Using High-Tech to Attack Environmental Perils: The End of the World as We Know It?

For environmental scientists, the world is in tremendous flux.  Never before has humankind and nature faced such a daunting constellation of environmental threats.  Yet for scientists, the tools available for studying and attacking these threats are improving at a remarkable pace---the only difficulty is keeping up.  I will highlight some of the evolving tools that scientists are using to study nature and environmental perils.  These include high-resolution remote-sensing methods to identify threats such as deforestation, logging and surface fires; increasingly sophisticated geographic and climatic modeling techniques; automated flying drones to monitor illegal activities and wildlife in remote locales; miniature sensors for studying animal movements and seed dispersal; and new genetic techniques to catalogue and quantify the diversity of life on Earth.  These new methods are no panacea, but they are giving us a far better chance to understand and attack many of the environmental insults that currently imperil our world.