Since 1985, USDA-APHIS-Wildlife Services (WS) personnel have received complaints concerning black vultures (Coragyps atratus) and turkey vultures (Cathartes aura) roosting at industrial facilities along the Texas gulf coast. The structures associated with these facilities are difficult for bird control personnel to access, and remote vulture roosting sites limit the effectiveness of many commonly used bird damage control methods. Methods attempted since 1985 include: capture and relocation, exclusion, harassment and shooting. In 1994, WS entered into a cooperative vulture control agreement with three chemical plants located in southeast Texas. WS personnel have developed an effective vulture damage management strategy that is currently used at six industrial sites in Texas.

Edward Harvey Davis (1862–1951), the narrator of the following popular account, was a proli c collector whose activities on behalf of the Museum of the American Indian/Heye Foundation brought him into contact with many native groups in Southern and Baja California, the Southwest, and northwestern Mexico, and contributed signi cantly to one of the most substantial collections of Native American objects ever assembled. Davis came to California in 1885 and soon settled on an isolated ranch in rural San Diego County. There he began to develop a deep and empathetic interest in his Kumeyaay neighbors that was to eventually culminate in a fascinating career as a wide-ranging museum collector, dedicated photographer, and amateur ethnographer. Most of the ethnographic and archaeological items collected by Davis are now curated at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), which also has about 3,000 of his prints and negatives; another 5,000 or so Davis images are curated at the San Diego History Center (SDHC), which has recently digitized them and made them available for viewing online. The SDHC also has many of Davis’ notebooks, although the bulk of his papers are now at the Cornell University Library (from which they can be obtained in the form of micro lm).

Estimates of paleodiversity patterns through time have relied on datasets that lump taxonomic occurrences from geographic areas of varying size per interval of time. In essence, such estimates assume that the species-area effect, whereby more species are recorded from larger geographic areas, is negligible for fossil data. We tested this assumption by using the newly developed Miocene Mammal Mapping Project database of western North American fossil mammals and its associated analysis tools to empirically determine the geographic area that contributed to species diversity counts in successive temporal bins. The results indicate that a species-area effect markedly influences counts of fossil species, just as variable spatial sampling influences diversity counts on the modern landscape. Removing this bias suggests some traditionally recognized peaks in paleodiversity are just artifacts of the species-area effect while others stand out as meriting further attention. This discovery means that there is great potential for refining existing time-series estimates of paleodiversity, and for using species-area relationships to more reliably understand the magnitude and timing of such biotically important events as extinction, lineage diversification, and long-term trends in ecological structure.

Conservation of species and ecosystems is increasingly difficult because anthropogenic impacts are pervasive and accelerating. Under this rapid global change, maximizing conservation success requires a paradigm shift from maintaining ecosystems in idealized past states toward facilitating their adaptive and functional capacities, even as species ebb and flow individually. Developing effective strategies under this new paradigm will require deeper understanding of the long-term dynamics that govern ecosystem persistence and reconciliation of conflicts among approaches to conserving historical versus novel ecosystems. Integrating emerging information from conservation biology, paleobiology, and the Earth sciences is an important step forward on the path to success. Maintaining nature in all its aspects will also entail immediately addressing the overarching threats of growing human population, overconsumption, pollution, and climate change.

Understanding variation of traits within and among species through time and across space is central to many questions in biology. Many resources assemble species-level trait data, but the data and metadata underlying those trait measurements are often not reported. Here, we introduce FuTRES (Functional Trait Resource for Environmental Studies; pronounced few-tress), an online datastore and community resource for individual-level trait reporting that utilizes a semantic framework. FuTRES already stores millions of trait measurements for paleobiological, zooarchaeological, and modern specimens, with a current focus on mammals. We compare dynamically derived extant mammal species' body size measurements in FuTRES with summary values from other compilations, highlighting potential issues with simply reporting a single mean estimate. We then show that individual-level data improve estimates of body mass-including uncertainty-for zooarchaeological specimens. FuTRES facilitates trait data integration and discoverability, accelerating new research agendas, especially scaling from intra- to interspecific trait variability.