In 2009, it was estimated that 13 million tourists took trips to observe whales, dolphins, and porpoises (cetaceans) in their natural habitats.  The whale watching industry is worth around $400 million and creates over 5,500 jobs. Whale watching is currently the greatest economic activity reliant upon cetaceans. Some of the fastest growing whale-watch industries are in developing countries such as China, Cambodia, Laos, Nicaragua and Panama. It has been argued that whale watching can provide benefits in conservation ethics and educational benefits as well. It is believed that the whale watching industry is positive for education there is also the issue of habituation and increase stress to the cetaceans in question.

This article is a review article from the Journal of Marine Biology. The topic of the articles is International Whale Watching. The questions from the article

Lu, J., Sookoor, T., Srinivasan, V., Gao, G., Holben, B., Stankovic, J., … & Whitehouse, K. (2010, November). The smart thermostat: using occupancy sensors to save energy in homes. In Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (pp. 211-224). ACM.

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Published in 1989 in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the article “Happiness is everything, or is it? Explorations on the meaning of psychological well-being” evaluated the measures of well-being. Upon the understanding of well-being and happiness, Carol D. Ryff asked the question: what constitutes positive psychological functioning?

The data needed to answer this question are reports of behavior. In order for this study to be workable, aspects of well-being were operationalized. The study consisted of a survey of 321 men and women who rated themselves on self-acceptance, positive relations with others, autonomy, environmental mastery, purpose in life, and personal growth. These same people then rated themselves on prior assessment indexes: affect balance, life satisfaction, self-esteem, morale, locus of control, and depression. Using correlation, the result of the study explains that relations with others, autonomy, purpose in life, and personal growth are not statistically correlated to the prior assessment indexes. Ryff concluded that the theoretical key aspects of psychological functioning holds little substance empirically.

For my evaluation of this study, I found it to be very straight forward and that made the claims much easier to understand and evaluate. My criticism of this research on whether or not I found the findings to be respectable was based mostly on construct validity, or how well Ryff operationalized the variables. If this study did not operationalized its variables well, it would fall apart because the claims would not be valid. I found the operationalization of happiness, and the other variables, to be pretty good. Thus, I respect this study and its findings; I think it was well done.

A fair amount of literature exists in support of environmental education. The typical types of articles I have found have generally focused on the fact that people, youth especially, have a lot to gain from environmental education. Many studies aim to answer the question “What should we be teaching people in order for them to see the importance of being environmentally responsible?” or “What is the most effective way to convey this information? Outdoors? With books? With charts?” Perhaps one of the most overlooked parts of education is not what we teach and should teach students, but rather how we should empower them to act and put their education to practical use.

The article “Factors in Helping Educate About Energy Conservation” centers around this issue. Their specific research question is “What are the attitudes and motivations that students have toward energy use and conservation?” The study collected results at three different times: 1995, 2002 and 2003. Researchers wanted to analyze motivation and attitudes toward energy conservation between the three data collection times and determine any broad changes between the three. Participants took surveys which were analyzed by researches using the Likert Scale (meaning the scale ranged from ‘strongly agree’ to ‘strongly disagree’), or participated in simple short-answer interviews which asked the same questions. Factor analysis and behavior analysis were then used to quantify the results.

Some of the main takeaways were the popular attitudes that: nature is important, yet we still need to uphold a functioning society and that many people feel a lack of empowerment to create solutions.

Unfortunately, the surveys and interviews concluded that having a positive environmental attitude does not always translate into action, in all three study years. The general consensus was that people often can only be environmentally conscious to a degree before having to disconnect themselves from modern society. This leaves us with a new question: how do we train our next and current generations of scientists to feel empowered enough to create new solutions for our energy crisis.

Christle, Christine A., Kristine Jolivette, and C. Michael Nelson. “School Characteristics Related to High School Dropout Rates.”Remedial and Special Education. no. 6 (2007). http://0-web.b.ebscohost.com.books.redlands.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=6ad6ba67-c3a0-49b5-8e3f-e9452ada29a7@sessionmgr114&vid=1&hid=127 (accessed March 30, 2014).

Dropping out of high school can have negative effects on the individual and his or her community, but high school dropout rates have remained fairly consistent over the last 30 years. The research topic of this article is high school dropout rate. The question this research paper is trying to answer is, “Are there school characteristics that effect the high school dropout rate at that particular school?”

The authors use high school dropout rates, 12 different school characteristics, and climate characteristics. Data for this project was collected at the school-level, using high schools in Kentucky that had grades 9-12, a total of 196 schools. Quantitative data was obtained from the Kentucky Department of Education’s (KDE) and Kentucky Center for School Safety’s (KCSS) annual reports. The qualitative data was gathered using questionnaires that were given to selected schools. These questionnaires contained survey questions with choices to circle and questions with room provided for short answers. Staff and administrators were surveyed, and researchers also performed observations to obtain the climate characteristics of each school.

The analysis was done in three stages. During the first stage, the authors looked at the dropout rate and 12 school variables chosen to assess the school. These school variables were used in a correlation analysis. Stage two used the dropout rate to choose the 20 schools reporting the lowest dropout rates and the 20 schools reporting the highest dropout rates. A multivariate analysis of variance was used to determine if there are any significant differences in the 12 school variables between the two groups of schools. An ANOVA test was also performed on each dependent variable. For the third stage, four schools from each of the twenty schools (four from the schools with the lowest dropout rates and four from the schools with the highest dropout rates) were chosen. From these schools, the researchers collected qualitative data using the surveys and observations and qualitative data was examined to develop an understanding of what was happening at a micro level.

This research described its limitations, discussed its findings, and suggested the implications of this research on real-world practice. I was interested that they used dropout rates as they were reported rather than using CPI, which has been very popular in the other literature I reviewed. Some scholars claim the dropout rates are not as reliable without calculating CPI, but the researchers were thoughtful about this project, so I trust their choice. This research was different from other research I have looked at concerning graduation or dropout rates because it looked at the effects of school characteristics. I appreciated finding this new point of view.

In a study conducted by Daniel Twedt, Paul Hamel and Mark Woodrey, they compared two different survey methods for determining species richness as well as relative abundance of grassland bird populations.  Their study area included 23 different sites, 9 coastal pine savannas and 14 recently reforested areas.  The study is titled Winter Bird Population Studies and Project Prairie Birds for Surveying Grassland Birds.  The study compared two survey methods, the first called Winter Bird Population Studies, is a method which has been used for decades, which simply involves a single observer to methodically move through a search area and identify and count all birds detected.  The second method titled Project Prairie Birds involves three researchers, the observer and the two “flushers”, it was designed to better determine the population and abundance of secretive species.  The study found that the Winter Bird Population Study method tended to overestimate the species richness.  While the Project Prairie Bird tended to overestimate avian abundance.  They also concluded that both of these methods are ineffective and suggests that the use of distance-based survey methods would provide the most complete results.

This article describes a study done where multiple methods were used in order to monitor benthic habitats in the Boston Harbor and their reactions to reductions in waste water associated with the outfalls (pipelines or tunnels carrying treated waste water) of the mouth of the harbor and offshore. Between the years of 1992 to 2006 there was an indication that benthic habitats in the Boston Harbor shifted from an anaerobic state to an aerobic state, and these changes can be directly attributed to improvements in waste water treatment as well as the placement of the outfall pipelines. From 1992 to 2000, when the outfall pipelines were put in place, there was over a 90% reduction in the amount of organic material used in the waste water treatment process and there were also a reduction in the amount of nutrients used in the treatment process and this in turn led to decreases in primary production of benthic habitats. The most obvious change was the increase (1992) and then decline (2005) of Amphipod tube mats, which are organisms along the bottom of estuaries in the Northeastern U.S, in these benthic habitats. These tube mats change the sediment level in estuaries and determine the amount of larva that can live in the estuary.

The topic of this study was the health or abundance of benthic habitats in the Boston Harbor attributed to waste water treatment as well as waste water outfalls. The study asks the question: how do ecosystems of the Boston Harbor, specifically benthic habitats, respond to the relocation of outfalls and better waste water treatment? The type of data needed to answer this question is quantitative and aggregate, interval or ratio data. In order to collect this data there were surveys taken at various site locations with benthic habitats within the Boston Harbor. The data samples collected were then analyzed for patterns across the various stations and for sediment size, level, as well as depth.

This article was not written for the average person to understand it; many terms and keywords were not well defined. However there were a good number of graphs and tables to visually describe the findings from the study.

Diaz, R. J., Rhoads, D. C., Blake, J. A., Kropp, R. K., & Keay, K. E. (2008). Long-term Trends of Benthic Habitats Related to Reduction in Wastewater Discharge to Boston Harbor. Estuaries and Coasts, 31(6), 1184-1197. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12237-008-9094-z

Who Researched:
Nathalie T. Burkert, Joanna Muckenhuber, Franziska Grobschadl, Eva Rasky, Wolfgang Freidl
Where Researched:
Austria
When Researched:
Research took place March 2006 through February 2007
Published February 07, 2014
Research Methods Used:
Cross-sectional study:
–First Step–the sample was taken from the Austrian Health Interview Survey, which interviewed 15,474 individual across Austria. The interviewees were asked about their day-to-day diets and placed into four categories:
Vegetarian diet, carnivorous diet rich in fruits and vegetables, carnivorous diet less rich in meat, carnivorous diet rich in meat.
–Second Step–all vegetarians were categorized by their sex, age (within 5 year spans), and socioeconomic status. A vegetarian falling into a certain demographic (ex: male, 20-25 years old, low socioeconomic status) was then paired with someone falling into the same demographic from the carnivorous diet rich in fruits and vegetables category, the carnivorous diet less rich in meat category, and the carnivorous diet rich in meat category. Therefore, there were 330 subjects selected from each dietary habit category.
–Third Step–face to face interviews were conducted to find out each subject’s socio-demographic characteristics, health-related behavior, diseases, medical treatments and psychological aspects.
–Fourth Step–the researchers compared individuals from each dietary habit category: one’s body mass index, one’s physical exercise habits, one’s smoking behavior and one’s typical alcohol consumption.
–Fifth Step–the researchers compared individuals’ overall health from each dietary habit category: self-reported health, levels of impairment from disorders, chronic diseases (if present), allergies (if present), cancer (if present), mental health ailments (if present) and urinary incontinence (if present).
What Was Found:
–BMI: vegetarians have the lowest mean BMI, followed by subjects eating a carnivorous diet less rich in meat, followed by subjects eating a carnivorous diet rich in fruits and vegetables, followed by subjects eating a carnivorous diet rich in meat.
–Physical exercise habits: no significant difference between dietary habit categories was found.
Smoking behavior: the number of cigarettes smoked per day did not differ between the various dietary habit groups
–Alcohol consumption: Subjects eating a vegetarian diet/a carnivorous diet rich in fruits and vegetables consume significantly less alcohol than those subjects eating a carnivorous diet less rich in meat/a carnivorous diet rich in meat.
–Vegetarians overall: self-report poorer health, higher levels of impairment from disorders, more chronic diseases than those eating a carnivorous diet less rich in meat, more suffer from allergies, more suffer from cancer, more suffer from mental health ailments, consult doctors more often than those eating a carnivorous diet less rich in meat, vaccinated less often, and make use of preventive check-ups less frequently.
–Carnivorous diet rich in meat overall: more urinary incontinence
What This Means:
When comparing vegetarians to the other dietary habit categories, vegetarians have an overall lower quality of “physical health”, “environment”, and “social relationships”. This study has revealed that vegetarians report poorer health, follow medical treatment more frequently, have worse preventive health care practices and have a “lower” quality of life. The subjects in this study that follow a vegetarian diet have a significantly higher cancer incidence, suffer more often from anxiety disorders and/or depression, and require more medical treatment. Of course, like any study, these results do not necessarily show causation or imply that every vegetarian will have a lower quality of physical health, environment and social relationships.

Molnar, J., Gamboa, R. Revenga, C, and Spalding, M.D. 2008 Assessing the global threat of invasive species to marine biodiversity. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, Vol 6, No. 9. pp. 485- 492.

It is widely accepted that invasive species are threatening to marine and terrestrial ecosystems and biodiversity. The impacts of these species have not been quantitatively assessed on a global level. In this report, over 350 databases and other sources are used to synthesize information on 329 marine invasive species. This included distribution, impacts on biodiversity, and introduction pathways. International shipping as well as aquaculture are two of the major ways that invasive species are introduced into an ecosystem.

The topic of this study is marine invasive species worldwide. There are multiple research questions being asked. One of them is, how do we quantify geographic distribution and pathways of invasive species? What are the invasive species by ecoregion and how threatening are they to the region?

An ecoregion is an area of relatively homogeneous species composition, quite clearly distinct from adjacent systems. They used this unit of analysis because it is global in scale and useful for ecological guides.  The database development was done by collecting data from a variety of sources and compiling the information into a geographically referenced database. Detailed information was collected about the threats that each invasive species posed on the biodiversity using a scoring system. Each invasive species was assigned a score from the following categories: ecological impact, geographic extent, invasive potential, and management difficulty. This score was assigned globally for each species. The pathway analysis is based off of the US National Invasive Species Council’s Pathways Team. It allows documentation of all known and likely pathways for each species in the database. The creation of the database was by using expert knowledge and published works. From there the analysis was done through the database and many different statistical tests were able to be run and averages analyzed.

The database includes 329 marine invasive species in 194 ecoregions. The data shows high levels of invasion in Northern California in San Francisco (n= 85 species, 66% which are harmful). The most common pathway is shipping and transfer through ballast water. Using data collected in this assessment, global patterns can be identified in hopes to conserve and create policy effort to decrease the number of invasive species through out the world. It was found that there is under reporting of both microorganisms and low impact invasive species on the global scale.