New research is reviving interest in the work of Edward F. Ricketts, a maverick marine biologist immortalized in the writings of John Steinbeck, who foresaw the impacts of overfishing in the Pacific more than 75 years ago. Today his scientific descendants are working to understand startling changes in the waters he loved.

Eastern North America receives elevated atmospheric mercury deposition from a combination of local, regional, and global sources. Anthropogenic emissions originate largely from electric utilities, incinerators, and industrial processes. The mercury species in these emissions have variable atmospheric residence times, which influence their atmospheric transport and deposition patterns. Forested regions with a prevalence of wetlands and of unproductive surface waters promote high concentrations of mercury in freshwater biota and thus are particularly sensitive to mercury deposition. Through fish consumption, humans and wildlife are exposed to methylmercury, which markedly bioaccumulates up the freshwater food chain. Average mercury concentrations in yellow perch fillets exceed the Environmental Protection Agency's human health criterion across the region, and mercury concentrations are high enough in piscivorous wildlife to cause adverse behavioral, physiological, and reproductive effects. Initiatives are under way to decrease mercury emissions from electric utilities in the United States by roughly 70%.

Biological mercury (Hg) hotspots were identified in the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada using a data set of biotic Hg concentrations. Eight layers representing three major taxa and more than 7300 observations were used to locate five biological Hg hotspots and nine areas of concern. The yellow perch and common loon were chosen as indicator species for the human and ecological effects of Hg, respectively. Biological Hg hotspots receive elevated atmospheric Hg deposition, have high landscape sensitivity, and/or experience large reservoir fluctuations. In the Merrimack River watershed, local Hg emissions are linked to elevated local deposition and high Hg concentrations in biota. Time series data for this region suggest that reductions in Hg emissions from local sources can lead to rapid reductions of Hg in biota. An enhanced Hg monitoring network is needed to further document areas of high deposition, biological hotspots, and the response to emissions reductions and other mitigation strategies.

Environmentally distributed ecological networks (EDENs) are growing increasingly important in ecology, coordinating research in more disciplines and over larger areas than ever before, while supplanting post hoc syntheses of uncoordinated research. With the rise of multiple broadly focused, continental-scale EDENs, these networks will be directing an increasingly large proportion of resources in ecology, which warrants a review of their use. EDENs have become important for monitoring populations and ecosystems across regions, focusing on everything from butterflies to soil carbon. They are also pivotal for testing the generality of ecological relationships, testing ecological responses to experimental manipulations across space, ensuring uniform methodology, and compressing the lead time for syntheses. We identify 10 major steps to running EDENs and discuss four avenues of growth for EDENs in the near future.

Integrated research across disciplines is required to address many of the pressing environmental problems facing human societies. Often the integration involves disparate disciplines, including those in the biological sciences, and demands collaboration from problem formulation through hypothesis development, data analysis, interpretation, and application. Such projects raise conceptual and methodological challenges that are new to many researchers in the biological sciences and to their collaborators in other disciplines. In this article, we develop the theme that many of these challenges are fundamentally philosophical, a dimension that has been largely overlooked in the extensive literature on cross-disciplinary research and education. We present a “toolbox for philosophical dialogue,” consisting of a set of questions for self-examination that cross-disciplinary collaborators can use to identify and address their philosophical disparities and commonalities. We provide a brief user's manual for this toolbox and evidence for its effectiveness in promoting successful integration across disciplines.

Hypothesis tests, which aim to minimize type I errors (false positive results), are standard procedures in scientific research, but they are often inappropriate in Endangered Species Act (ESA) reviews, where the primary objective is to prevent type II errors (false negative results). Recognizing this disparity is particularly important when the best data available are sparse and therefore lack statistical power, because hypothesis tests that use data sets with low statistical power are likely to commit type II errors, thereby denying necessary protection to threatened and endangered species. Equivalence tests can alleviate this problem, and ensure that imperiled species receive the benefit of the doubt, by switching the null and alternative hypotheses. These points are illustrated by critiquing a recent review of ESA requirements for endangered fishes in Upper Klamath Lake (southern Oregon).

A scientific culture that welcomes a diversity of participants and addresses a broad range of questions is critical to the success of the scientific enterprise and essential for engaging the public in science. By favoring behaviors and practices that result in a narrow set of outcomes, our current scientific culture may lower the diversity of the scientific workforce, limit the range and relevance of scientific pursuits, and restrict the scope of interdisciplinary collaboration and public engagement. The scientific community will reach its full intellectual potential and secure public support through thorough, multitiered initiatives that aim to change individual and institutional behaviors, shift current reward structures to reflect a wider set of values, and explicitly consider societal benefits in the establishment of research agendas. We discuss some shortcomings and costs of the current value system and provide some guidelines for the development of initiatives that transcend such limitations.