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Curt Stager

American author, radio co-host, musician, and professor of natural sciences at Paul Smith's College

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 13, 2026
Entity authorityQ45228817
Source-derived summary

Jay Curtis Stager (born July 29, 1956) is an author, radio co-host, musician, and professor of natural sciences at Paul Smith's College in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, where he holds the Draper-Lussi Endowed Chair in Lake Ecology and Paleoecology. He is also a research associate with the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine, Orono.

Education

He received a B.A. in biology and geology from Bowdoin College in 1979 and a Ph.D. in zoology and geology from Duke University in 1984.

Academic career

His research in Africa and the Adirondacks has focused on the use of lake sediment cores to reconstruct past climates, evolution, and human impacts on ecosystems over centuries to thousands of years. In addition to investigating environmental histories of lakes in Africa, South America, and the United States, he has studied acid rain recovery in Adirondack lakes, human impacts on Thoreau's Walden Pond, fish evolution in Uganda, megadroughts in the Afro-Asian monsoon region, coral reef ecology in the Bahamas, and exploding lakes in Cameroon.

In 2013 he was named the Carnegie-CASE Science Professor of the Year for New York state. A reviewer for the fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, he has published several dozen papers in Science, PNAS, and other journals, and has written for National Geographic Magazine, The New York Times, and other periodicals for general audiences.

Public Outreach

His science-outreach efforts have also included a graphic novel about his student-centered research on Walden Pond, numerous public presentations on climate change and lake ecology, and a convention of Catholic Climate Ambassadors at Paul Smith's College in March, 2016.

Since 1990 he has co-hosted Natural Selections a weekly science program on North Country Public Radio.

A YouTube video of Curt playing guitar for a pet crow that appeared online in 2015 gained over 100k views on the site.

Editorial summary

“Curt Stager” enters the record as american author, radio co-host, musician, and professor of natural sciences at Paul Smith's College. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Curt, Stager and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewStrongest as a route into the people, institutions and dated events that shaped the subject’s public record. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1956, 1979, 1984, 2013—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1956-07-29. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Curt, Stager and American.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Curt Stager” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Curt, Stager and American provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q45228817. VIAF identifies the subject as 50976188. The Library of Congress control number is n97081080. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1956, 1979, 1984 and 2013.

Critical limits

Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Curt Stager” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.