Conservation should benefit ecosystems, nonhuman organisms, and current and future human beings. Nevertheless, tension among these goals engenders potential ethical conflicts: conservationists' true motivations may differ from the justifications they offer for their activities, and conservation projects have the potential to disempower and oppress people. We reviewed the promise and deficiencies of integrating social, economic, and biological concerns into conservation, focusing on research in ecosystem services and efforts in community-based conservation. Despite much progress, neither paradigm provides a silver bullet for conservation's most pressing problems, and both require additional thought and modification to become maximally effective. We conclude that the following strategies are needed to make conservation more effective in our human-dominated world. (1) Conservation research needs to integrate with social scholarship in a more sophisticated manner. (2) Conservation must be informed by a detailed understanding of the spatial, temporal, and social distributions of costs and benefits of conservation efforts. Strategies should reflect this understanding, particularly by equitably distributing conservation's costs. (3) We must better acknowledge the social concerns that accompany biodiversity conservation; accordingly, sometimes we must argue for conservation for biodiversity's sake, not for its direct human benefits.

Interdisciplinary environmental research has been deemed essential to addressing the dynamics of coupled social-biophysical systems. Although decades of scholarship in science and technology studies (STS) take the analysis of interdisciplinarity out of the realm of anecdote, there is almost no overlap between this literature and discussions of interdisciplinarity in ecology-oriented journals. The goals of researchers in these areas are quite different, and thus far, their analyses of interdisciplinarity have been incommensurate with each other's purposes. To introduce an STS perspective into how environmental scientists think about interdisciplinarity, I argue that biophysical and social scientists are not just bringing information and different understandings of biophysical and social systems to the intellectual table. Those knowledge claims have differential power associated with them: within the sciences, between social and biophysical science, and between science and society. Power can manifest in many ways, e.g., individual scientific status, the most accepted account of an environmental problem, inclusion or exclusion of researchers, or perceived relevance of research to policy decisions. I propose four possible scenarios: conflict, tolerant ambivalence, mutual identification, cooperation, and fundamental transformation for how an interdisciplinary undertaking might unfold. Then, to constructively confront the relationship between power and knowledge, I outline a three stage process to enhance the transparent development of interdisciplinary research. First, there is differentiation of the analytical elements of the research, then clarification of purposes, and finally, the steps toward intellectual synthesis. As core differences are encountered, e.g., "subjectivity" vs. "objectivity," active engagement with these issues will be essential to successful communication, collaboration, and innovation.

Average global surface-air temperature is increasing. Contention exists over relative contributions by natural and anthropogenic forcings. Ecological studies attribute plant and animal changes to observed warming. Until now, temperature-species connections have not been statistically attributed directly to anthropogenic climatic change. Using modeled climatic variables and observed species data, which are independent of thermometer records and paleoclimatic proxies, we demonstrate statistically significant ''joint attribution,'' a two-step linkage: human activities contribute significantly to temperature changes and human-changed temperatures are associated with discernible changes in plant and animal traits. Additionally, our analyses provide independent testing of grid-box-scale temperature projections from a general circulation model (HadCM3).climate change ͉ double attribution ͉ global warming ͉ plant animal impacts ͉ regional climate change T he Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group I concluded that humans are changing the climate by injecting greenhouse gases and aerosols into the atmosphere (1). One line of evidence that was examined included temperature trends produced by the HadCM3 general circulation model (GCM) in response to three different scenarios: (i) only natural climatic forcings (hereafter called NF), (ii) only greenhouse gas and aerosol forcings (anthropogenic forcings, AF), and (iii) a coupling of both natural and anthropogenic forcings (combined forcings, CF). Stott and colleagues (2) compared surface-air temperature data from all three model runs to observed global surface-air temperatures. Results for the CF yield the closest match with observed temperatures over the 20th century, AF produce a good fit, but NF results are notably less skillful. Stott (3) has extended these methods to a regional analysis that yields similar results, further confirming the importance of AF for credible simulation of historical observed temperatures.Even though paleoclimatic proxies, surface thermometers, satellites, and weather balloons are recording global warming, interpretations of these instrumental records have sometimes been contentious (4, 5). Having measures of warming that are not based on the interpretations of these data allows independent testing of different external and internal factors influencing the climate. For instance, results from biological metaanalyses, which examined numerous studies to determine the occurrence of a biotic signal consistent with climatic change, indicated that ''. . . a significant impact of recent climatic warming is discernible in the form of long-term, large-scale alterations of animal and plant populations' ' (ref. 6, p. 59). The vast majority (Ϸ80%) of species exhibiting changes are shifting in the manner expected with increasing temperature (6). What has been lacking thus far, however, is statistical evidence that attributes a significant portion of the changes seen in plants and animals (6-8) directly to ...

The intra- and inter-season complexity of bird migration has received limited attention in climatic change research. Our phenological analysis of 22 species collected in Chicago, USA, (1979-2002) evaluates the relationship between multi-scalar climate variables and differences (1) in arrival timing between sexes, (2) in arrival distributions among species, and (3) between spring and fall migration. The early migratory period for earliest arriving species (i.e., short-distance migrants) and earliest arriving individuals of a species (i.e., males) most frequently correlate with climate variables. Compared to long-distance migrant species, four times as many short-distance migrants correlate with spring temperature, while 8 of 11 (73%) of long-distance migrant species' arrival is correlated with the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). While migratory phenology has been correlated with NAO in Europe, we believe that this is the first documentation of a significant association in North America. Geographically proximate conditions apparently influence migratory timing for short-distance migrants while continental-scale climate (e.g., NAO) seemingly influences the phenology of Neotropical migrants. The preponderance of climate correlations is with the early migratory period, not the median of arrival, suggesting that early spring conditions constrain the onset or rate of migration for some species. The seasonal arrival distribution provides considerable information about migratory passage beyond what is apparent from statistical analyses of phenology. A relationship between climate and fall phenology is not detected at this location. Analysis of the within-season complexity of migration, including multiple metrics of arrival, is essential to detect species' responses to changing climate as well as evaluate the underlying biological mechanisms.