Her essays have appeared in "The New York Times", "Smithsonian", "Parade", "The New Yorker", "National Geographic", and many other journals. Her research has taken her to such diverse locales as Mata Atlantic in Brazil (working with endangered golden lion tamarins), Patagonia (right whales), Hawaii (humpback whales), California (tagging monarch butterflies at their overwintering sites), French Frigate Shoals (monk seals), Toroshima, Japan (short-tailed albatross), Texas (with Bat Conservation International), the Amazon rainforest, and Antarctica (penguins). In 1986, she was a semi-finalist for NASA's Journalist-in-Space Project—this program was cancelled after the Space Shuttle "Challenger" (carrying Christa McAuliffe as a payload specialist with the Teacher in Space Project) disaster. A molecule has been named after her—"dianeackerone"—a crocodilian sex pheromone.