(Please feel free to share this within FWS.  Click on the titles to be directed to the appropriate website.  If you know of anyone outside FWS who might be interested, please let me know as I send out a slightly edited version to other audiences.  As always, feedback or suggestions of news / research to include are welcome!)This isn't directly related to wildlife conservation, but as we continue through the 2018 hurricane season, you might want to take a look back at the events of last year, if just as a reminder that we need to be prepared to assist in mitigating the damage from such storms and responding afterward.  In this well-done documentary, NOVA takes you inside the 2017 superstorms and the cutting-edge research that will help society deal with hurricanes in the future.
Climate Change in America's National Parks Webinar Series: Future Park Leaders of  Emerging Change
September 13, 2pm EDT | 11am PDT
The Future Park Leaders of Emerging Change program builds a pathway for exemplary students in higher education to apply cutting-edge skills and knowledge to various park management issues while gaining valuable work experience, exploring career options, and developing leadership skills. The program assists parks in meeting the complex real-world challenges posed by global drivers of change.  Learn more about some of this year's student experiences and learn how parks can apply to host an intern next summer through the Future Park Leaders of Emerging Change program.

Connectivity for Climate Change: Assessing Threats and Identifying Conservation Actions
Thursday, September 20, 3 pm ET
Modeling habitat connectivity for wildlife species often results in a mapped network of linkages between habitat patches. A critical next step is to determine which of those linkages are priorities for conservation under climate change, and which conservation actions should be taken on those linkages. This webinar will present a framework for identifying priority conservation actions for linkages based on information on their degree of climate change threat, their importance to the overall habitat network, and projected threats from other stressors. Southeast Climate Adaptation Science Center researchers applied this framework to the connectivity networks of three species in the Southeastern U.S.: Rafinesque’s big-eared bat, black bear, and timber rattlesnake. 

The paper's findings highlight that most species and communities in the world oceans have high risk of impacts from climate change and fishing under “business‐as‐usual” climate change scenario and status quo fishing by the 2050s. However, the effects of improvement (or degradation) in fisheries management can play a key role in affecting the global‐average climate‐fishing risk of impacts. The work emphasizes the importance of eliminating overfishing and other measures, such as habitat restoration, as an adaptation measure to reduce extinction risk from climate change.  A news summary of the article can be found here.How individual species and entire ecosystems will respond to future climate change are among the most pressing questions facing ecologists.  In this review, the authors discuss the mechanisms by which biodiversity responds to environmental change and identify gaps of knowledge on the role of range shifts and tolerance.  The study shows that local adaptation to new conditions seems to have played a key role in the way species survived.