and the water would have boiled.
GM crop lures pest killers: Nature Newsresearchers have created transgenic maize plants that fight off pests by emitting a chemical to attract insect-killing nematode worms. 1the method,
which a team led by Arjen Hoekstra at the University of Twente in The netherlands suggested that jatropha needs more water than other bioenergy crops, such as maize (corn),
) Jatropha had nearly four times the water footprint of sugar-cane ethanol, for instance. Critics point out what they see as flaws in that analysis,
Phytophthora infestans, the water mould that causes late blight in potatoes, consumes and rots the leaves and tubers of the plant.
meaning fewer trees can absorb the water from the rains. Massive floods have hit the provinces of Chaco
After a bitter and lengthy controversy over water management, four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River in Oregon and California will be removed to restore salmon runs.
A NASA probe sent crashing into the Cabeus crater near the Moon's north pole on 9 october ploughed up a plume containing water, hydrocarbons and, unexpectedly, mercury,
whether by water in running streams and deep lakes, or by soil adsorption that takes the compounds out of solution.
Planting trees can shift water flow: Nature Newsplanting trees, which can significantly help to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide,
According to two new studies, planting forests in areas that currently don't have trees a process called afforestation can reduce the local availability of water.
One key measure of water flow is'base flow, 'the proportion of a stream or river not attributable to direct run off from precipitation or melting snow.
Base flow is seen often as the minimum supply of water on which people can safely rely.
gy, an ecologist at Argentina's national scientific council (CONICET) and the National University of San luis. Less base flow means less water for local populations.
and transpire more water than do grasses, resulting in drier streams. According to Jobb ¡gy, reductions in base flow are pronounced less in sloping or rocky basins,
as water can escape from the tree roots and travel through the rocks. Jobb ¡gy presented his team's results last month at the World Forestry Congress in Buenos aires. A second study presented at the conference,
Besides reducing base flow, afforestation can affect how water filters through the ecosystem. Afforested sites are not as'splashy'as pastured sites,
Tree roots help to filter water into the soil, thus slowing the rate at which water levels rise after rain.
This is actually a good thing, he says. It could reduce flood flows, particularly from small watershed areas.
at least for his study areas, the ideal balance between afforestation and water needs is for one-quarter of the river basin to be planted with between 400 and 500 trees per hectare.
It is possible to prevent drastic effects on water availability, he says. Choosing tree species wisely might help, Binkley and Jobb ¡
as different species use water at different rates. Whereas fast-growing evergreen pines consume large amounts of water,
deciduous trees such as poplar and walnut use less, especially in winter. Also, planting only some portions of the watershed might achieve the balance of providing wood products for the people without the impact on the basin's water balance
says Binkley.
Lions'taste for human flesh dissected: Nature Newsa notorious pair of man-eating lions that teamed up to terrorize Kenyan labour camps more than 100 years ago did not have the same taste for human flesh,
resulting in tremendous pressure upon water resources, agricultural production and the fragile biomes, all of which increases vulnerability to climatic perturbations such as El Ni  o,
and leaves and polluting water supplies. By late January, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the country's president, had declared a state of emergency
and exposes darker surface water, thus accelerating the melting effect there. Average temperatures in the Arctic are already rising roughly twice as fast as those in the rest of the world.
and also that the water lapping the shore is warmer than it was. Asked what her team's findings might mean for the international climate negotiations going on in Copenhagen,
California. www. agu. org/meetings/fm09 Number crunch 221 The number of days unmanned underwater glider Scarlet Knight took to cross the Atlantic ocean, gathering water data.
The iron in whale faeces is an important micronutrient that is often in short supply in waters such as the Southern Ocean,
In 2007, agriculture was responsible for 43.7%of the total 30.3 million tonnes of chemical oxygen demand (COD) a measure of organic pollutants in water.
It also contributed to 57.2%and 67.4%of the total 4. 7 million tonnes of nitrogen and 0. 4 million tonnes of phosphorus effluents, respectively.
The pollution discharges far exceed the 7 million tonnes a year that China estimates its water can safely absorb.
Consequently, the country's numerous lakes, rivers and coastal waters have suffered from repeated outbreaks of algal blooms owing to the excess of nutrients polluting the water.
says Colin Chartres, director general of the International Water Management Institute in Colombo, Sri lanka, one of the CGIAR's centres.
and the levels of different oxygen isotopes in their shells vary with the temperature of the water in
The colder the water, the higher the proportion of the heavy oxygen isotope oxygen-18.
Technically, the molluscs record water temperatures, not air temperatures. But the two are linked closely specially close to the shore,
So, when the water temperatures are up, air temperatures are up. When water temperatures are down
air temperatures are down, Patterson says. One of Patterson's goals was to verify assertions in historical Icelandic sagas describing the weather.
with summer water temperatures peaking at only 5-6 °C, down from as high as 7. 5-9. 5 °C around 100 years earlier.
The sector includes renewable-energy generation and storage, waste and water treatment, and materials and infrastructure for greater energy efficiency.
water and climate services in Africa are under the spotlight at the First Conference of Ministers Responsible for Meteorology in Africa, in Nairobi,
The Cerling group contends that the abundance of small-mammal fossils at the site which White's group says supports a woodland environment could be due to predators hiding in vegetation growing around water
When ingested by water-inhabiting mosquito larvae, toxic proteins produced by Bti cause pores to form in the guts of the larvae,
higher concentrations of the gas reduce water loss during photosynthesis. A strong CO2 fertilization effect
it spewed some 475,000 tonnes of oil into waters northwest of Ciudad del Carmen on Mexico's Yucat ¡
or leaving for cleaner waters. I told my wife,'Sorry, we have to buy fish.''They began serving freshwater fish
For example, although the water depth at Ixtoc I was just 50 metres, compared with 1, 500 metres for the current spill,
and at one point some beaches in Texas took an unexpected oil hit after it mixed with surface waters close to shore.
cut water waste and help farming become more efficient. The water crisis is not unique to China,
says Frank Schwartz, a hydrologist at Ohio State university in Columbus, who was at the meeting.
forcing people to dig hundreds of metres to access fresh water, according to research presented by Bridget Scanlon, a hydrogeologist at the University of Texas at Austin.
water is scarce for two-thirds of China's 660 cities, according to a survey by the Ministry of Water Resources (MOWR.
so will its demand for water. The country will consume 750 billion cubic metres of water a year by 2030, about 90%of the total amount of usable water resources in the country, projects the MOWR.
Pollution is also putting the system under pressure. In southern and southeastern China, which have seen rapid economic development,
to funnel 45 billion cubic metres of water a year from China's moist south to its arid north,
But the team assumed that groundwater use will not increase as more surface water becomes available
Efforts to understand the scale of the problem are stymied often by the lack of a national water-monitoring network,
Groundwater and surface water are managed separately, by the MOLR and the MOWR respectively. This can lead to poor communication,
and means that water is counted sometimes twice when it flows underground, and again when it reaches the surface inflating estimates of the size of the resource.
and human activities on water resources says Zheng Chunmiao, a hydrologist with a joint position at Peking University and the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa,
of the Beijing-based Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research, found that climate contributed only about 10-30%of the water-table depletion in three regions of China.
There is much room for improvement in terms of more effective water management, says Gao. Arguably, the biggest improvement could come in the agriculture sector,
which already uses 70%of the country's fresh water. To boost grain production, for example, China has a double-cropping system of growing wheat in winter and maize in summer.
ambel, who managed to get the water level in the reservoir reduced, thus saving the sites.
water is being diverted from the swollen Indus river into irrigation canals. But engineers are warning that these canals are becoming swamped,
Water Management Advisor for the International Union for Conservation of Nature Water Programme, headquartered in Switzerland.
it gave northern regions some respite from the fast-flowing floods as the ground began to absorb some of the water.
and the waters have nowhere to go apart from across the surface, says Dalton. Last week, the northwest Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region was the worst hit (see'Pakistan's floods:
But experts believe that the management of the flood waters may present a longer-term problem.
engineering and development consultancy specializing in water and resource management, is leading an irrigation project in Sindh.
But the way the authorities have controlled the flood water is different to normal. The first signs that something strange was happening were measurements earlier this week from the Guddu and Sukkur barrages
two of the largest barrages in the Sindh province, where more than 25,000 cubic metres per second of water was flowing down the river.
That's because the excess water is being diverted into the canals. Officials have been opening gates to canals in an attempt to pass water down the canal system to relieve pressure on the barrages,
Those canals that are breached not still face problems from the silt-laden waters. If too much silt is deposited the flow will be reduced along the canal gradients,
and this will affect normal irrigation once waters recede, says Davey. Without adequate irrigation, severe food shortages will become even more likely over the coming months.
Millions of families may have lost their personal grain stores in the flood water and chaos. Â
%Excess phosphorus in many of China's lakes, coastal waters and rivers has caused repeated occurrences of harmful algal blooms known as eutrophication.
The blooms consume much of the oxygen dissolved in the water, killing fish and other plant life,
It found that the area of land from which water drains into the lake exports more than 6 kilograms of phosphate per hectare-most
Molybdenum in sea water behaves in different ways, depending on the concentration of oxygen. In oxygenated water, the lighter of the two main molybdenum isotopes 95mo and 98mo is absorbed into the seabed
leaving the heavier isotope in solution. Sea water gets lighter and heavier as a measure of the balance between oxic
and anoxic conditions, says Tim Lyons, a geochemist at the University of California, Riverside. Patterns of heavy and light molybdenum in sea water, reflecting oxygenation levels, are captured in deposited rocks called shales.
By examining the shale strata, scientists can chart periods of low and high oxygenation in the history of the seabed and, by inference, in the oceans themselves.
Water levels in the primary tributary Rio Negro or Black River are at historic lows. Although deforestation in Brazil has decreased,
Periodic droughts are associated also with El Ni  o a periodic warming of surface waters in the eastern Pacific ocean
and technology to use water that's unusable and land that's unusable. There are forward-looking people in the United states,
but our water policy is not conducive to developing desert agriculture. If there's a nation in the world that has need the and the resources,
How to avert a global water crisis: Nature Newsif current trends continue, global annual water usage is set to increase by more than 2 trillion cubic metres by 2030, rising to 6. 9 trillion cubic metres:
40%more than can be provided by available water supplies. Without immediate action to improve the monitoring and management of existing water resources,
and in particular to reform water use in agriculture, the world will face a water crisis. But researchers at the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) in Battaramulla,
Sri lanka, have come up with plan for averting disaster1. Nature asked Colin Chartres, director of the IWMI and a co-author of the plan,
how to avoid running out of water. What is causing the crisis? Agriculture is the biggest user of fresh water, making up 70-90%of the annual water demand for many countries.
This will have to change, because global food production is going to have to double over the next 40 years to meet the needs of a growing population.
Farmers will have to increase production without using any more water than they do today. If all the water in a river is used by agriculture
and industry, leaving nothing for the aquatic environment, fish and plants won't be able to survive,
and the river will die. How can we change the way we use and manage water?
The water-management institutions and governance models for many nations were developed when water was plentiful.
Developing countries, such as India, have used traditionally surface-irrigation systems, which use gravity to distribute water over the soil surface.
But these systems are no longer adequate, and farmers are now using up groundwater supplies to irrigate their land.
Governments are not regulating groundwater extraction properly, and the water tables in many regions are declining.
Governments need to introduce polices that allocate water to agriculture and industry, and that will enable them to reduce those allocations
when supplies become scarce or demand from other sectors increases. So what is the hold up?
We need better data on how much water there actually is, and how demand and supply are changing.
Only with those data can we make sound decisions on how to manage resources, forecast flood risks
Following the privatization of water resources during the 1980s, many countries in the West now have inadequate data
because the corporate water managers cut back on information gathering and monitoring to save money. In developing countries, the problem is even greater
and monitor water resources. Can we prevent a catastrophe? I don't think we will reach crisis point,
For example, farmers in developing countries could save water by using sprinklers on the surface of fields to irrigate crops,
which wastes a lot of water. Wastewater recycling also has an important role, but safe practices need to be developed.
For example, industrial and domestic discharges should be separated and the water-supply and sanitation sectors should work more closely together.
Uganda prepares to plant transgenic bananas: Nature Newsscientists in Uganda will next week start field trials of a banana variety genetically engineered to resist a bacterial disease that has been decimating crops across Central africa.
we will need to produce a lot more rice in the coming years to feed the world's population with less land, less water and less labour,
and water use. Working with industry and farmers, the partnership will translate its discoveries into products and services,
he and his wife, Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach, a physical geographer specializing in water quality from George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia,
and navigate, the team dug trenches some 3 metres deep and 10-20 metres long to study soil and water chemistry.
Their research suggests that the Maya built canals between wetlands to divert water and create new farmland,
while allowing access to the irrigation water. Beach says that surveys carried out using Google earth
and how much that extra water should raise sea level. Warming, though, could also affect the rate at
so that the water is polluted not by eroded soil and fertilizers. They will also study how patches of conserved forest totalling 750 hectares contribute to the environmental effects of the logging.
and maintaining US water resources (see Nature 467, 1021; 2010. But the EPA has ruled that Spruce 1 Mine in the Appalachian mountains of West virginia presented major environmental and water-quality concerns,
and would jeopardize the health of local communities. US mountaintop mines, such as the one on Kayford Mountain (pictured), are largely found in the Appalachians.
Business BP in Russian deal BP is joining up with Russia's state oil company Rosneft to drill in the Arctic waters of the Kara Sea.
announced plans to release a series of hybrid maize (corn) strains that can flourish with less water.
Pioneer says that field studies show its new hybrids will increase maize yields by 5%in water-limited environments
and other factors such as nutrient availability and soil quality are at play during water shortages,
when thirsty often underperform when water is plentiful. The industry researchers identified thousands of genes associated with drought tolerance
The water muddies even more when it comes to seagrasses. Earth-observing satellites lack the ability to look into turbid waters
and cannot tell the difference between the desirable grasses that store carbon, sea lettuce that stores little carbon and algae attached to rocks.
when the chemical was discovered in many water supplies. Perchlorate interferes with the production of thyroid hormones and mainly leaches into the environment from its use in the manufacture of rocket fuel and explosives.
Crucially, the team's modelling work also suggests that the bulk of the seeds are distributed on the flood plains where they are likely to germinate rather than in permanent bodies of water such as lakes.
Many fish may provide a hugely important link between terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, and not only in the Amazon.
and has invaded more temperate waters off Tasmania. Likewise, many terrestrial plants and insects are moving or expanding pole-wards.
Sure, the sea urchin is probably shifting due to warming waters. As it shifts, it's been devastating local ecosystems.
including water, forest or plantation. Given the rather coarse resolution of that satellite data, only large palm-oil plantations with closed canopies are easily identifiable,
Events Cleanup visions for Fukushima As workers continue to douse stricken reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant with water,
workers will continue to pump in water to cool three damaged reactors, as well as spent fuel pools,
and decontaminate used water on the site. The company also plans to cover the damaged reactors with temporary structures in order to limit the release of radioactivity.
China's rural areas produce more than 9 billion tonnes of waste water and 280 million tonnes of household rubbish a year.
showed that agriculture was responsible for 43.7%of the total chemical oxygen demand (COD) a measure of organic pollutants in water.
It also contributed 57.2%and 67.3%of the total 4. 7 million tonnes of nitrogen and 0. 4 million tonnes of phosphorus effluents, respectively.
Such a mixed crop and livestock system could better utilize water, nutrients and animal wastes and reduce pollution,
Radioecologists with The french Institute of Radioprotection and Nuclear Safety (ISRN) in Cadarache converted concentrations of radioisotopes measured in the soil and seawater into the actual doses that various groups of wildlife were likely
The seawater samples were taken from a region close to the reactor site. Both were measured in late March.
reached 47,000 becquerel per litre in seawater, and 72,900 becquerels per kilogram in soils. A becquerel is defined as one radioactive decay per second.
and to tackle the pollution of water supplies downstream in the Yangtze river. Other problems that the council plans to address include the dam's potential to cause seismic disasters,
Research Cholera in Haiti The cholera epidemic currently raging through Haiti was introduced inadvertently to the country through faecal contamination of river water,
So it might be more important to breed heat tolerance into future generations of crops than to make them capable of surviving with less water.
and promotes pests and water loss. Additional rainfall, meanwhile, is beneficial up to a point. The authors used their modelling results to estimate the effect that temperature
The aim is to spot pockets of plant growth by combining a measure of the'greenness'of an area with infrared data that reveal water content.
It is possible that the vegetables were contaminated with bacteria originally carried in soil or water;
And they can survive outside their hosts, in water or soil, for example. Weiss adds that carrying the phage also provides a survival advantage for the host bacteria.
According to Wieler, the strain's resistance characteristics could point towards an environmental source, such as water or soil.
Aquatic ecosystems are among those most degraded, for example from pollution from fertilisers running off of agricultural land, says Bob Watson, chief scientist for the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural affairs,
The water systems in general are still in bad shape. They are better than they were but the direction of travel is still not where we want it to be,
including everything from water supplies and soil conditions to income and agrochemical use at the level of individual farmers.
and little is known about how it regulates important traits such as cold tolerance and water efficiency.
but in theory, the stable temperatures and ph of sea water should preserve DNA well, adds Matthew Collins, a bioarchaeologist from the University of York,
more than 80%of this gain would have to be made on existing agricultural land through more efficient use of land and water resources.
) On 22 november the company announced it was ending its engineering work on cutting the cost and water consumption of concentrated solar power systems,
In Alberta, the Department of Environment and Water requires facilities to have their emission estimates
and Water for allowing carbon credits for emissions-reducing activities that have become common practice.
which store contaminated water, clay, sand and bitumen from oil-sands processing. Many opponents of emissions trading programmes also argue that companies are likely to purchase carbon offsets instead of reducing emissions by adopting new technologies
and Water that it had to offer better guidance to improve consistency in emissions estimates
In areas where land and water are limited for developing both rice and fish production it is important to conduct RF rice-fish co-culture,
thus keeping the water cool and allowing fish to remain active even during the hottest months.
water supplies and infrastructure. The report also praises Australia's Carbon Farming Initiative the world's first national legislation aimed at reducing carbon emissions from farming and forestry,
water will need still to be pumped into the reactors to cool their decaying fuel, and residents who once lived near the plant will not be able to return until the land has been decontaminated.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/ASUEVENTS Fresh clue to ancient Mars water NASA's Opportunity rover has discovered veins of hydrothermally deposited minerals at the edge of Endeavour crater on Mars. The bright
mineral-rich water once pulsed through fractures in the volcanic rock. Gypsum deposits can form in water that is much less acidic than required by the water-altered sulphate minerals previously discovered on Mars meaning that the site could have been more habitable than others explored by the rover.
Principal investigator Steve Squyres, of Cornell University in Ithaca, New york, told a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San francisco, California,
on 8 december that the discovery is the most"bulletproof support yet for ancient water. See go. nature. com/nmsldl for more.
probably polluted water supplies in central Wyoming. Shale-gas companies have maintained that complaints of methane and other chemicals in groundwater can't definitely be linked to fracking,
But the most pressing risks laid out by the study concern water, with droughts and shortages in the summer and winter flooding all expected to affect the country more.
"Seaweed is produced already in huge quantities around the world without taking up any fresh water or arable land.
For methane, the study identified 14 control measures that would target leakage from coal mining and oil and gas operations, emissions from landfills, wastewater systems, livestock manure and rice paddies.
and was presented on national television with a sample of yellowing water (pictured) Â although the water was melted probably from ice at the bottom of the borehole, not from the lake itself.
The Russian drilling team has now left the borehole until next summer (in December when they will return to do further analysis. See page 287 for more.
to build two pressurized-water nuclear reactors at its Vogtle station near Waynesboro. The company said the reactors could be operating by 2017.
His team found that DNA surveys of water samples from a Canadian river identified the same invertebrate species as visual surveys7.
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