He is a powerfully engaging public speaker and has lectured widely about the environmental crisis, including his TED talk “How we wrecked the oceans’[2] that has been viewed over half a million times.

Jackson's work on the collapse of coastal ecosystems was chosen by Discover magazine as the outstanding scientific achievement of 2001.

His work on marine bryozoans provided some of the strongest evidence to date for the controversial punctuated equilibrium model of evolutionary change.

In addition to the bryozoan work, Jackson produced influential studies on coral reef communities and served as a central figure in a Smithsonian Institution investigation of ecosystems in Panama and the surrounding regions.

A few years later, in Jamaica Jackson led a study concerning the impact of an oil spill on the nearshore regions affected.

Using historical and ecological sources, Jackson demonstrated that green sea turtles in the pre-Columbian Caribbean used to exist by the tens of millions, greater than current populations.

The first result of this interdisciplinary working group was a paper[7] led by Jackson showing that fishing predated any other major disturbance to marine ecosystems in the Holocene.

Naval War College on the degradation of the ocean environment and its implications for human wellbeing and US national security.