School of forestry and environmental studies

School Notes: School of the Environment
May/June 2021

Ingrid C. “Indy” Burke | http://environment.yale.edu

Tracking mosquito movement

A Yale-led research team has developed a new method of tracking the deadly yellow fever mosquito as it moves through the environment, combining genetic data from the mosquitoes and environmental data from satellites. The authors mapped “landscape connectivity”—defined as how a landscape facilitates the movements of organisms and their genes across large areas—which will be useful in designing more strategic releases of genetically modified mosquitoes, a cutting-edge method of disease control. “By integrating machine learning with an optimization process, our approach overcomes constraints of previous methods and should be helpful for more precise planning of vector control actions,” says Giuseppe Amatulli, a research scientist at YSE and Yale’s Center for Research Computing. The authors also believe this novel advance could have broader applications, including in conservation and environmental protection.

Expanding research on sustainable investing

The Yale Initiative on Sustainable Finance (YISF), a joint program between the Yale 
Center for Environmental Law and Policy (YCELP) and the Yale Center for Business 
and the Environment (CBEY), has announced a new partnership with investment bank BNY Mellon to expand research on various aspects of sustainable investing, including forces shaping sustainable finance, best practices in environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting, and how corporate sustainability performance affects financial results. This collaboration will support YISF’s ongoing research agenda that includes exploring the relationship between ESG metrics and financial performance, and investor-grade ESG metrics.

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