Dear YIBS community,

Researchers had barely started to understand the ecology of coral reefs before human impacts began to kill them off. For many the situation seemed hopeless. But there is increasing evidence that local conservation actions achieve modest success, that some corals are adapting to rising temperatures, and others are migrating into higher latitudes. By focusing broadly on the health of tropical coastal ecosystems, attainable goals like the creation of coastal protection and sustainable fisheries can be achieved.

Noted ecologist Jeremy Jackson studies the ecology, evolution, and conservation of coastal and ocean ecosystems. He holds emeritus positions at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and Scripps Institution of Oceanography and is a Research Associate at the American Museum of Natural History. Jackson has won numerous international prizes and awards and is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Fellow of AAAS. He has authored more than 180 scientific publications and eleven books, most recently Breakpoint: Reckoning with America’s Environmental Crises and Shifting Baselines in Fisheries: Using the Past to Manage the Future. Discover Magazine selected Jackson’s work on overfishing as its outstanding research achievement of 2001 and his TED talk How We Wrecked the Oceans has been watched almost one million times.