Researchers at the Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve are working to restore the west coast’s native oyster species, the Olympia Oyster, to the slough, an estuary teeming with wildlife along California’s Central Coast between Monterey and Santa Cruz. Harvested to near extinction following the Gold Rush, efforts are now underway to restore the bivalves to parts of their historic range, reports Genevieve Bookwalter of the Santa Cruz Sentinel.

The Obama administration has deployed the 'BP Squad' of federal investigators to the Gulf to probe whether there was any wrongdoing on the part of government regulators or private companies related to the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig. As Peter Henning points out in The New York Times, the criminal probe focuses mostly on

Cornelia Dean of the New York Times examines worrying news from NOAA about the danger that nitrous oxide poses to the ozone layer.

Part of the promise of an Obama presidency is a government that will take on new responsibilities: ensuring every citizen gets health care, facilitating a renewable energy economy. Another part, though, is just undoing the dumbest things George W. Bush did.

Today, as the Washington ...

The Washington Post's David A. Farenthold reports that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has weakened protections for the North Atlantic right whale. NOAA decided to change "buffer zones" for these whales to a 20-mile area off of Altantic Ocean ports instead of ...

It took a while for George W. Bush to acknowledge the seriousness of climate change. But the administration's U.S. Climate Change Science Program has released reports unflinchingly showing global warming's effects.

The Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin looks at such a report released yesterday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. ...

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is considering whether to put four different kinds of seals in the Bering Strait on the endangered species list because of melting ice. The Washington Post’s Juliet Elperin points out that the seals may not be the first arctic ...