Reviewing the Proximate Future: 2010 Electric Car Round-up

Two recent articles paint pictures of the future of cars powered partly or fully by electricity. Reported by the DOE's Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy (EERE) division, the LA Auto Show made some of the trends visible. The most prominent, to my mind, was that US companies only showed two vehicles: two new hybrids from Ford. Much busier were European and Japanese companies, including BMW with its all electric MINI E (pictured here).

The trend towards foreign leadership in the electric car space is buttressed by this piece: "Foreign companies advance in race for electric car". The story here is positive for US interests in terms of creating a fertile infrastructure environment for electrics, as California's leaders are teaming with Shai Agassi & Project Better Place with the expressed goal of making San Francisco the “Electric Vehicle Capital of the U.S.” Notably absent in this work, however, are the Big 3 US car makers. Right now, they face short term structural and existential challenges and may not have the bandwidth to invest much in the future. Here's hoping they survive long enough to reinvent themselves ... and their cars.

Tom Leppert Has a Little Conversation with T. Boone Pickens

It was "only five, maybe ten minutes," Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert said of his conversation with T. Boone on using natural gas instead of diesel (the City is on the verge committing its bus fleet to diesel). It's interesting how competing objectives and moving target costs can obscure clear choice. Diesel saves $54 million over natural gas, proponents said at first...$200 million they said later. How are they forecasting for diesel and natural gas, given the volatile price histories of each? Is there a way for them to make account for the external costs of foreign diesel dependency? Are the fuels environmentally equivalent (diesel was dirty but is getting cleaner, but is it cleaner than natural gas today; will it get cleaner still going forward--who can weigh in authoritatively)?

In the absence of an over-arching national strategy (sustainably eliminate foreign oil dependence, for instance), it's tougher to evaluate options for local decisions with so many moving price pieces and in the swirl of so many opinions. Here's hoping that people like incoming National Security Advisor Jim Jones, a former Marine with a keen sense of how energy and national security issues intersect, can articulate a national strategy that creates a meaty backdrop for state and local decision making (like the for-now-stalled Dallas fleet fueling decision).

National strategy doesn't have to dole out incentives to influence local decision making. Example. Building mechanical engineers often over-designed air conditioning and air distribution systems because "you don't get in trouble with building owners if occupants don't complain," and most owners weren't good at connecting sloppy, inflated construction design with inflated construction costs and utility bills. Green building strategy helped us re-look at the habit of over-designing air conditioning and brought a renewed focus on efficient design. Green building strategy didn't hand out rebates to go green, it just helped people think about things differently.

Likewise, a clear national strategy to eliminate our dependence on foreign oil could help shape that swirl of opinion that decides whether city buses are diesel or natural gas.

Antarctic Cruise Ship Runs Aground; Oil Leak Spreading?

A cruise ship stranded itself on Antarctica's western peninsula on Thursday, and may be leaking unknown amounts of oil into the fragile oceans, one expert said.

All 122 passengers and crew were rescued from the leaking ship, Ushuaia, on Friday by the Chilean Navy. The ship did not appear to be in danger of sinking.
The Chilean vessel Aquiles transported 89 passengers and 33 crew members to the Presidente Frei Naval Base in Antarctica.

Jon Bowermaster, a National Geographic Expeditions Council grantee and writer, was on the National Geographic Explorer about 30 miles (48.2 kilometers) from the cruise ship when it ran aground after hitting a rock.
"We were in the same area on Wednesday, when hurricane force winds blew for much of the day, gusting over 100 miles [161 kilometers] per hour," Bowermaster told National Geographic News in an email from the Explorer.

"The Ushuaia reported having been in heavy weather; whether or not this contributed to its [grounding] is speculation, but would make sense."

Bowermaster witnessed the sinking of another Antarctic tourist vessel in November 2007. All 154 passengers of the Canadian M.S. Explorer escaped safely.

Alarm Call

The Panamanian-flagged Ushuaia sent out alarms midday Thursday after it started leaking fuel and taking on water.

A rock damaged the hull as the vessel passed through the Gerlache Strait, Chilean Captain Pedro Ojeda told Argentina's Telam news agency. The crash left the boat adrift in Guillermina Bay.

The Chilean Navy said the cruise ship was carrying 14 Danish passengers, 12 Americans, 11 Australians, 9 Germans, 7 Argentines, 7 British, 6 Chinese, 6 Spaniards, 5 Swiss, 3 Italians, 2 French, 2 Canadians, 2 Irish, a Belgian and a New Zealander. All were in good condition.

The cruise ship, built in 1970, operates from the Port of Ushuaia in southern Argentina, transporting passengers to Antarctica and islands in the icy waters of the South Atlantic.
The navy positioned the ship Lautaro near the abandoned Ushuaia in an attempt to prevent any environmental damage from leaking fuel.
But Bowermaster said it's still unknown how much fuel oil has spilled from the ship.

"A Chilean plane reports seeing no major leak, but it [has] also reported that a fuel leak has spread for half a mile around the ship," he wrote.

"Though containment efforts are being made, it is windy in the area again and the leak is spreading."

Ushuaia may not be able to free itself from the rocks, and has at least one hole, Bowermaster added.

"A sinking ship in this pristine, narrow channel would have long-lasting impact on both the local environment and the future of tourism along the [Antarctic] Peninsula."

"Accident Waiting to Happen"

In addition to the 2007 sinking of the M.S. Explorer, another ship—the Norwegian M.S. Fram—lost engine power during an electrical outage in December 2007 and struck a glacier, smashing a lifeboat but causing no injuries among its 300 passengers.
A boom in Antarctic tourism may be an "accident waiting to happen,"
More than 30,000 tourists were estimated to have made the trek to Antarctica on some 50 different ships during the November 2007 to February 2008 cruise season, according to the International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators, a trade group.

"A big question for those who oversee and monitor tourism in Antarctica is [whether] there be limits on who can visit Antarctica, and on what kind of ship?" Bowermaster added.

Public Ambivalent About Human Enhancing Nanotech

A team of researchers from North Carolina State University and Arizona State University recently released their "Public Awareness of Nanotechnology Study," the first national survey to examine public opinion on the use of nanotechnology for human enhancement. Enhancement meaning, among other things, artificial eyesight, human biomarkers that detect diseases early, implants to improve performance of soldiers on the battlefield and brain implants to permit basic computer to brain functions.

The researchers say, "Overall, we find that attitudes are largely ambivalent and dependent on the information provided in the question wording, but also that interest declines as they learn more and that equity is fairly important concern regarding the long-term distribution of potential benefits."

Some interesting findings:

Most people say they have not heard anything about nano for human enhancements (61%), while just 38% say they have heard nothing about nanotechnology in general.
Of those who have heard something about nanotechnology, most people associate it with “machines and computers” (84%) rather than “consumer products” (47%), even though nano-based applications are mostly enhancements to consumer products.
Interestingly, far fewer people believed that human enhancements were important at the end of the survey after they had been asked more questions about it (55%) than at the beginning before they heard much about it (81%).
I think the last point is the most interesting and harkens back to a post I did in October about how people filter scientific information. An increase in knowledge about the benefits of a particular scientific approach isn't necessarily going to garner more support.

Walruses Threatened by Shrinking Ice

A conservation group is going to court to force the federal government to consider adding the Pacific walrus to the list of threatened species.
The Center for Biological Diversity sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne on Wednesday for failing to act on a petition seeking protection for walruses under the Endangered Species Act.
Walruses are threatened by global warming that melts Arctic sea ice, according to the group, one of the parties that successfully petitioned to list polar bears as threatened. The group also has filed petitions to protect Arctic seals.
The walrus petition was filed in February. The Fish and Wildlife Service was required by law to decide by May 8 whether the petition had merit, which would trigger a more thorough review and a preliminary decision after 12 months. The agency missed the deadline.Rebecca Noblin, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, said the delay would harm walruses.
"Every day that goes by without protecting the walrus, we're emitting more greenhouse gases, accelerating the ice melt," Noblin said.
"In addition to the climate change, the other main threat is oil and gas development that continues to go forward without any consultation regarding walrus," she said.
Fish and Wildlife spokesman Bruce Woods said Wednesday the agency anticipates making a decision on the petition soon but has limited resources. Decisions on endangered species listings are driven by litigation, he said, forcing the agency to rank actions by court order rather than species need.
Global warming is blamed for Arctic sea ice shrinking to record low levels.
The National Snow and Ice Data Center said summer sea ice in 2008 reached the second lowest level, 1.74 million square miles, since satellite monitoring began in 1979. The loss was exceeded only by the 1.65 million square miles in 2007.
Like polar bears, listed as a threatened species in May, walruses depend on sea ice to breed and forage.
Walruses dive from ice over the shallow outer continental shelf in search of clams and other benthic creatures. Females and their young traditionally use ice as a moving diving platform, riding it north as it recedes in spring and summer, first in the northern Bering Sea, then into the Chukchi Sea off Alaska's northwest coast.
Sea ice in the Chukchi Sea, shared with the Russian Far East, for the last two years receded well beyond the outer continental shelf over water too deep for walruses to dive to reach clams. In the fall of 2007, herds congregated on Alaska and Siberia shores until ice re-formed.
According to the Center for Biological Diversity, warming sea temperatures and sea ice loss may also be reducing walrus prey at the bottom of the ocean.
The group hopes a listing could slow plans for offshore petroleum development. Oil companies in February bid on 2.7 million acres in the Chukchi Sea. Other lease sales are planned.
The Fish and Wildlife Service, along with its Russian counterparts, has nearly completed a comprehensive population count of walruses. The numbers are anticipated in the coming weeks, possibly by the end of the year, Woods said.

For Carbon Storage, Burn the Bogs?

Burning peat bogs in a controlled way may be a good way to sequester carbon from the atmosphere, according to new research.
Peatlands are dense carbon storage units -- as the woody plants growing on top of the peat die, they fall into oxygen-poor, water-logged soil that keeps their carbon-rich remains preserved indefinitely. Around the world, peat contains 30 percent of all carbon buried in soils, equivalent to slightly less than all of the carbon in the atmosphere today.
"Peatlands suck up between 1 and 2 percent of all anthropogenic carbon emissions in the U.K. annually," Fred Worrall of Durham University in the United Kingdom said.
In the United Kingdom, private land managers burn peatlands regularly to clear space for grouse habitat and sheep grazing. This is no tree-hugging exercise -- the grouse are cultivated for recreational hunting -- but Worrall and Gareth Clay, also of Durham University, think the burning may have the beneficial side effect of enhancing carbon sequestration in the bogs.When the vegetation growing on top of peat bogs burns, some of it turns into black carbon charcoal. The charcoal can sink into the murky depths where it is preserved. In a computer simulation, the researchers found that if controlled burns were applied to optimize this process, the bogs could absorb 20 to 30 percent more carbon than when they were left to grow naturally.
"The key is that only the top heather vegetation can be burned -- what we call a 'cool burn.' Once you start burning down into the litter and soil, all bets are off. It's definitely a carbon source," Worrall said.
There's also a risk that a burn could get out of control and turn into a wildfire, devastating the peat."This is kind of an up and coming idea," said Andrew Zimmermann of the University of Florida. "Making what is called 'biochar' to enhance carbon sequestration has potential to be used all over the world."
Zimmermann pointed to forests as having even more potential to store carbon by making charcoal, because as trees die, their carbon-rich wood and leaf litter are broken down by microorganisms and released back into the atmosphere.
"Peat is already preserving plenty of carbon. What we need is to preserve what is not already being preserved," he said.
But poor land management has severely damaged peat bogs, Worrall said, and erosion is already releasing up to 400 tons of carbon per square kilometer of peat each year from its sodden layers. To reverse that trend, close attention to the bogs is needed -- and perhaps even a fire every now and then.
"If you do nothing, peatlands are sure to become part of our greenhouse gas emissions," Worrall said. "But if we do something and it's the right thing, we can turn this system around and make it part of the solution."

Alien-like Squid With "Elbows" Filmed at Drilling Site

A mile and a half (two and a half kilometers) underwater, a remote control submersible's camera has captured an eerie surprise: an alien-like, long-armed, and—strangest of all—"elbowed" Magnapinna squid.In a brief video from the dive recently obtained by National Geographic News, one of the rarely seen squid loiters above the seafloor in the Gulf of Mexico on November 11, 2007.

The clip—from a Shell oil company ROV (remotely operated vehicle)—arrived after a long, circuitous trip through oil-industry in-boxes and other email accounts.

"Perdido ROV Visitor, What Is It?" the email's subject line read—Perdido being the name of a Shell-owned drilling site. Located about 200 miles (320 kilometers) off Houston, Texas (Gulf of Mexico map), Perdido is one of the world's deepest oil and gas developments.

The video clip shows the screen of the ROV's guidance monitor framed with pulsing inputs of time and positioning data.

In a few seconds of jerky camerawork, the squid appears with its huge fins waving like elephant ears and its remarkable arms and tentacles trailing from elbow-like appendages.

Despite the squid's apparent unflappability on camera, Magnapinna, or "big fin," squid remain largely a mystery to science.

ROVs have filmed Magnapinna squid a dozen or so times in the Gulf and the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans.

The recent video marks the first sighting of a Magnapinna at an oil development, though experts don't think the squid's presence there has any special scientific significance.

But the video is evidence of how, as oil- and gas-industry ROVs dive deeper and stay down longer, they are yielding valuable footage of deep-sea animals.

Some marine biologists have even formed formal partnerships with oil companies, allowing scientists to share camera time on the corporate ROVs—though critics worry about possible conflicts of interest.

Real Deal

The Perdido squid may look like a science fiction movie monster, but it's no special effect, according to squid biologist Michael Vecchione of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), who is based at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.
In 1998 Vecchoine and University of Hawaii biologist Richard Young became the first to document a Magnapinna, based on juveniles of the Magnapinna pacifica species. M. pacifica was so unusual that the scientists had to create a new classification category to accommodate it: the family Magnapinnidae, which currently boasts four species.

In 2001 the pair released the first scientific report based on adult Magnapinna specimens, as seen via video. The study demonstrated that Magnapinna are common worldwide in the permanently dark zone of the ocean below about 4,000 feet (1,219 meters).
In 2006 a single damaged specimen from the North Atlantic led to the naming of a second Magnapinna species, M. talismani. And in 2007 the scientists documented two more: M. atlantica and a species based on a specimen from the mid-Atlantic.

That fourth Magnapinna species remains nameless, because its arms were too badly damaged for a full study. "However, it was clearly different from the three known species," Vecchione said.

The Magnapinna species apparently have only slight physical differences, mainly related to tentacle and arm structure in juveniles.

The subtlety of those variations makes it impossible to identify which species is in the oil-rig video, given that at least two Magnapinna species—M. atlantica and M. pacifica—are known to inhabit the Gulf of Mexico, Vecchione said.

Enduring Mystery

Based on analysis of videos not unlike the one captured at the Perdido site, scientists know that the adult Magnapinna observed to date range from 5 to 23 feet (1.5 to 7 meters) long, Vecchione said. By contrast, the largest known giant squid measured about 16 meters (52 feet) long.

And whereas giant squid and other cephalopods have eight short arms and two long tentacles, Magnapinna has ten indistinguishable appendages that all appear to be the same length.

"The most peculiar structure is that of the arms," said deep-sea biologist Bruce Robison of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California.

Referring to the way the tentacles hang down from elbow-like kinks, Robison said: "Judging from that structure, we think the animal feeds by dragging its arms and the ends of its tentacles along the seafloor as it drifts slowly above it."

The elbow-like angles allow the tentacles to spread out, perhaps preventing them from getting tangled.

"Imagine spreading the fingers of a hand and dragging the fingertips along the top of a table to grab bits of food," he added.

But NOAA's Vecchione suggests a feeding behavior that is more like trapping than hunting. He speculates that Magnapinna passively waits for prey to bump into the sticky appendages.

Strange Bedfellows?

As oil companies and their ROVs spend more time in the bathypelagic zone, more discoveries are sure to follow, experts say.

Eager for hard-to-come-by deep-sea video and data, some biologists are formally aligning themselves with the companies.

The U.K.-based SERPENT (Scientific and Environmental ROV Partnership using Existing iNdustrial Technology) project, for example, matches oil companies with researchers "to make cutting-edge ROV technology and data more accessible to the world's science community," according to the project's Web site.

Despite such partnerships, Monterey Bay's Robison said, most sightings of the Magnapinna squid have come from research vessels, not oil companies. The November 2007 video, for the record, was captured without scientific involvement.

Some scientists, including Robison, are not entirely comfortable relying on corporations for new data.

Andrew Shepard, director of NOAA's Undersea Research Center, is excited about the potential for new ocean resources, but he does have concerns.

"Oil companies are there to develop hydrocarbons, not find new species," Shepard said.

"These discoveries may, in fact, have a negative impact on very expensive and valuable lease tracts if someone decides a rare species needs to be protected."

But given how expensive and time consuming ROV-based deep-sea research is, scientific cooperation with industry is crucial, SERPENT project oceanographer Mark Benfield said.

"There are relatively few research vessels and far fewer ROVs and manned submersibles capable of working down through [extremely deep regions of the ocean]," said Benfield, who teaches at Louisiana State University.

Research funds are getting scarcer, he added, and "with SERPENT we gain access to sophisticated ROVs for free.

"These systems are based on vessels or rigs that spend months to years at a single location. This allows us to build up a much more complete picture of life in the deep-sea than would be possible with [only] academic ships and deep-submergence vehicles."

NOAA's Vecchione said he has "gotten a lot of interesting observations from the SERPENT project and other petro sources."

But the oil-industry collaborations "should not get in the way of purely scientific exploration," Vecchione said. "We need to be careful about deep-sea conservation."

Mars Phoenix's Twitter Proves a Huge Success

If the Phoenix Lander comes back to life on Mars, Twitter users could be among the first to know.
NASA gave the historic Space Age mission an Internet Age spin by adding a Twitter page, enabling the robotic interplanetary explorer to answer the hot micro-blogging Web site's trademark query: "What are you doing?"
Twitter rocketed to popularity with technology that lets people use mobile telephones or personal computers to continually keep friends updated on their activities with "tweets," text messages of no more than 140 characters.
When NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory News Services manager Veronica McGregor was tasked with delivering word of the agency's first-ever robotic landing on Mars during a holiday weekend, she turned to the social-networking Web site.
"Readership and viewership in traditional news media usually goes down over a three-day weekend," said McGregor, a former CNN correspondent.
"The fact that Twitter could send messages right to people's cell phones -- it seemed like a good idea to let people know about the landing."
So McGregor created a plucky persona for the 420-million-dollar robot and planted a flag on a new NASA frontier: Twitter-verse.
"I dig Mars!" was among Lander Tweets. Blog posts after its unprecedented May touch-down included an ice-discovery message ending with "w00t!!! Best day ever!!"
Tweets at twitter.com/MarsPhoenix won numerous Internet awards and garnered nearly 40,000 dedicated followers -- 2,000 of whom joined after NASA lost contact with the Lander in November.
"There was a certain joy and exuberance that came with every day, and every sight it was seeing," McGregor said. "I think people really related to that."
The Lander's writing style helped the blog stand out, according to Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.
"It was the way she chose to send out the updates -- in the first person and anthropomorphizing the Lander -- that really made all of the difference," Stone said. "As a result, NASA gets a level of engagement with citizens they didn't have before."
NASA is not the first major organization to get its message out on Twitter. Computer maker Dell began using Twitter in January to publish Internet-only sales bargains. US cable television giant Comcast sent service trouble missives over the service.Some media organizations have also been using Twitter to gather timely, first-hand accounts from witnesses or to provide news updates to subscribers. CNN regularly presents live responses from Twitter users on the cable network, with footage of the service's feed on a computer screen.
Many businesses have turned to social-networking services MySpace and Facebook to spread messages.
McGregor prefers Twitter for its speed. "A lot of people said that the short posts were exactly the right amount of information they wanted to know," she said.
That pithiness, mixed with a little attitude, impressed Wired.com writer Alexis Madrigal.
"In the near-term, NASA has found an absolutely outstanding way to reach large numbers of influential people at a fairly low investment," Madrigal said.
NASA has begun setting up Twitter accounts for other missions in hopes of repeating their success.
"I'm hoping the lesson they'll take from this is that you need freedom to craft a character and a feed that will be appealing to people," Madrigal said.
McGregor said she is giving presentations throughout NASA on her successful experiment while pressing the agency to explore new communications strategies.
As for the Lander, it sent this farewell tweet: "I should stay well-preserved in this cold. I'll be humankind's monument here for centuries, eons, until future explorers come for me."

NASA Space Probe to Track CO2 on Earth

The occasionally acrimonious debate about the planet's climate has been missing a key component: accurate measurements of how much carbon dioxide is in the air and how it is being recycled by Earth.
That is the heart of a new NASA mission called the Orbital Carbon Observatory, which is set to launch early next year.
"We will uncover all kinds of patterns and cycles in carbon dioxide that people never thought existed. It'll be just like when the first ozone measurements were made," said project scientist Chip Miller, with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
"We get at the question of the sources of carbon dioxide and see how much is pulled out (of the atmosphere) by land and how much by seas," he said.
Many scientists consider carbon dioxide to be the telltale gas of global warming. Once it is released into the air, there is little chemistry to remove it. Its presence traps reflected sunlight. Plants, soils and the oceans of Earth reabsorb the gas, but that takes a while. Miller says that the average lifetime for carbon dioxide is about 300 years. About 20 percent of atmospheric carbon dioxide, however, lasts for 10,000 years or longer.

New Field Could Explain How Salmon, Turtles, Find Home

Sea turtles and salmon may use their sensitivity to Earth's magnetic field to guide them home at the end of their epic coming-of-age journeys, suggest scientists aiming to solve one of nature's enduring mysteries.

The newly proposed theory is one of several ideas being explored under the banner of an emerging scientific field dubbed movement ecology.

According to the field's proponents, the study of movement is central to understanding where animals and plants live, how they evolve and diverge, and why they become extinct.

By making movement central to ecological studies, scientists hope general theories about movement will emerge.

Such theories could, for example, help scientists predict how organisms will respond to global climate change and prevent the spread of pests and diseases.

Kenneth Lohmann, a marine scientist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, applied the concept of movement ecology to sea turtles and salmon.

His aim was to develop a hypothesis for how such animals navigate to their natal areas from distant oceanic locations.

Juvenile sea turtles and salmon leave their birthplaces with an inescapable wanderlust, swimming hundreds or even thousands of miles away.

But after years on the high seas, the biological urge to reproduce calls the creatures home, and they return to the very spots in which they were born.

How they do this has eluded scientists for decades. Lohmann says the secret to the marine animals' navigational success may lie in the variability of Earth's magnetic field.

Each coastal area has a unique magnetic signature, he said.

Previous studies, including work in Lohmann's lab on sea turtles, indicated both the turtles and salmon are sensitive to the magnetic field.

"What we're proposing is the sea turtles and salmon, when they begin life, basically learn, or imprint, on the magnetic field that marks their home area," Lohmann said.

"They retain this information. And years later, when it is time for them to return, they are able to exploit this information in navigating back to their home area."
Once the animals reach their native coastal areas, other senses, such as vision or smell, may guide them the rest of the way. Salmon, for example, are known to use smell to locate spawning grounds once the fish are nearby.

Lohmann and colleagues propose the theory in a paper published this week in a special package about movement ecology in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"We are excited about [the theory], because it really is the first plausible explanation for how sea turtles and salmon might be able to return," he said.

An Ancient Idea

Some 2,300 years ago, the Greek philosopher Aristotle searched for common features that unified animal movements of all types, noted Ran Nathan, an ecologist at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

This kicked off a long tradition of movement-ecology research.

But over the years, Nathan said, researchers have focused on different types of movement in specific species or landscapes, without looking at how different patterns impacted each other.

These scientists "never meet each other, they never talk to each other, they never go to the same conference, they publish in different journals," Nathan said.

In an effort to bring the scientific community together, Nathan led a yearlong project to establish a unifying framework for studying movement ecology.

Twelve teams of scientists were asked to address four basic questions: Why, how, where, and when do organisms move?

The methodology, Nathan said, applies to all types of organisms, from animals such as salmon, sea turtles, and elephants to bacteria and plants.

"If you give a legitimate field for the study of movement itself ... then people will study movement-related questions more thoroughly," Nathan said.

Martin Wikelski is a zoologist at the Max Planck Institute of Ornithology in Seewiesen, Germany, who specializes in animal movement.

The initiative to raise the prominence of movement ecology is "absolutely essential" to the understanding of wild animals, especially in an era complicated by a changing climate, Wikelski said.

"Every animal moves around and if we don't know the fate of these animals during movement, and how movement contributes to selection, then I think we are pretty much lost," he said.

For example, by understanding what animals encounter as they move about their environment, scientists may be able to determine the factors that cause some to go extinct.

Birds and Bees

James Mandel, an ecologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, said the new paradigm is ideal for his research, which seeks connections between weather patterns and animal movement.

His team outfitted turkey vultures with GPS tags and two-way radio transmitters to collect data on the birds' hourly and daily movements.

One turkey vulture even carried a heart rate monitor to measure how much energy the bird expended during flight.

The researchers combined this data with information on the wind speed, atmospheric turbulence, and cloud height wherever the birds were.

The team found that turkey vultures soar from one billowing updraft of warm air to the next as they migrate thousands of miles between their summer and winter homes.

While many questions remain, Mandel said the data indicate the birds "are highly dependent on favorable weather conditions from energy source to energy source as they go."

Other teams applied the movement ecology framework to the study of elephants in Africa, elk in Canada, lynx in Spain, and butterflies from Estonia, Finland, and China.

Still other groups tested the methodology on seeds in Panama and various plants in the eastern U.S.

The Max Planck Institute's Wikelski, who is also a 2008 National Geographic emerging explorer (the National Geographic Society owns National Geographic News), is pioneering new tracking technology that allows scientists to study the movement of even the smallest creatures, such as bees.

The combination of Nathan's movement-ecology initiative and new technologies, he said, will open "a new era in biology."