College of Forestry

Democrat-Herald, Feb. 13, 2018: Bill Ripple, a distinguished professor of ecology at Oregon State University, has spent a large part of his career studying the interplay between predators, prey and plant life in and around Yellowstone National Park. But that changed in December, when he took the lead role in authoring a paper titled “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice,” which was published in the journal BioScience.

Boston Globe, Nov. 13, 2017: Of the more than 15,000 scientists who signed a letter Monday warning people about the environmental threats the Earth faces, about 70 of them were professors, researchers, or PhD candidates at Massachusetts universities.

CNN, Nov. 15, 2017: More than 16,000 scientists from 184 countries have published a second warning to humanity advising that we need to change our wicked ways to help the planet.

This letter, spearheaded by Oregon State University ecologist William Ripple, serves as a “second notice,” the authors say: “Soon it will be too late to shift course away from our failing trajectory.”

OSU Press Release, Nov. 13, 2017: Human well-being will be severely jeopardized by negative trends in some types of environmental harm, such as a changing climate, deforestation, loss of access to fresh water, species extinctions and human population growth, scientists warn in today’s issue of BioScience, an international journal.

“World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice,” published today in the international journal BioScience, charts the progress — or lack thereof — on the issues highlighted in the original document and renews the call for urgent action. Lead author William J. Ripple, a distinguished professor of ecology at Oregon State University, said he was astounded by the level of support he and his seven co-authors received for their manuscript.

William Ripple, an ecologist at Oregon State University, is no newbie in this realm of research. In 2015 he published a paper that found that of the 74 species of large herbivores left on earth, 44 are threatened with extinction.

"Knowing how animal body size correlates with the likelihood of a species being threatened provides us with a tool to assess extinction risk for the many species we know very little about," says William Ripple, professor of ecology at Oregon State University (OSU) and lead author of the study, in a statement.

"The largest vertebrates are mostly threatened by direct killing by humans," said a team led by Prof Bill Ripple of Oregon State University in Corvallis, US.

Phys.Org, August 15, 2017: Dr Arian Wallach and Dr Daniel Ramp from the UTS Centre for Compassionate Conversation, along with researchers from Arizona State University and Oregon State University, say the research challenges fundamental ideas surrounding "invasive" species and conservation.