else.

The collar-chomping culprit, his Malagasy guide explained inhushed tones, was a fossa (pronounced FOO-sa), Madagascar’slargest predator. Pound-for-pound, the elusive, bobcat-sizedfossa is among the world’s fiercest creatures. At the end of the dryseason when prey is in short supply, Dollar says, they’ve been

by Margaret L. Harris

S T U D E N T N E W S action

Living a Double Life:For Six Months of the Year, Grad Student Luke Dollar Trades Number Crunching in Durham for a

Chance to Track the Elusive Fossa in Madagascar

photo captions from left to right (top to bottom): 1. Madagascar sunset 2. Betsileo village child in Madagascar 3. Ring-tailed mongoos (Galidia elegans) 4. Namorona River in Madagascar 5. & 6. Ranomafana National Park 7.Three-day hike into Zahamena National Park

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known to “do really amazing stuff,” includingmaking successful solo attacks on cows andpigs. For decades after its discovery, though,the elusive fossa remained a scientific mystery. Even its place in the animal kingdom had to be pencilled in. The fossalooks something like a cat-dog hybrid, withits long tail, pointed snout and sharp claws;and DNA evidence linking it to the mongoose family was a long time coming.

Now, thanks in large part to the work ofDollar and his team, the veil of mysteryaround the fossa is lifting. Early observershad assumed it must be nocturnal becausethey rarely saw it, but now scientists knowthat the fossa is cathemeral, or equallyactive day and night. When it comes tofood, fossas regard “anything with a heart-beat” as potential prey, but lemurs make upa large part of their diet. This might seemlike an ecological Catch-22 — what shouldconservation-minded scientists do to helpan endangered predator whose chief prey isitself endangered? But the actual relation-ship is considerably healthier, Dollar said.By keeping more common varieties oflemur in check, fossa predation preventsthese better-adapted lemurs from outcom-peting their endangered cousins. Take away

the fossa, Dollar said, and rare lemurs likethe sifaka would likely die off, too.

The threat to fossa survival is two-fold.As with thousands of other species inTexas-sized Madagascar, slash and burnagriculture is rapidly consuming the fossa’snatural habitat. Worse, many Malagasypeople fear and loathe the fossa and willshoot it on sight.

“Killing a sifaka [lemur] is taboo, but the fossa is like their big bad wolf,” heexplained. “They’re told from childhoodthat if they’re bad, the fossa will come andget them. And if their chickens disappear,it’s always the fossa’s fault.”

Fossas do eat chickens — in fact, Luke’steam uses them to bait live-traps — but Dollarbelieves local fear has a much deeper cause.When humans arrived in Madagascar about1,500 years ago, the fourth largest island inthe world had twice as many species as itdoes now. Among the ranks of the now-extinct is an animal Dollar describes as “the fossa’s big brother,” a predator largeand fierce enough to hunt and killhumans. Although there are no reliablereports of modern fossas attacking humans,Malagasy animosity may stem from a timewhen a “fossa” attack was a very real threat.

Dollar figures the best way to changemisperceptions is through education, socommunity programs form an importantpart of his group’s work. Usually, afterteam members sedate a trapped fossa with adart from a blowpipe, they transport theslumbering animal back to the station fortests — measurements, blood work, and tissue samples. Sometimes, during thesesessions, the once-feared creature becomesa goodwill ambassador for the entire team,as many villagers have a chance to see,touch, and even hold a fossa for the firsttime in their lives. Afterwards, Dollar said,villagers will often greet members of hisgroup with shouts of “Arovny ny fossa!” —“Save the fossa!”— in Malagasy.

Fossa visits aren’t the team’s only community outreach program. Othersinclude attending village ceremonies, helping the Peace Corps build a conserva-tion-themed basketball court (completewith a slam-dunking lemur on the back-board), and vaccinating domestic animalsagainst rabies. The team itself includesmany native Malagasy, both local helpersand full-time graduate students fromAntananarivo University in the capital.The long-term goal of their efforts,

S T U D E N T N E W S

8. Slash and burn agriculture hillside in Madagascar 9. Madagascar capital city, Antananarivo; rice paddies in foreground 10. Fossa (Cryptoprocia ferox) 11. Black and white ruffed lemur (Varicea variegatavariegata) 12. Slash and burn agriculture; hand-terraced rice paddies 13. &14. Luke Dollar in the field (Photos 1-12 by Luke Dollar; and photo 14 by Chris Hildreth, Duke University Photography)

‘Anybody There Do Carnivores?’

Twenty years ago, only about 30 Florida panthers survived inthe wild, and most carried genetic defects from inbreeding.Today, thanks to a controversial program that improved pan-ther viability by crossbreeding them with their Texas cousins,the situation has improved. But the heated political atmos-phere surrounding the panther made it impossible for localgroups to do objective science. Who, then, could take years ofdata and write papers on the panther?

“Stuart Pimm’s group had been in the Everglades doingbird research for over a decade,” graduate student LukeDollar explained. “So the Florida people called up and asked,‘Anybody there do carnivores?’”

Three days and 15,000 photocopies later, Dollar had allthe Florida panther data in hand and was ready to start min-ing it for papers. He presented the first at Cambridge inMarch, and he says the panther data displays some parallels tothe fossa that he is studying in Madagascar.

“The panther 20 years ago was in the shape that fossa willbe in 20 years from now if we don’t continue our work,” hesaid. “I hope the fossa population never reaches those levels,but if it does, we have a road map.”

web sites to noteWant to know more about Luke Dollar and fossa?http://www.earthwatch.org/expeditions/dollar_02.html

http://www.pulseplanet.com/archive/Nov02/2791.html

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/madagascar/dispatches/20000525.html

http://www.nwf.org/international-wildlife/2000/fossa.html

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Dollar said, is to empower the Malagasypeople to understand and manage theirown resources.

That might seem like a tall order, even for a man whose enthusiasm seemsundimmed by hazards ranging from political instability to malaria (despite taking prophylactic anti-malarial drugs,he’s had the disease four times). However,Dollar believes his ambitious, activistapproach is the only way to ensure long-term survival of the animals and ecosystemshe studies.

“If researchers aren’t paying attentionto the conservation implications, theyshouldn’t be doing research,” he said,leaning forward to emphasize the point.“And if they don’t have policy implications,they shouldn’t be there either.”

Dollar acknowledges that his views mayseem harsh to some of his fellow scientists.The spectre of extinction, however, is veryreal, and he takes it seriously. A committedanimal lover — he answers his telephonewith a cheery “Hello, animal house!” —Dollar is the only biologist in Madagascarwho keeps a full-time veterinarian on staff.The extra expense has paid off: no researchanimals have died under the team’s care.

At times, Dollar even gives the impression that the fossa’s survival is a matter of personal scientific pride, and anexperience early in his career explains why.When he joined Pimm’s team, “TheFamily” was based at the University ofTennessee. There, Dollar worked next doorto the man who had been the world’s experton ivory-billed woodpeckers. But the last

ivory-bill had perished years before, leavingthe scientist with only stuffed specimensand reams of data to show for his life’s work.

“I realized pretty quickly that if I didn’twant to know a lot about an extinct specieswhen I retired, I had to look towards conservation as well as pure science,”Dollar said, noting that one of the first fossas he ever trapped was later killed.

So, by utilizing Pimm’s expertise withGeographic Information Systems (GIS)data-managing software, the team launcheda broad survey of Madagascar’s protectedareas. Using images taken by LANDSATEarth-mapping satellites, the group tracked10-year deforestation rates in and aroundseven protected regions. Such satellite-based tracking, Dollar said, is an “easy,cheap and effective” way of monitoring and quantifying the success of conservationefforts. By quantifying conservation, scientists can hold ineffective managersaccountable. He cited the AnkarafantsikaIntegrated Natural Reserve as an example;under kleptocratic local management, thereserve actually lost habitat faster thannearby unprotected areas — a phenomenonDollar compared to “a conservation Enron.”

On a more encouraging note, parkswith tourism or research development did significantly better at keeping forestcover than undeveloped parks or sur-rounding areas. The reason, Dollar said, is that the presence of outsiders cuts downon poaching and illegal habitat destruction,and jobs in research or tourism offer local Malagasy better-paid alternatives to farming.

“In the absence of some other way tosurvive, they’re going to do what they can,which is slash and burn agriculture,” Dollarsaid. “But growing rice is hard work, and ifpeople have options, they’ll take them.Someone who’s just worried about survivalhasn’t necessarily put together the fact thatif they keep cutting down forest, they’llruin the watershed. And then they’ll starveto death. Since I care about people as muchas I care about habitat, I want to help themstrike a balance.”

Fortunately, for a man who lives in twocultures, life is all about balance. “I havethe best of both worlds,” he says, grinning.“And I love going to Madagascar. But it’sstill nice to be eating something besidesrice and beans.”

Margaret Harris T'03 is a physics major with amedieval/renaissance studies minor and a sideinterest in science writing. She will enter physicsgraduate school in the fall.

— Margaret Harris

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F A C U L T Y & S T A F F N O T E S scopePresentations and Conferences

At the Fall 2002 Meeting of the AmericanGeophysical Union, professor of geologyPaul Baker presented the papers“Geochemical and Diatom Records ofHydrologic Variability in the TropicalAndes During the Late Quaternary FromDrill Cores of Lake Titicaca” (with S.Fritz, G. Seltzer, K. Arnold, P. Tapia),

and “OxygenIsotopes andRing Widths inthe TropicalTree SpeciesPolylepis tarapacanaas Proxies ofPastPrecipitation inthe Tropical

Andes of South America” (with A.Ballantyne, R. Jackson, M. Silman, M.Evans, and S. Leavitt).

Larry Crowder, Stephen TothProfessor of Marine Ecology, was a partic-ipant in the talk, “Bycatch from DifferentFishing Gears: Impacts from Populationsto Ecosystems,” and organizer for“Rethinking the Management of OceanicPelagics: Forging a Future for Sea Turtles”during the annual meeting of theAmerican Association for theAdvancement of Sciences (AAAS) held inDenver, Colo., in February.

In November, Peter Haff, professor ofgeology and civil and environmental engi-neering and chair of the Division of Earthand Ocean Sciences, gave an invited talkon “The Future of Landscape – DoesNature Bat Last?” for the Department ofGeological Sciences at Florida StateUniversity, and again in December for the Department of Geography andEnvironmental Engineering at JohnsHopkins University.

Professor of Geology Jeffrey Karsonbegins a research cruise aboard the R/VAtlantis this April for an investigation of theLost City Vent Field in the Mid-AtlanticRidge with the Alvin submersible.

In October, at the Annual Meeting ofthe Geological Society of America held inDenver, Colo., Karson participated in the

Integrated Tectonics Forum, sponsored bythe National Science Foundation.

In September, he made two posterpresentations for the Inter-RidgeTheoretical Institute on Thermal Regimeof Ocean Ridges and Dynamics ofHydrothermal Circulation in Pavia, Italy:“Geologic Setting of Serpentinite-HostedHydrothermal Vents at the Lost City,Atlantis Massif, Mid-Atlantic Ridge,30°N” (with E.A. Williams, D.S. Kelley,D.K. Blackman and the MARVEL CruiseParticipants), and “Outcrop-ScaleStructure of the Atlantis Massif withImplications for its Evolution” (with E.A.Williams).

Karson also attended the Fall 2002Meeting of the American GeophysicalUnion in San Francisco, Calif., inDecember and gave the following talks:“Proterozoic Blueschist-Bearing Mélangein the Anti-Atlas Mountains, Morocco:Implications for Pan-African Subduction”(with K.P. Hefferan, H. Admou, R Hilal,A. Saquaque, T. Juteau, and M. Bohn);“Internal Structure of Uppermost OceanicCrust Created at Intermediate-to Fast-Spreading Ridges: Evidence of SubaxialFaulting, Tilting, and Subsidence fromVertical Crustal Sections”; and “TheUltramafic-Hosted Lost City HydrothermalField: Clues in The Search for LifeElsewhere in the Solar System?” (with D.SKelley, J.A. Baross, G.L. Früh-Green,and M.O. Schrenk).

Lynn Maguire, associate professor ofthe practice of environmental manage-

ment, gave thetalk “What CanDecisionAnalysis Do forInvasive SpeciesManagement?”at the annualmeeting of theSociety for RiskAnalysis in New

Orleans, La., December 2002. A. Bradshaw Murray, assistant profes-

sor of geomorphology and coastal process-es, gave several talks at the Fall 2002Meeting of the American GeophysicalUnion held in San Francisco, Calif: “Rip

Currents and Rip Channels on Non-Barred Beaches: A SecondaryMorphodynamic Feedback? FieldEvidence and Model Results”; “Self-Organized Evolution of Sandy CoastlineShapes: Connections with ShorelineErosion Problems” (with A. Ashton);“Formation of Rip Currents Due to Wave-Current Interactions” (with J. Yu); and“Are There Connections BetweenErosional Hot Spots and AlongshoreSediment Transport Along the NorthCarolina Outer Banks?” (with A. Ashton).

John W. Terborgh, James B. DukeProfessor of Environmental Science, wasthe invited keynote speaker for the annualmeeting of Conservation Internationalheld in April at the Smithsonian NationalMuseum of Natural History, Washington,D.C. The weeklong meeting had a techni-cal focus with themes of invasive species;land use change, pollution and global cli-mate change; monitoring and evaluationof conservation outcomes; and centers forbiodiversity conservation (CBCs): chang-ing the scale of conservation.

Professor of Law and EnvironmentalPolicy Jonathan B. Wiener presented“Comparing Precaution in the U.S. andEurope,” at the Sanford Institute of PublicPolicy, Duke University in January 2003.

In December 2002, at the annualmeeting of the Society for Risk Analysis inNew Orleans, La., he presented “JudicialReview of Risk Science in the U.S. andEurope: The Case of Antibiotics inAnimal Feed.” Also in December, at theResources for the Future conference inWashington D.C., Wiener presented“International Experience with CompetingRegulatory Approaches,” and was a discus-sant in a session on “Leaded Gasoline.”

In November, Wiener co-organizedthe Second Annual Duke EnvironmentalLeadership Forum, “Dealing withDisasters: Prediction, Prevention andResponse,” held at Duke University, andwas conference co-organizer for “TheMalaria-DDT Dilemma: Science, Policyand Law,” also at Duke University.

Paul Baker

Lynn Maguire

In PrintRecent publications by Nicholas School faculty or staff

Professor of Geology Paul Baker• “Trans-Atlantic Climate Connections,”

Science, 2002 (author)• “Early Warming of Tropical South

America at the Last Glacial-InterglacialTransition,” Science, 2002 (coauthor)

Peter Haff, professor of geology andcivil and environmental engineering andchair of the Division of Earth and OceanSciences• “Neogeomorphology,” Earth and Ocean

Sciences, 2002 (author) Rob Jackson, associate professor of

botany and environment• The Earth Remains Forever: Generations at a

Crossroads, University of Texas Press,2002 (author). This book has receivedfavorable reviews nationally in newspa-pers such as the Boston Globe and thenewswire Associated Press and in localnewspapers. Interviews have been airedon radio talk shows including NationalPublic Radio’s “Tavis Smiley Show” and“Morning Edition.” Jackson has giventwo book readings to audiences at localbookstores, the Regulator Bookshop in Durham and Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh.

• “Linking Molecular Insight andEcological Research,” Trends in Ecology andEvolution, 2002 (coauthor)

• “Positive feedbacks of Fire, Climate, andVegetation and the Conversion ofTropical Savanna,” Journal of GeophysicalResearch, 2002 (coauthor)

Professor of Geology Jeffrey Karson• “Proterozoic Blue Schist-Bearing

Mélange in the Anti-Atlas Mountains,Morocco,” Precambrian Research, 2002(coauthor)

• “Geologic Structure of the UppermostOceanic Crust Created at Fast- toIntermediate-Rate Spreading Centers,”Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences,2002 (author)

• “Comparison of Geologic and SeismicStructure of Uppermost Fast-SpreadOceanic Crust: Insights From a CrustalCross Section at the Hess Deep Rift, inSmall-Scale Crustal Heterogeneity,” in

Heterogeneity inCrust and UpperMantle: NatureScaling and SeismicProptery, editedby J. Goff andK. Holliger,Kluwer/PlenumPublishing,2002 (leadauthor).

• “Internal Structure of UppermostOceanic Crust Along the WesternBlanco Transform Scarp: Implicationsfor Subaxial Accretion and Deformationat the Juan de Fuca Ridge,” Journal ofGeophysical Research, 2002 (lead author)

• “Magnetic Anisotropy of SerpentinizedPeridotites from the MARK Area:Implications for the Orientation ofMesoscopic Structures and Major FaultZones,” Journal of Geophysical Research, 2002(coauthor)

• “The Geochemistry of Dikes and Lavasfrom the North Wall of the Hess DeepRift: Insights into the Four-Dimensional Character of CrustalConstruction at Fast-Spreading Mid-Ocean Ridges,” Journal of GeophysicalResearch, 2002 (coauthor)

Prasad Kasibhatla, associate professorof environmental chemistry• “Top-Down Estimate of a Large

Source OfAtmosphericCarbonMonoxideAssociated with FuelCombustionin Asia,” Journalof GeophysicalResearch, 2002(lead author)

A. Bradshaw Murray, assistant profes-sor of geomorphology and coastal processes• “Contrasting the Goal, Strategies, and

Predictions Associated with SimplifiedNumerical Models and DetailedSimulations,” Prediction in Geomorphology,Chapter 11, 2003 (author)

• “Seeking Explanation AffectsNumerical-Modeling Strategies,” Earth

and Ocean Sciences, 2002 (author)Research Associate Jeffrey Pippen

• Butterflies In Your Backyard, North CarolinaCooperative Extention Publication,December 2002 (contributor)

William H. Schlesinger, James B.Duke Professor of Biogeochemistry anddean of the Nicholas School• “The Role of Overland Flow in

Sediment and Nitrogen Budgets ofMesquite Dunefields, Southern NewMexico,” Journal of Arid Environments, 2003(coauthor)

• “Species Control Variation in LitterDecomposition in a Pine Forest Exposedto Elevated CO2,” Global Change Biology,2002 (coauthor)

• “The Global Biogeochemical Cycle ofBoron,” Global Biogeochemical Cycles, 2002(coauthor with Haewon Park MEM ’01)

• “Methane-Limited Methanotrophy inTidal Freshwater Swamps,” GlobalBiogeochemical Cycles, 2002 (coauthor)

• “Potential Environmental Controls onNitrogenase Activity in Biological Crustsof the Northern Chihuahuan Desert,”Journal of Arid Environments, 2002 (coau-thor)

• “Hydrology-Vegetation Interactions inAreas of Discontinuous Flow on a Semi-Arid Bajada, Southern New Mexico,”Journal of Arid Environments, 2002 (coau-thor)

• “The Nitrogen Budget of a Pine ForestUnder Free Air CO2 Enrichment,”Oceologia, 2002 (coauthor)

• “Relationships Among Soil CarbonDistributions and Biophysical Factors atNested Spatial Scales in Rain Forests ofNortheastern Costa Rica,” Geoderma,2002 (coauthor)

Craig Stow, visiting assistant professorof water resources• “On Monte Carlo Methods for Bayesian

Inference,” Ecological Modelling, 2003(coauthor)

P.V. Sundareshwar, research associate and instructor • “Phosphorus Limitation of Coastal Ecosystem

Processes,” Science, 2003 (lead author)• “Response of Coastal Wetlands to Rising

Seal Level,” Ecology, 2002 (coauthor)

F A C U L T Y & S T A F F N O T E S

Jeff Karson

Prasad Kashibhatla

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F A C U L T Y & S T A F F N O T E S scopeJonathan B. Wiener, professor of law

and environmental policy• “Comparing Precaution in the United

States and Europe,” Journal of Risk Research,2002 (lead author)

Memberships, Appointments and Awards

Duke Forest Resource Manager Judson D.Edeburn has recently been approved forstatus as Certified Forester joining theranks of more than 1,600 forestersnationwide. The certificate is a mark ofdistinction within the forestry professionand signifies the individual’s commitmentto provide quality resource stewardship.The Certified Forester Program is admin-istered through the Society of AmericanForesters (SAF) and was established in1994. The program is designed to assessacademic preparation, professional experi-

ence, continuingeducation, andadherence tostandards ofprofessionalpractice forthose profes-sionals engagedin forestry. SAFmembers num-ber 16,000.

Edeburn also has been namedAppalachian Society chair elect for 2003.He will become chair in 2004 and pastchair in 2005. The Appalachian Society isone of 33 multi-state/state societies thatmake up the national body of Society ofAmerican Foresters.

George Pendergraft, Duke Forest’sgrounds and maintenance supervisor, andMichael Burke, forestry technician, havebeen awarded the 2002 EnvironmentalImpact Award by the Duke UniversityEnvironmental Management AdvisoryCommittee. Their work was instrumentalin the Forest’s recent attainment of certification by the Sustainable ForestryInitiative and Forest Stewardship Council(SmartWood) programs. Their efforts alsohelp showcase the Forest and Duke’s com-

mitment to environmental sustainability tothe more than 250,000 visitors annually.

John W. Terborgh, James B. DukeProfessor of Environmental Science, wasthe honoree at an award ceremony wherehe gave a talk to the environmental commission of Peru, a group under thePeruvian congress. National congress-woman Fabiola Morales Castillo heads theenvironmental commission that consists of 80 congress people. Terborgh was presented with a lifetime achievementaward for his contribution to Peruvianenvironmental causes. Marcia Toledo,MEM/MS ’02, an assistant to CongresswomanCastillo, helped arrange the award ceremony and speech which was held inLima, Peru in January.

Grants (Grants of $50,000 or more awarded to faculty inthe past six months)

Paul Baker, professor of geology,National Science Foundation (NSF)$140,592, “Holocene Geology andAnthropology: Paleoclimate, LandscapeEvolution, and Human Occupation of theWestern Lake Titicaca Basin, Peru.”Duration: 2003-06.

Celia J. Bonaventura, professor ofcell biology, Einstein University $147,276,“Functional Analysis of EngineeredHemoglobins.” Duration: 2002-03.

Larry B. Crowder, Stephen TothProfessor of Marine Ecology, Florida StateUniversity $131,900, “PEW Study onRecreational Fisheries.” Duration: 2002-03.

Gabriele C. Hegerl, associate researchprofessor, National Oceanic andAtmospheric Administration $81,897,“Connections Between AnthropogenicChanges in Climate Extremes and LargeScale Circulation.” Duration: 2002-05.

Rob Jackson, associate professor ofbotany and environment, NSF $500,000,“Ecohydrology of Semiarid Woodlands:Role of Woody Plants in the Water Cycle.”Duration: 2002-05; NSF $388,000,“Continental Drying and CarbonSequestration Along a Subambient toElevated CO2 Gradient.” Duration:2002-05; Department of Energy

NationalInstitute forGlobalEnvironmentalChange$329,000,“Precipitationand CarbonStorage withWoody Plant Encroachment intoGrasslands.” Duration: 2002-05;Andrew W. Mellon Foundation$330,000, “Interactions of Water andNutrient Cycling by Plants.” Duration:2002-05.

Lincoln F. Pratson, assistant profes-sor of sedimentary geology, Office ofNaval Research $92,979, “Modeling theImpact of Seascape Evolution on theSeismic Response of Shelf and SlopeStrata.” Duration: 2002-04.

Joseph S. Ramus, professor of biolog-ical oceanography, Z. Smith ReynoldsFoundation Inc. $50,000, “BridgeFunding for North Carolina FerryMonProject.” Duration: 2003-04.

Daniel D. Richter, professor of soilsand forest ecology, Andrew W. MellonFoundation $500,000 and NationalOceanic and Atmospheric Administration$165,946, each for “Temporal and Spatial Reassembly of Soil MicrobialCommunities and Organic Matter inPost-Disturbance Forests.” Duration:2002-05.

William H. Schlesinger, James B.Duke Professor of Biogeochemistry anddean, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation$357,500, Doris Duke ConservationFellowship Program. Duration: 2003-06.

compiled by Donna Picard, Nicholas SchoolCommunications

Rob Jackson

Judson Edeburn

Bartow “Bo” Shaw F’64 grew up in theforestry business. His great-grandfatherstarted a lumber mill back in the late1800s, and as a child, Shaw visited thefamily mill often. His father and unclesold forest products in their building sup-ply business, and when his family acquiredsome timberland, young Shaw enjoyedworking with the foresters each summer.So when it came time to choose his field ofstudy, the decision was easy.

The South Carolinian earned a bache-lor of science degree in forestry atClemson University in 1963, then came toDuke for the one-year master of forestryprogram. “I wanted to focus on foresteconomics. That’s the main reason I choseDuke,” he explains. “The Duke faculty wasinternationally known; a lot of the oldAmerican forestry textbooks were writtenby Duke faculty members.”

Today, Shaw is chairman of AmericanForest Management Inc., a consultingfirm that provides services to private andcorporate timberland owners, primarily inthe Southeast and the Lake states, in forestand land management; also real estatebrokering, investment and appraisal serv-ices, data management and technology andenvironmental management. One focus ishelping a variety of timberland ownersdevelop sustainable forestry systems.

“I feel good to have assembled a groupof really fine, highly competent people ina company culture that stresses integrity,”Shaw says. “Working together with a com-mon goal, we’ve not only provided serviceto a lot of people; we’ve also made animpact on today’s forestry landscape.”

Shaw andhis wife of 36years, Vickey,have four grownchildren. Itlooks like theShaw family’sforestry lineagemay end at thisgeneration: asof now, none have followed in theirfather’s woodland footsteps. He is espe-cially proud of what all four of his chil-dren have accomplished in their chosencareer paths. They all retain a deep appre-ciation of the outdoors, of what it canoffer when managed properly, and of whatresponsibilities we all have to practice goodstewardship. The Sumter, S.C., residenthas many interests — church, golf, hunt-ing, fishing and flying (he has had a pilot’slicense for 37 years) — but modestlyclaims, “I’m a master of none!”

Shaw says the impact Duke has had onhis career goes far beyond the year hespent earning his degree. “There’s noquestion that the people I was exposed towhile I was at Duke broadened my thoughtprocess. I have maintained contact withpeople at the university ever since, gettinginput and going back for continuing edu-cation courses to enhance what I know andwhat I’m able to pass along. One of theunique things about Duke is the number ofprofessional schools there and its interdis-ciplinary philosophy. It gives you differentperspectives and broadens your view.”

Much of Shaw’s ongoing connectionwith Duke has been maintained through

his contributions as avolunteer. For 10 years,he represented theNicholas School of theEnvironment and EarthSciences on the DukeAnnual Fund ExecutiveCommittee, and heremains an active mem-ber of the school’s Board

of Visitors. In 1999, Shaw and his familyestablished the Bartow Shaw FamilyFellowship to provide support for graduatestudents at the Nicholas School.

“I’ve always felt that you can make animpact by enabling some really capableand bright young people to take advantageof what Duke has to offer,” he says. “Iknow it’s a cliché, but I’ve always believedthat you receive much more when yougive. Through my involvement with Duke,I’ve met other people who are givingbecause they love the university, and I’vemade some great friends.”

In appreciation for all that he hasgiven to this institution and to the field offorestry, on April 11 Shaw received theRalston Distinguished Alumni Award, theNicholas School’s highest alumni honor.It was a small way that Duke could giveback for all that the university has receivedfrom this generous gentleman.

Laura Ertel is a freelance writer based in Durham,N.C. She writes regularly for programs and publi-cations at Duke and other North Carolina universi-ties, organizations, and companies.

sightingsA L U M N I P R O F I L E

by Laura Ertel

Bo Shaw:Forestry–and generosity– are in his blood

Jimmy Wood photo

26dukenvironment

sightingsC L A S S N O T E S

Class Notes

Warren T. Doolittle MF’50 has stepped down after 18 years as pres-ident of the International Society of Tropical Foresters, but he stillvolunteers to help the staff.

Leigh R. Kerr MEM’75 was elected president-elect of the FloridaPlanning and Zoning Association. Kerr is president of LeighRobinson Kerr & Associates Inc., a land use, planning and con-sulting firm, which has been based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., forthe past 18 years.

Chandler C. Smith F’75 is president of Summit ManagementResources in Denver, Colo. His wife, Peggy, is a speech therapistin the Brighton Public Schools.

Richard Early MF’84 has recently transferred from the Washingtonoffice of the Plum Creek Timber Co. to the northwest regionoffice in Columbia Falls, Mont. He was promoted to be NorthwestRegion GIS/Inventory Manager. He is responsible for the compa-ny’s activities in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana.

John Warfield Simpson MF’86 recently published Yearning for theLand: A Search for the Importance of Place. He also has authored Visions ofParadise: Glimpses of Our Landscape’s Legacy. Simpson is a professor oflandscape architecture and natural resources at Ohio State. In2001, he was a visiting research scholar at Heriot-Watt Universityin Edinburgh, Scotland.

Jonathan A. Moyer F’88 joined the Canon Capital ManagementGroup of Telford, Penn., in July as an investment advisor for theInvestment Advisory business unit. Moyer and his family live inFranconia Township.

Hsing-Yi Chang F’89 is now the assistant investigator in theDivision of Health Policy of the National Health ResearchInstitutes in Taipei, Taiwan.

Sandra PostelMEM’80 hasbeen namedby ScientificAmerican as one of the“ScientificAmerican 50”in recognitionof accom-plishments

that demonstrate a “clear, progressive viewof the technological future, and the lead-ership, knowledge and expertise needed tomake that vision a reality.” Postel, whodirects the Global Water Policy Project inAmherst, Mass., was honored in the mag-azine’s December 2002 issue as Policy

Leader in Agriculture for advocatingsweeping changes aimed at preserving theworld’s dwindling supplies of freshwater.

“Few challenges loom as large as meet-ing the food and water needs of theworld’s growing population while at thesame time protecting the freshwaterecosystems that sustain life,” she said.“Meeting this challenge requires funda-mental shifts in how we use, value andmanage the earth’s finite freshwater.”

In 1991, the Nicholas School recog-nized Postel for her contributions to herfield with the Ralston DistinguishedAlumni Award.

A leading authority on global freshwa-ter issues, Postel speaks at conferences anduniversities and has published extensively.

Her new book on river conservation —which follows her Pillar of Sand: Can theIrrigation Miracle Last? and Last Oasis — is dueout this summer. She is a senior fellow atWorldwatch Institute and a visiting seniorlecturer in environmental studies atMount Holyoke College.

“My Duke education was great prepa-ration for the work I have been engaged infor the last 20 years. Water problems areinherently interdisciplinary — spanningscience, technology, economics, policy,law and ethics. Thanks in no small part tomy time and training at Duke, I am com-fortable in this interdisciplinary zone.”

— Laura Ertel

Nicholas School Alum Named One of Scientific American 50

spotlight

C L A S S N O T E S

Stephanie Stansbury Dobbie T’94 was married to Jim Dobbie onAug. 3, 2002. Stephanie and Jim live in Albuquerque where sheserves as the program coordinator for a nonprofit educationreform organization, New Mexico Education Network Center.

In November, Michael J. Zucchet MEM’94 was elected to representDistrict 2 on the City Council of San Diego, Calif. Zucchet hasbeen working as the legislative and community affairs director forthe San Diego City Fire Fighters since 1998.

Marjut Hadisa Herzog MEM’96 has just returned to the UnitedStates after five years working with NGOs and the United NationsDevelopment Programme in Venezuela. Herzog and her husband,Jonathan B’97, who was transferred to Florida, are now living inAventura while Marjut looks for work in Miami.

Lydia Breunig MEM’97 received a Fulbright grant for dissertationresearch in Mexico. She and her husband, Brian Stark, will spendnine months researching how the recent creation of natural protected areas are influencing rural people and resources.

Tim Hanley MEM’97 and his wife, Wanda, announce the birth oftheir third son, Sean Robert. Sean was born on Oct. 18.

Cynthia Van Der Wiele MEM’98 is a doctoral candidate in envi-ronmental and community design at North Carolina StateUniversity College of Design. She is studying the adoption of sus-tainable natural resource management practices by Liberian small-holder farmers.

Erika Nystrom Sasser PhD’99 and her husband, Fuller, arepleased to announce the birth of their son, James Fuller Sasser, on Sept. 22.

Jean Lauer MEM’00 is living in Menlo Park in California andworking for the Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST), which man-ages open space and agricultural lands on the San FranciscoPeninsula.

This past summer Brad Rogers MEM’00 authored a play that wasproduced onstage in Baltimore. Entitled A Certain Mystery, the playconcerns a murder at a highbrow college. Rogers wrote in the pro-gram notes that his play is conceived to work on two levels. At base,it’s a mystery: Dr. Randall Scott, Haverton University’s brash phi-losophy professor, gets clocked over the head with a candlestick.The college hires psych major-cum-pricey private investigator WillBartlett to investigate. Whodunit? You’ll have to see the play tofind out!

Jennifer E. Ryan T’00 is in her second year of grad school atScripps Institution of Oceanography working on biochemicalstudies of bryostatin biosynthesis. “I owe it all to Dr. Dan(Rittschof) for getting me interested in marine natural productsand chemical ecology.”

Timothy O’Connor F’01 sends word that he is “fighting crime inSan Francisco. I have a shiny badge and write BIG tickets to oilrefineries that pollute the air. I started law school in January. I amgetting my certification in hazardous materials management and Ijust got back from a Middle East peacekeeping tour.”

John E. Terborgh F’02 is on a 10-month assignment in Amman,Jordan on a project supported by the U.S. Agency forInternational Development. He is working as a marketing adviserfor the Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature.

Susan Watts Chinn MEM’02 was married to Chris Chinn in June2002. Susan’s twin sister, Sarah Watts MEM’00, was her maid ofhonor. Sue and Chris are now living in Cambridge, Mass.

Dana Wusinich-Mendez MEM’02 is working at the CoastalPrograms Division of the Office of Ocean and Coastal ResourceManagement (OCRM) on Coral Reef Task Force efforts in PuertoRico, the Virgin Islands and Florida.

28dukenvironment

C A M P A I G N N E W S nature& nurture

Nicholas School Surpasses Campaign Goal,But ‘Buckets’ Still Need to be Filled

The Nicholas School surpassed its campaign goal of $60 millionon Dec. 20 through the generosity of alumni and friends.

“On behalf of the entire NicholasSchool community, I want to thankeach donor for his or her generosityto the campaign,” said Peggy DeanGlenn, associate dean for externalaffairs at the Nicholas School. “Thefinancial support of individuals andorganizations enables the school toexcel in the arena of environmentaleducation where expectations are highand quality is paramount.”

“We are thrilled to pass our dollar goal a full year before theend of the campaign,” said Sally Kleberg, chair of the NicholasSchool Campaign Committee. “What a wonderful holiday gift forour students, faculty, and staff. I would also like to add my thanksto all the donors, staff, board members and volunteers who madethis dream a reality. It was a huge and unselfish effort on the partof everyone involved and our success demonstrates our dedicationto the school and our belief in its mission. ”

On the day that the goal was surpassed, the school received 17gifts to the Annual Fund and three restricted gifts. It is the menand women who have made the decision to continue to invest atevery level in the work of the Nicholas School who have made thisfeat possible, said Kleberg.

Gifts from the campaign already are working to strengthen theNicholas School by supporting endowed professorships, studentscholarships, faculty research, academic programs and other projects.

Everyone hopes to leave his or her mark on the world. An innovative matchingopportunity can assist donors who wish to imprint their “signature” on the NicholasSchool while helping to “fill the endowmentbucket.”

The Signature Venture Endowment is the brainchild of anonymous donors whowanted to assist other friends of the schoolin establishing endowments that would support the donor’s special interests. Designedto provide maximum flexibility for both the donor and the school, these uniqueendowments may be designated for studentsupport, faculty support or as venture capitalfor new programs, courses, and initiatives.For each $750,000 contributed by a signature donor, anonymous donors willcontribute $250,000, creating a $1 millionnaming opportunity.

“In today’s competitive admissions environment, increasing our financial aidpool is vital,” said Cynthia A. Peters, director of enrollment services. “Establishinga Signature Venture Scholarship Endowmentwould fund multiple full-tuition scholar-ships, and scholars would forever carry thename of the donor or honoree of the fund.For example, with a gift of $750,000 theSmith family could establish the ‘SmithSociety of Fellows’ for support of multiplestudents aided by a $250,000 contributionfrom our matching donors.”

“The dean and the development staff will work closely with each donor to create anendowment that reflects his or her personalinterests while meeting the greatest needs of the school,” said Anita Brown, director of advancement. “If a donor wishes, thefund could provide both scholarship and

programmatic support. A faculty fund couldprovide support for research and teachingfor junior or senior faculty, to establish newresearch programs, or to underwrite marineoperations at the Duke Marine Lab.”

Environmental emergencies, such asthose created by Hurricane Floyd or theevents of Sept. 11, could also be addressedwith a Signature Venture Endowment. Thefund could provide critical dollars to assist in the study of toxins released in the atmos-phere after an explosion or the effects offlooding on estuaries, native animal, marineand plant life, or the coastline.

If you would like additional informationabout Signature Venture Endowments orother funding opportunities, please contactAnita Brown, director of advancement, at919-613-8019 or anita.brown@duke.edu.

Help ‘Fill A Bucket’ and Imprint Your ‘Signature’ on the Nicholas School

Sally Kleberg

C A M P A I G N N E W S

Endowed Professorships Created or Enhanced During the Campaign for Duke

Doris Duke Professorship in Conservation EcologyDan and Bunny Gabel Associate Professorship in Environmental EthicsThe Korstian Professorship in Forest Resource ManagementNicholas Professorship in Earth Systems ScienceNicholas Professorship in Environmental Economics and PolicyNicholas Professorship in Environmental QualityNicholas Professorship in Natural Resource EcologyTruman and Nellie Semans /Alex Brown & Sons Associate Professorship Lee Hill Snowdon ProfessorshipRachel Carson Professorship in Marine Conservation BiologyRachel Carson Professorship in Marine Affairs and Policy

Endowed Fellowships and Scholarships Created or EnhancedDuring the Campaign for Duke

Lawrence E.Blanchard EndowmentBookhout Scholarship FundWhitney Lawson Chamberlin Memorial Endowment Norman L.Christensen Jr.Fellowship EndowmentWilliam Cleveland Fellowship EndowmentTimothy J.and Anne G.Creem Scholarship EndowmentCummings Family FellowshipLeRoy George Scholarship Laura J.Grierson Memorial ScholarshipCharlotte and Robert Hay Endowment Richard Heintzelman Family Fellowship EndowmentTim and Karen Hixon Wildlife Conservation EndowmentLawrence I'Anson Jr.Scholarship FundThomas W.Keesee Jr.Fellowship Endowment Kuzimer-Lee-Nikitine EndowmentThomas Vaclav Laska MemorialMelanie Lynn Memorial Scholarship EndowmentNicholas Fellowships in Environmental Sciences and PolicyNicholas School of the Environment Alumni Fellowships EndowmentNicholas School of the Environment Professional Student Fellowship EndowmentOrvis Fellowship EndowmentOrrin Pilkey Fellowship EndowmentElizabeth Reid Endowment Nancy and Simon B.Rich FellowshipGary H.Salenger Fellowship EndowmentBartow Shaw Family Fellowship EndowmentThomas and Anne Shepherd EndowmentEdward and Joyce Sitz EndowmentHarvey W. Smith Graduate Fellowship EndowmentDeborah Susan Steer Scholarship FundSyngenta Crop Protection Inc.FellowshipYasuomi Tanaka Memorial Fellowship Wade Family EndowmentJohn and Sue Wall Fellowship Endowment Dr.Larry R.Widell Memorial Fellowship Endowment

Kleberg said that raising $60 million, though a great accom-plishment, will carry the school only so far toward its goal. “Whilewe have raised more than we anticipated by this time, we have notyet accomplished what we have called ‘filling all the buckets,’ which means funding every priority identified at the start of the campaign.”

Through a strategic planning process, critical needs wereidentified and prioritized at the school, with fellowship supportidentified as the number one priority. In addition, completingthe funding for the Ocean Sciences Teaching Center and continued growth in the annual fund and endowment are essential, said Kleberg.

“We see this as a short intermission.” said Kleberg. “We’vecompleted act one, now on to act two.”

Campaign Progress and Goals

as of 3/22/03

Goal $60 millionProgress $60.7 million

Goal $45.5 millionProgress $38.3 million

Goal $7.5 millionProgress $9.03 million

Goal $1.5 millionProgress $500,000

Campaign Total

Endowment

RestrictedPrograms

Ocean SciencesTeaching

Center

30dukenvironment

A N N U A L F U N D N E W S nature& nurture

Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation Inc.Funds Coastal ProjectsThe Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation Inc. hasawarded grants totaling $100,000 to theNicholas School to benefit the FerryMonProject and The Duke Program for theStudy of Developed Shorelines (PSDS).

“The Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation isdelighted to be able to support the NicholasSchool and the work of the FerryMonProject and the Program for the Study ofDeveloped Shorelines. Both projects havegreat potential to assist efforts to protect andimprove North Carolina’s unique and frag-ile environment,” said Tom Ross, executivedirector of the foundation.

If you thought ferries were only used totransport vehicles across large bodies ofwater, think again. Scientists also are usingferries to monitor water quality. TheAlbemarle-Pamlico Estuarine System(APES) is North America’s second largestestuary and provides critical habitat for the

southeastern U.S. fishery. Presently, several,interrelated factors impact water quality inthe APES including land use change in theupland and coastal watershed, legislativelymandated basinwide nutrient managementplans, intense storms (hurricanes andnor’easters), and global and local changes insea level.

Despite its importance as essential fishhabitat, the APES has not been monitored asintensively or extensively for habitat impactsassociated with decreased water quality asother estuaries, such as Chesapeake Bay. Tosupport the sustainable use of these estuar-ies, the Nicholas School joined with theUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,the NC Department of Transportation FerryDivision, the NC Department ofEnvironment and Natural Resources, andthe AllTel Corp. to develop an automatedwater quality monitoring system aboard fer-ries that traverse the APES. The FerryMonprogram provides a unique, long-term andcost-effective monitoring system to evaluatestatus and trends in APES water quality.

“Thanks to the generosity of the Z.Smith Reynolds Foundation, the M/Vs FloydLupton, Carteret, and Governor Hyde will continueto provide important information on waterquality in APES. We are extremely gratefulfor the foundation’s support,” said JoeRamus, professor of biological oceanogra-phy, former director of the Duke UniversityMarine Laboratory, and co-director of theFerryMon project.

Dr. Orrin Pilkey, James B. DukeProfessor Emeritus of Earth Sciences anddirector of the Program for the Study ofDeveloped Shorelines (PSDS), agrees withRamus. “The Z. Smith ReynoldsFoundation not only supports the importantwork of PSDS, but has also provided us withan opportunity to expand and fulfill anexciting and important new role, that of scientific advocate.”

PSDS is dedicated to conserving, pre-serving and protecting the quality and long-term sustainability of North Carolina’sbeaches and has established a scientificcoastal advocacy initiative to ensure that stateand local management decisions and actionsthat affect the health, viability and long-termsustainability of the state’s beaches are madein the context of “good” science and are inthe best interest of all North Carolinians.

PSDS provides objective technical andscientific data to organizations around thecountry working to preserve our nation’sbeaches. According to Pilkey, “Scientificadvocacy is very rare, and we are fortunate thatthe folks at Z. Smith Reynolds had the fore-sight to see the benefits in what we are doing.”

PSDS was established in 1985 to examinethe physical and scientific basis for managingdeveloped shorelines in a time of rising sealevel. Since its inception, PSDS has been anoutspoken advocate for the responsiblemanagement of America’s shorelines andhas made significant contributions in thefields of coastal geology, policy and hazardmitigation.

Orvis Fellowship Endowment Fund EstablishedThe Orvis Fellowship Endowment Fund was established with com-bined gifts of $100,000 from The Perkins Charitable Foundation,the Orvis-Perkins Foundation, and the Leigh H. Perkins CharitableLead Trust. The new fellowship will benefit students in the Masters ofEnvironmental Management program.

“My good friend, John D. Drinko, told me about the importantwork going on at the Nicholas School. My own interest in the work of The Nature Conservancy and the challenges facing it and otherconservation organizations led the foundations to make this commitment,”said Leigh H. Perkins, president of the Orvis-Perkins Foundationand a trustee of The Perkins Charitable Foundation.

“Conservation organizations are having difficulty finding site-based generalists —individuals trained in natural resource man-agement, communications, policy and law. These are precisely thekind of professionals trained in the Nicholas School MEM program.”

“The Orvis Fellowship is a wonderful addition to our program,”

stated Dean William H. Schlesinger. “I am not surprised that conser-vation organizations are having difficulty hiring the talent they need.There is an extremely competitive market for our graduates. In fact,98 percent of our graduates are employed in their chosen field withinsix months of graduation. The solution to the problem is at the otherend of the pipeline — enabling more brightand talented young people to enter the envi-ronmental field. The Orvis Fellowship willallow the Nicholas School to offer fundingto a student who might otherwise stay inanother field because they could not affordthe cost of an environmental education.”

If you would like additional informationabout fellowships or other funding oppor-tunities, please contact Anita Brown, director of advancement, at 919-613-8019or anita.brown@duke.edu.

Joe Ramus

Leigh H. Perkins

Orrin Pilkey

gift clubs

A N N U A L F U N D N E W S

Annual Fund support from our alumni, parents and friends enables us to do many things that enrich the daily life of students at the Nicholas School.These include distinguished speakers, field trips, special hardware and software, and the development of career skills. If you are ever tempted tothink that your support is not important — please reconsider! Every gift to the Nicholas School, regardless of its size, counts in a big way for our studentsand for the environment. William H. Schlesinger, Dean”

“

Duke University Gift Club Levels

William Preston Few AssociationPresident’s Executive Council$25,000 Minimum Gift

President’s Council$10,000 Minimum Gift

Few Associates$5,000 Minimum Gift

Washington Duke ClubWashington Duke Club Fellow$2,500 Minimum Gift

Washington Duke Club Member$1,000 Minimum Gift

Washington Duke Young Alumni MemberDuke University undergraduates 5-9 years post-graduation may join for $300. DukeUniversity undergraduates 0-4 years post-graduation may join for $100.

Nicholas School Gift Clubs

Clarence F. Korstian Society$500 or more to the Nicholas School of theEnvironment

A.S. Pearse Society$500 or more to the Duke University MarineLaboratory

Nicholas School Young Alumni MemberIndividuals who have graduated from theNicholas School of the Environment and EarthSciences in the last four years may join theKorstian or Pearse Society for $100.

For additional information, contact the Office of AlumniAffairs & the Annual Fund at the Nicholas School of theEnvironment and Earth SciencesP.O. Box 90328, Durham, NC 27708-0328919-613-8035 (phone) 919-613-8077 (fax)k.bolfill@duke.edu

July 25-27, 2003

Duke University • Marine Lab in Beaufort, NC

Plan to Attend This Weekend of Adventure, Discovery and Fun!

Join us for presentations of the latest faculty research, a cruise on the

R/V Susan Hudson, field trips to Cape Lookout and other ecologically

important sites, a water front reception and an authentic seafood feast.

There will be supervised educational activities for children and

grandchildren — fun for the entire family.

Nicholas School or Marine Lab donors at the Korstian, Pearse, Washington

Duke and William Preston Few Gift Club levels and their families are

invited. Gift Clubs are for cumulative giving during the fiscal year

2002-2003. Make your gift club level contribution by June 30 to

receive your invitation.

Beaufort Experience Weekend

32dukenvironment

May 3, 2003 Book SigningOrrin H. Pilkey and Mary Edna Fraser will be signing A Celebration of the World’s BarrierIslands at the annual meeting of the NCCoastal Federation, signing is from 1:30-3 pm.A field trip will also start at 8:30 am to Bear Island.Hammock Beach State Park, Swansboro, NCContact: Coastal Federation (252) 393-8185

May 7-9, 2003 Native Americans and the U.S. GovernmentA course that will examine the historical andlegal underpinnings of the government-to-government relationship between the U.S.government and American Indian tribes.Duke University Contact: Nicholas Office of Continuing andExecutive Education, (919) 613-8082

May 11-14, 2003American Association of Petroleum Geologists Annual MeetingSalt Lake City, UtahContact: AAPG, (800) 364-2274 or convene@aapg.org

Duke University Alumni ReceptionAAPG Salt Lake City, UtahContact: Ron Perkins, (919) 684-3376 or rperkins@duke.edu

May 10-11, 2003Commencement WeekendDuke University

May 28-30, 2003The Law of NEPADuke UniversityContact: Nicholas Office of Continuing andExecutive Education, (919) 613-8082

June 16, 2003Book SigningOrrin H. Pilkey and Mary Edna Fraser will be signing A Celebration of the World’s BarrierIslands, sponsored by SC CoastalConservation LeagueCharleston, SCContact: Heather Spires (843) 723-8035 or heathers@scccl.org

July 25-27, 2003Beaufort Experience Weekend for Nicholas SchoolGift Club membersDuke University Marine LaboratoryBeaufort, N.C.Contact: Carol Dahm, (919) 613-8001 or cdahm@duke.edu

Aug. 3-8, 2003Ecological Society of America (ESA)Savannah, Ga.Contact: ESA, (202) 833-8773 orwww.esa.org

Aug. 6-8, 2003Making the NEPA Process More Efficient: Scopingand Public ParticipationDuke UniversityContact: Nicholas Office of Continuing andExecutive Education, (919) 613-8082

September 2003National Geographic Society Dinner and LectureFor Nicholas School and Duke Marine Labmembers of William Preston Few Gift Club AssociationWashington, D.C.Contact: Office of External Affairs,(919) 613-8003

Sept. 15-19, 2003Preparing and Documenting EnvironmentalImpact AnalysesDuke UniversityContact: Nicholas Office of Continuing andExecutive Education, (919) 613-8082

Sept. 20, 2003New Student DayDuke University Marine LabBeaufort, NCContact: Belinda Williford, (252) 504-7508or bbw@duke.edu

monitorMark your calendar for the following dates and monitor our Web site atwww.env.duke.edu for additional events:

Upcoming Events/Monitor

How to contact us:Nicholas School of the Environment

and Earth SciencesOffice of External AffairsDuke UniversityBox 90328Durham, NC 27708-0328

(919) 613-8003 phone(919) 613-8077 fax

www.env.duke.edu

Duke University Marine Laboratory135 Duke Marine Lab RoadBeaufort, NC 28516-9721

(252) 504-7503 phone(252) 504-7648 fax

dukenvironment is printed with vegetable-based inks on 100% recycled paper. Please recycle this magazine.

Oct. 24-26, 2003Parents’ Weekend at the CoastDuke University Marine LabBeaufort, NCContact: Belinda Williford, (252) 504-7508or bbw@duke.edu

Oct. 25-29, 2003Society of American Foresters (SAF) National ConventionBuffalo, N.Y.Contact: Rita Baur, (919) 613-8003 or rbaur@duke.eduOr www.safnet.org/calendar/natcon.htm

Oct. 26, 2003Society of American Foresters (SAF) National ConventionAlumni SocialBuffalo, N.Y.Contact: Rita Baur, (919) 613-8003 or rbaur@duke.edu

Oct. 31, 2003Nicholas School Prospective MEM/MF Students Visitation DayDuke UniversityContact: Enrollment Services,(919) 613-8070, or envadm@duke.edu to reserve a place.

Nov. 2-5, 2003Geological Society of America Annual MeetingSeattle, Wash.Don’t miss the Duke University Alumni eventhonoring Orrin Pilkey!Contact: Krista Bofill, (919) 613-8035,or kbofill@duke.edu

Nov. 3-7, 2003Implementation of NEPA on Federal Lands and FacilitiesDuke UniversityContact: Nicholas Office of Continuing andExecutive Education, (919) 613-8082

March 8-9, 2004 Third Annual Environmental Leadership Forum:Energy and the Environment.R. David Thomas Executive Conference CenterDuke University Contact: Laura Turcotte, (919) 613-8081 or ljturco@duke.edu

April 16-18, 2004 Alumni Reunion WeekendDuke UniversityContact: Krista Bofill, (919) 613-8035,or kbofill@duke.edu

April 17, 2004 Field DayDuke UniversityContact: Krista Bofill, (919) 613-8035,or kbofill@duke.edu

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