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Dot Earth often had the feel of an accelerating hamster wheel (see posts marked with the fire hose image). But it was a wheel of my own creation, given the broad question I chose to pursue starting back in October, 2007 – how do humans navigate this century with the fewest regrets?

Countless relevant developments and insights slipped by before I could note them, which is why Twitter and Facebook, in the end, became my real web log – my way of assessing, relating and sharing consequential nuggets crossing my screen. (I hope you’ll continue to follow me there; just click on the preceding links.)

Before this blogging adventure ends this weekend, there’s one sad development that I feel compelled to catch up with — the untimely death in August 2015 of Linda J. Gormezano — a tireless Arctic-focused field biologist from the American Museum of Natural History.

I first wrote about Gormezano’s innovative work studying coyote and polar bear populations with the help of her scat-sniffing Dutch shepherd, Quinoa, back in 2007. But I kept track of the important batch of studies she produced in subsequent years, and the healthy debate they had prompted. Her work showed that polar bears, while best known for their life at sea or on sea ice pursuing seals, have been able, at least in some circumstances, to gain significant nutrition on land as well, scarfing down geese and goose eggs, grasses and other fare when sea ice is in retreat.

There have been substantial, sometimes rancorous, debates among polar bear researchers about this predator’s prospects in a warming climate with less summer sea ice.

Robert F. Rockwell, a Museum of Natural History population biologist and ecologist who was one of Gormezano’s mentors since she started at the museum as a grad student, made no secret of his frustration with what he felt was agenda-driven resistance to publishing some of her findings.

After her death (from natural causes unrelated to her work), he persisted at finding a home for her final paper, co-written with him and colleagues Scott R. McWilliams and David T. Iles. The paper was published in September in the journal Conservation Physiology. You can read it here: “Costs of locomotion in polar bears: when do the costs outweigh the benefits of chasing down terrestrial prey?”

Rockwell has posted an inspiring written and pictorial tribute to Gormezano. I hope you’ll click and read and pass it around. He starts out describing her, as a spirited and talented student, as “every professor’s dream.”

In this excerpt, you can read how she quickly became much more than that, steering the museum’s research program in new directions: Read more…