As aquaculture production expands, we must avoid mistakes made during increasing intensification of agriculture. Understanding environmental impacts and measures to mitigate them is important for designing responsible aquaculture production systems. There are four realistic goals that can make future aquaculture operations more sustainable and productive: (1) improvement of management practices to create more efficient and diverse systems at every production level; (2) emphasis on local decisionmaking, human capacity development, and collective action to generate productive aquaculture systems that fit into societal constraints and demands; (3) development of risk management efforts for all systems that reduce disease problems, eliminate antibiotic and drug abuse, and prevent exotic organism introduction into local waters; and (4) creation of systems to better identify more sustainably grown aquaculture products in the market and promote them to individual consumers. By 2050, seafood will be predominantly sourced through aquaculture, including not only finfish and invertebrates but also seaweeds.

Using the Farm Energy Analysis Tool (FEAT), we compare energy use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the cultivation of different crops, highlight the role of sustainable management practices, and discuss the impact of soil nitrous oxide (N₂O) emissions and the uncertainty associated with denitrification estimates in the northeastern United States. FEAT is a transparent, open-source model that allows users to choose parameter estimates from an evolving database. The results show that nitrogen fertilizer and N₂O emissions accounted for the majority of differences between crop energy use and GHG emissions, respectively. Integrating sustainable practices such as no tillage and a legume cover crop reduced energy use and GHG emissions from corn production by 37% and 42%, respectively. Our comparisons of diverse crops and management practices illustrate important trade-offs and can inform decisions about agriculture. We also compared methods of estimating N₂O emissions and suggest additional research on this potent GHG.

Caves and other subterranean habitats represent one of the most challenging environments on the planet. Other than salamanders, bony fishes are the only vertebrate group that has successfully colonized and are completely restricted to those habitats. Despite being known to science for over 150 years, only recently have cavefishes become model systems for evolutionary studies. Several cavefishes, such as the Mexican characid Astyanax mexicanus, have provided valuable insights into how fishes have evolved to cope with life in perpetual darkness and often-limited food resources. Much less is known about the biology of other cavefishes and their sensory modalities. Here, we summarize the current understanding of nonvisual sensory modalities in cavefishes. Enhancement of mechanosensation appears to be the most common adaptive strategy, but little is known of other sensory modalities in these fishes. Only comparative studies nested within well-resolved phylogenies will clarify the sensory adaptation of fishes to subterranean habitats.

The transformation of today's mass media system leads to uncertainty about communication behaviors concerning scientific issues. So far, few researchers have investigated this issue among scientists. We conducted a survey of neuroscientists in Germany and the United States in which we asked them about their own information-seeking behaviors and their assessment of the influence of various types of “old” and “new” media on public opinion and political decisionmaking. Our findings suggest that neuroscientists continue to use traditional journalistic media more often than blogs and social networks for information seeking but perceive all of these channels to have a strong influence on public opinion and political decisionmaking processes.

Expert reasoning about ecosystems requires a focus on the dynamics of the system, including the inherent processes, change over time, and responses to disturbances. However, students often bring assumptions to thinking about ecosystems that may limit their developing expertise. Cognitive science research has shown that novices often reduce ongoing patterns and processes to events across diverse science concepts. A robust, event-based focus may exacerbate student difficulties with reasoning about ecosystems in terms of resilience and change over time. In this study, we investigated middle-school students' initial reasoning about ecosystem dynamics and analyzed promising shifts in their reasoning after they interacted with a virtual environment with features designed to support thinking about change over time. Some students adopted a domino narrative pattern—a sequential story about the events and processes. The findings suggest that educators should consider the possibility that novices will bring event-based framing to their ecosystems learning.

Despite a steady growth in coral-reef monitoring efforts, the application of the monitoring results to decisionmaking often remains limited, because questions that can be answered are frequently posed after monitoring commences, rather than having the questions define the data to be gathered. We review how hierarchical, question-driven frameworks can improve monitoring designs and how added attention to high-population-variance structures play a central role in this process. Stratification is necessary to avoid the high variance and low power caused by sampling across coral-reef habitats. Yet, knowing when and where to introduce stratification into sampling designs requires information on the environmental and biological processes that drive species abundance patterns. Using case studies, we review some limitations of approaches that back-calculate the effort required to attain desirable statistical power and highlight some approaches to better account for the heterogeneous nature of coral-reef assemblages in monitoring designs.