Excerpts

After a fire, what’s set into place is a series of events, especially on steep slopes, of massive erosion where the soils can literally be stripped from the land, leaving a barren wasteland … What we’ve been seeing, really not just this year but since 2000, is an increasing crescendo of heavier fires that are burning hotter than anything we’ve seen in historic times.

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—	Fires create barren wasteland in Colorado NBC Nightly News Wally Covington, executive director of the Ecological Restoration Institute at Northern Arizona University

We wanted dense forests a hundred years ago, but now that’s starting to cause problems. A dry season, coupled with dense, dry forests create the perfect conditions for wildfires to start and to spread quickly.

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—	Super fires in America: The creation of bad choices and natural forces The Inquisitor Pete Fulé, professor of fire ecology

Young mammals, even young humans, tend to move away from home…[Cougars] once occupied the midwestern U.S. There’s still some appropriate habitat, and this is how they’ll find it.

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—	Cougars returning to Midwest, study finds Huffington Post Paul Beier, professor of conservation biology in NAU’s School of Forestry

It’s about manhood and failing to live up to prescriptions of modern-day masculinity…You can see it coming. You can log it. You can count it.

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—	Signs almost always precede deadly domestic violence cases USA Today Neil Websdale, professor of criminology and criminal justice

If you want to destroy these ecosystems, this is a pretty good recipe.

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—	Why Arizona gets scorched by severe wildfires Live Science Wally Covington, executive director of the Ecological Restoration Institute at Northern Arizona University

The separation of events was pretty smart in terms of law enforcement, but it’s interesting because it shows that they were worried enough about the atmosphere on the ground to change the entire event. They saw things building up to what could have been a perfect storm.

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—	G-8 move puts protest plans in flux The Washington Times Luis Fernandez, professor of criminology and criminal justice

The life of a plant is about balancing water, nutrients, carbon dioxide and light. If a tree has plenty of all the others, life becomes a race to the light.

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—	Climate explains why West Coast trees are much taller than those in the East The Washington Post George Koch, professor of biological sciences

These ecosystem feedbacks are critical—you can’t figure this out with plants grown in a greenhouse.

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—	Climate change boosts then quickly stunts plants, decade-long study shows EarthSky.org Bruce Hungate, professor of biological sciences

It was like throwing a lighted match into a gasoline-filled room.

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—	In Haiti, global failures on a cholera epidemic The New York Times Paul Keim, Regents’ Professor and a microbial geneticist whose laboratory determined that the Haitian and Nepalese cholera strains were virtually identical

These are community-based teams of professionals from multiple agencies to review domestic fatalities with a view to preventing them. Multiple agencies and systems together can uncover what went wrong… It’s not ‘blaming and shaming.’ … It’s to find out why this woman was isolated and did not seek services. … It’s to find out why police department X did not do A, B and C.

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—	New approach to studying domestic fatalities Kane County Chronicle Neil Websdale, professor of criminology and criminal justice