you'd lose these on a modern day beach, they have an arch and a totally human gait, recalls Latimer.
Arctic fishing Fishing catches in the seasonally ice-free Arctic Sea by Russia the United states and Canada were 75 times greater than reported to the United nations'Food and agriculture organization from 1950 to 2006, according to estimates published last week (D. Zeller et al.
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.
could allowing cattle to graze in the country's Alpine National park the picturesque setting for the film The Man from Snowy River reduce the risk of bushfires?
and manure damage sensitive wetland ecosystems. Coleman says that the cattle do stop fires, by eating the vegetation that forms potential fuel,
for example, has moved from the warming seas off mainland Australia and has invaded more temperate waters off Tasmania.
the fact that many are dying after high ocean temperature events may have something to do with humans stressing them with pollution, dynamite fishing, recreational activities and coastal development.
if the reefs were overstressed not by other things humans are doing again, we'll never know.
A previous attempt at quantifying peat-forest conversion to oil-palm planting was made by the nonprofit organization Wetlands International for the Malaysian state of Sarawak on Borneo.
When global pressures, including rising ocean temperatures or ocean acidification, are taken into account, about 75%are threatened,
with the proportion expected to rise to 90%by 2030. The World Resources Institute in WASHINGTON DC published the statistics on 23 february in Reefs at Risk
a report updating a 1998 study. The latest report emphasized that reefs affect society, providing food and coastline protection,
and said that they can rebound if communities stop unsustainable practices. Oil-spill health study A study claiming to be the largest ever to follow up the long-term effects of an oil spill on human health was launched on 28 february (see nihgulfstudy. org.
The National institutes of health says it has committed US$19 million to the project so far; its National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences hopes to spend a decade following 55,000 of the workers
and volunteers who supported the cleanup effort after the Deepwater horizon disaster in the Gulf of mexico. Booking a rocket The first contracts have been signed to send researchers into suborbit using commercial spacecraft.
A flight test vehicle, Enterprise, will travel to the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New york city.
Although carbon reserves in other types of tropical wetland forest have been assessed, the amount of carbon in mangroves has been ignored largely,
Kauffman and his team assessed aboveground and belowground carbon pools in mangrove sites occupying estuaries and oceanic settings, such as island coasts.
The team found that this underground layer is thicker in mangrove forests in estuaries than in those near the ocean
the relative area of mangrove forests in estuaries compared with those near oceans, and the effect of land-use changes on carbon release from soils.
cleaning up contaminated soil and waterways, and the development of large-scale livestock farms to make it easier to collect
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,
and lower reaches of the Yangtze that has devastated farmland and left millions of people short of drinking water.
will not be restarted until Chubu completes existing plans to upgrade seawall defences there. The suspension has worried both utilities and local industry,
hydro, wind, solar, geothermal and oceans). More than half of the 164 future scenarios presented in the report suggest that these sources will provide more than 27%of the global energy supply by 2050.
Research Cholera in Haiti The cholera epidemic currently raging through Haiti was introduced inadvertently to the country through faecal contamination of river water,
The report pointed to probable leakage from latrines at a riverside United nations peacekeepers'camp. However it stopped short of directly accusing Nepalese soldiers in the camp,
or'citation cascade',is evident in records of more than 100 other Nobel prizewinners, says a study published on 4 may (A. Mazloumian et al.
and a wood-exporting country that aims to ensure that timber reaching European shores is legally sourced.
The grasshoppers have infested already Saudi arabia's Red sea coast. Special locust squads, guided by satellite data to the breeding grounds,
and Xuemei Chen (pictured) at the University of California, Riverside, who looks at the formation of flowers.
The Amazon basin in South america, the Congo Basin in Central africa and the Borneo-Mekong Basin in Southeast asia are home to about 80%of the world's rainforests and two-thirds of global terrestrial biodiversity.
and the Borneo-Mekong Basin has developed a secondary industry to process its wood. We need to work together to promote best forest practices in the three basins.
Many countries within the Amazon and Borneo-Mekong regions were unrepresented. This meeting sort of came out of the blue,
Ancient sea jelly makes tree of life wobble: Nature News A 580-million-year-old fossil is casting doubt on the established tree of animal life.
believe that Eoandromeda is the ancient ancestor of modern ocean dwellers known as comb jellies gelatinous creatures similar to jellyfish,
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,
The proposed reserve, in the Coral sea off the country's northeast coast, covers around 990,000 square kilometres.
which sticks out from the Amundsen Sea coast on the west of the continent. The rift (pictured, around 80 metres wide and 50 metres deep) was seen first in Mid-october by NASA's Operation Icebridge project, which released images last week.
Island states threatened by rising seas, such as Grenada and Papua new guinea, had hoped for more immediate, aggressive steps.
 the ecologically sensitive areas along rivers and streams, on steep slopes and hilltops throughout Brazil.
Conservationists are concerned that the pending law would reduce the width of preserved forested areas along rivers.
The preserved area, for instance, will be measured from the low river level mark, where the riverbank is during the drier season,
and not from the high water mark, which exists during seasonal flooding..Â"These are areas of extreme importance,
and they keep rivers flowing with some quality. Â They re very sensitive and they re under risk.
such as improved access to Arctic shipping routes owing to melting sea ice, increased wheat yields as a result of warmer conditions,
Brown seaweed also grows faster than red or green seaweed, with varieties such as the giant kelp, found off the coast of California, growing by up to a metre a day.
which is less abundant in the world s oceans than brown seaweed, but"relatively easy to ferment using yeast,
Xinhua/Photoshotevents Drought in China After a decade-long dry spell, China's largest freshwater lake has shrunk to its smallest size in years,
The area of Poyang Lake, in the eastern Jiangxi province, was 183 square kilometres early this year, nearly half the average of 344 square kilometres recorded since 1951.
it on the northwestern edge of a large tropical island off the eastern shore of the supercontinent Pangaea,
and the forests ended up farther from the coasts, says Ralph Taggart, a palaeoecologist at Michigan State university in East Lansing.
769 metres through Antarctica's ice sheet to reach the subglacial Lake Vostok. The breakthrough was made on 5 february,
although the water was melted probably from ice at the bottom of the borehole, not from the lake itself.
See page 289 for more on the flu-virus debate. go. nature. com/pf7bwv20-24 february Marine scientists'responses to the Gulf of mexico oil spill in 2010 are discussed among topics at the Ocean Sciences Meeting in Salt lake city, Utah
Geochemist Germain Bayon and his colleagues at The french Research Institute for Exploration of the Sea in Plouzanã examined the weathering of sediment samples drawn from the mouth of the Congo river.
Forests, rangelands and wetlands. The land rush is very much jeopardizing the existence of these resources.
"I don't know that it's a sea change yet, Gibbs says, "but they are definitely changing the rules
His team found that DNA surveys of water samples from a Canadian river identified the same invertebrate species as visual surveys7.
Cash reward for saving Australia's watera contentious plan to reduce the amount of water that can be taken from the rivers in Australia s Murray-Darling Basin would reap billions of dollars in ecological benefits,
But the extraction of too much water from the basin s rivers has triggered increases in the salinity of water
algal blooms and damage to important wetlands, eucalyptus forests and wildlife. To address these problems,
The largest benefits would come to the Murray river, including the downstream Lower Lakes and Coorong regions, in the form of increased tourism and improved water quality, for example.
The plan would mean fewer blooms of blue-green algae and less risk of acidification of the Lower Lakes.
Despite this, some forest communities in the drier woodland parts of the floodplain would probably remain vulnerable,
This'deep sequencing'technique has been used to characterize mixtures of microbes living in environments such as oceans and animal guts.
scale back forest protections along rivers and hills, give state and local governments more authority over forests,
ranging from 20%in the Atlantic forest along the coast to 80%in the Amazon basin.
That record includes pushing forward with the controversial Belo Monte dam on the Xingu River in the eastern Amazon,
covering 3. 1 Â million square kilometres of ocean along the nation s coasts. Researchers were worried by draft proposals last year (see Nature 480,14-15;
Ocean acidity The International atomic energy agency (IAEA), based in Vienna, is to create a centre to facilitate
and communicate research into ocean acidification, it announced on 18 june. The centre, to be launched this summer at the IAEA s Environmental Laboratories in Monaco,
affected by acidifying oceans.  German excellence Thirty-nine universities have won each a share of  2. 4  billion (US$3 billion) in the second round of Germany s Excellence Initiative
and in April they won a challenge in the state of Rio grande do Sul, where a judge ruled that the company s levy was illegal.
Russia, the United nations educational scientific and cultural organization s World Heritage Committee meets to discuss the state of conservation sites including Australia s Great Barrier  Reef. whc36-russia2012. ru26-28 june
marine scientists plan out an international network to monitor the acidification of the oceans. go. nature. com/lopgt6
picks and pans came to search the riverbanks for deposits of gold washed down from the Andes mountains.
and pollute local rivers  as well as depriving the government of an estimated US$305 million in taxes each year.
destroying 6, 600 Â hectares of wetlands and primary tropical forest. And they predicted that the trend will only get worse.
and a large proportion of that ends up in rivers or is released into the atmosphere. Miners combine mercury with sediments that contain gold  typically using their feet to mix them in a bucket
Because the metal accumulates in rivers, elevated mercury levels were much more common in those who ate a lot of fish:
after it became clear that about three-quarters of the soya crops produced in the southern state of Rio grande do Sul were already being grown from Roundup Ready seeds that had been smuggled in from Argentina.
In 2009, a consortium of farming syndicates from Rio grande do mounted Sul a legal challenge to the levy,
a judge in Rio grande do decided Sul that Monsanto s levy was illegal, noting that the patents relating to Roundup Ready soya beans have expired already in Brazil.
pending consideration by the Justice Tribune of Rio grande do Sul. But in 2011, Monsanto had made also a parallel legal bid to the Brazilian Supreme court of Justice, the country's highest federal court.
and also that any final ruling should be limited to Rio grande do Sul, fearing that its losses would be even greater
deciding unanimously that the ruling by the Justice Tribune of Rio grande do Sul, once it is made,
a BSL-3 facility located off New york s Atlantic coast and currently the only US facility in
Mark Thurmond, a committee member and veterinarian at the University of California at Davis. Deciding the ultimate fate of the NBAF falls to policy-makers,
Whereas the old forest code required landowners to maintain corridors of riverbank forest 30-500 metres wide,
depending on the size of the waterway, the revised law and presidential order reduce those requirements to just 5-100 metres.
Dry weather is expected to continue into August in the southern to central Plains, across the Gulf coast and along the west coast
"Persistent and extreme June dryness across the central and Eastern corn belt and extreme late June and early July heat from the central Plains to the Ohio river Valley have lowered substantially yield prospects across most of the major growing regions,
of sea to reach Wolf, probably carried by pirates and whalers. Using DNA from museum specimens
so that they can tolerate irrigation with sea water? It would be really presumptuous of me to say,
where the agricultural caucus has been trying to further cut down its provisions for safeguarding forested land near rivers.
and gas resources off the coast of Alaska have been abandoned following damage to oil containers on the spill-cleanup barge Arctic Challenger,
nsidcarctic sea-ice coverage reached the lowest point of this year s summer melt on 16 Â September, the US National Snow and Ice Data center in Boulder,
On that date, around 3. 41 million square kilometres of sea in the Arctic were covered at least 15 in ice,
creating millions of new jobs from coast to coast. With fewer energy imports and more exports of manufactured goods
and cooperative conservation measures will improve the water quality of our lakes, rivers, streams and coastal environments.
and large areas of ocean and coastlines are polluted. What role should the federal government play domestically
and through foreign policy to protect the environmental health and economic vitality of the oceans? We are directing additional funding to Gulf Coast restoration to bring back the fisheries and coastal ecosystems
which are still recovering in the aftermath of the Deepwater horizon spill. We kicked off the Great lakes Restoration Initiative, the largest investment in the Great lakes in two decades,
which is targeting ecological problems such as invasive species, toxic hot spots, and pollution runoff. We are cleaning up the Chesapeake bay,
protected more than 54,000 acres of coastlines and restored over 5, 200 acres of coastal habitat.
These are significant steps that are helping us improve the health of our oceans and build more robust fisheries.
and vitality of the oceans and to adjust policy when necessary. A Romney Administration will safeguard the long-term health of fisheries,
among other things, would have removed forest protection along rivers and slopes, and would have allowed lawbreakers to receive a blanket amnesty.
No native microbes were found by an early analysis of the ice on the drill used by a Russian team to penetrate Lake Vostok, a body of water buried deep under Antarctica s ice, in February.
The top layer of the lake seems to be lifeless, according to"very preliminary results presented by Sergey Bulat of the Petersburg Nuclear physics Institute in Gatchina, Russia, at the 12th European Workshop on Astrobiology in Stockholm on 16 october.
they would be reared similarly isolated from the ocean. The prospects for research are better outside the United states. Last year,
and will use physical boundaries, such as rivers and roads, to prevent infected badgers from roaming in or out of the cull zone.
who now directs a US-Mexican collaboration programme at the University of California, Riverside.""Most of our industry has preferred to buy intellectual property,
Scientists assume that the rest is absorbed largely by the oceans and plants, but ground-based monitoring stations are too few and far apart to pinpoint the sinks.
Named after the town of Bogia on the north coast of mainland PNG, the disease appears to be caused by bacteria similar to,
In an attempt to contain the disease, movement of coconuts and coconut palms, both from the gene bank and for commercial reasons,
But these restrictions are preventing the gene bank from fulfilling one of its key roles:
We are also planning to duplicate the gene bank in another country. The crisis is at least providing an opportunity to rethink the strategy for regional coconut conservation
but the severe droughts of 2005 and 2010 seem to have been influenced by warmer sea-surface temperatures in the North Atlantic ocean.
Customs officials announced on Tuesday that they had confiscated 1, 500 pieces of tusk at Port Klang, on the west coast of peninsular Malaysia.
 hours of drilling to reach Antarctica s subglacial Lake  Ellsworth, buried under more than 3  kilometres of ice (see Nature 491,506-507;
Reed Schererdrilling team reaches Lake Whillans A US research team drilled through 800-metre-thick ice to reach the subglacial Lake Whillans in Western Antarctica on 28 january.
The project is the first to retrieve fully intact samples of liquid water (pictured) and sediment from a subglacial lake,
This is the first time that researchers have probed the water of one of the more than 300 Â lakes discovered under Antarctica s ice in recent years.
Perciasepe, currently deputy administrator at the environment agency, developed a watershed-protection programme while previously at the agency under Bill clinton.
Jane Lubchencolubchenco (pictured) promoted a new US oceans policy and overhauled the way the agency disseminated environmental data.
Her successor will face questions about catch limits in ocean fisheries, and will need to resolve cost overruns
Greenland s frozen surface turned into a colossal puddle. Even the coldest parts of the world s largest island saw ice thaw
fuelling concerns over the future of glaciers that hold enough water to raise global sea levels by around 7 Â metres.
it also implies that Antarctica has much greater potential to raise sea levels than previously thought.
respectively enough to raise sea levels by about 0. 6 millimetres per year3. Scientists think that by 2100
the global sea level may have risen by 0. 5-1. 2 metres above current levels. Although ice loss is currently greatest in Greenland,
which one of the company s oil platforms in the Gulf of mexico exploded. The deal follows a $4. 5-billion settlement last year by oil
Comb jellies paddle through the sea with iridescent cilia and snare prey with sticky tentacles. They are much more complex than sponges they have nerves, muscles, tissue layers and light sensors, all of which the sponges lack."
says Mark Springer, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Riverside. For example, grouping animals according to their anatomy alone puts physically similar species such as pangolins, anteaters and aardvarks in the same tight group,
A stream that lies just 1. 5 kilometres from the Hube Global plant flows into the Nakdong River,
That was especially the case for soil on small islands in northern lakes, where wildfires rage only rarely
But when Lindahl and his colleagues carbon-dated samples taken at various depths throughout the soil on 30 islands in two Swedish lakes near the Arctic circle,
which can reveal changes in ice mass and ocean circulation; SMOS is measuring soil moisture and ocean salinity;
and Cryosat-2 is monitoring variations in sea-ice thickness and changes in the mass of large ice sheets and glaciers.
Three further missions Swarm, ADM-Aeolus and Earthcare are scheduled for launch over the next three years,
In the second study, a team led by St andrews marine mammal science student Jenny Allen examined 27 years of whale-watching data from the Gulf of Maine, off the eastern coast of the United states,
But in 1980, observers in the gulf saw something new: a humpback slapping the surface of the water with its tail fluke before proceeding with a standard bubble feed.
but by 2007,37%of the humpbacks in the Gulf of Maine were observed using the technique,
David Wiley, research coordinator at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric administration's Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary in Scituate,
The first known cases of human infection with H7n9 were reported in China on 31 march, with two cases in Shanghai on the eastern seaboard and one in the neighbouring province of Anhui.
and a belt extending around the Bohai Sea to Liaoning province in the north. Gilbert was one of more than 30 international experts who gathered at the Food and agriculture organization of the united nations in Rome for a two-day meeting last week to discuss the current H7n9 outbreaks.
The agency said that the corporation had dumped iron compounds off the west coast of Canada illegally.
boosting ocean productivity and salmon populations. On 17 april, the corporation filed a court brief arguing that Canadian anti-dumping regulations do not apply to"ocean pasture replenishment and restoration.
Source: Thomson Reuters Point Carbonprices for allowances to emit a tonne of carbon dioxide on Europe s carbon-trading market are likely to remain low until 2020,
how could an experiment be large enough to be representative of a forest that has thousands of species of canopy trees and a cascade of plants beneath?
Up until now, the virus had been restricted to Shanghai and neighbouring regions on the Eastern seaboard. Experts worry that this new development may be the start of an expansion that may see H7n9 quickly fan out across large areas of China, and beyond.
Kwok-Yung Yuen, an infectious-disease expert at the University of Hong kong, notes the proximity of the reported human cases to the Yangtze river delta
who is flyways programme manager for conservation group Wetlands International in The netherlands. He also co-convenes the Asia-Pacific Working group on Migratory Waterbirds and Avian influenza with the Food and agriculture organization of the united nations (FAO.
Melting sea ice exposes dark water, allowing the ocean to soak up more heat. Arctic warming speeds the release of carbon dioxide from permafrost.
And, as researchers discussed at a meeting last week in Seefeld, Austria, climate extremes heatwaves,
and think that coastal communities should be prepared better for rising seas and stronger storms, a survey published on 28 march has found.
Aurora Photos/Alamyus waterways in bad shape More than half of US rivers and streams are in a poor environmental condition,
The data from 2008-09 the most recent available show that 28%of the nation s waterways have excessive levels of nitrogen
near the Iron Gate dam on the Klamath River in northern California), the breakdown of which saps water of the oxygen that aquatic life needs to survive."
US National Snow and Ice Data Centera record low in the extent of sea ice in the Arctic last September has been followed by a record refreezing of uncovered ocean surface,
one of the larger 17-year groups and one that emerges in major metropolitan regions on the east coast.
The paper highlights the Aral sea in Central asia as an example of a collapsed ecosystem. River-diversion projects have caused the body of water, once the fourth-largest lake in the world,
to lose about 90%of its volume in the past 50 years, stranding fishing boats (pictured) and depleting native wildlife.
and think,'what can we do to keep the oceans clean
Amazon plant discovery could yield green cash cropin a farmer s garden deep in the Peruvian Amazon in August 2012, Rainer Bussmann and Carlos Vega struck oil.
The Samoylov station, located on a small island in the Lena Delta close to the Laptev Sea, replaces a 15-year-old small wooden station situated nearby.
Hannah Hoagfreshwater lifeline Ontario s government threw a lifeline to Canada s Experimental Lakes Area (ELA) on 24 Â April.
Canada. go. nature. com/enai636-8 may Darmstadt, Germany, hosts the first international meeting on research into ocean colour science:
how satellite observations of the ocean can infer photosynthesis and other activity from colour. go. nature. com/ubntid
visitors will encounter a shiny expanse of recycled plastic jutting out to sea on a platform of steel-reinforced concrete."
By 600 bc, the Etruscans of central Italy were trading their wine along The french Mediterranean coast.
would have banned fishing in 1. 6  million  square  kilometres of the Ross Sea
and created seven protected areas off the coast of East Antarctica. Despite the failure to reach agreement,
China s cordgrass plan is overkill On an island in Shanghai at the mouth of the Yangtze river in China,
home on its eastern end to the 24,000-hectare Shanghai Chongming Dongtan National Nature Reserve declared a region of international ecological importance by the Ramsar Convention, a global wetland-conservation treaty.
so far consuming more than 10%of the wetland. It colonizes an area by forming dense bundles with deeply penetrating roots squeezing out native plants
eating mudflats and drying up wetlands. At Dongtan,"this has had devastating consequences for many bird species,
In October, construction of an 8-metre-high, 27-kilometre-long sea wall is set to begin at the heart of the reserve.
and sea walls have been used in past decades to reclaim land from the sea for agriculture and other human uses.
permanent sea wall to resolve it. Melville and other experts note that an 8-metre-high wall accounting for more than 80%of the project s budget is unnecessary
For example, without the ebb and flow of tides, the sea bulrush (Scirpus mariqueter), a native intertidal grass bearing fruit and stalks that are key food sources for many birds
says Wang Tianhou, a wetlands ecologist at East China Normal University in Shanghai.""It s unrealistic to conserve habitats without any compromise.
During that time, the cordgrass grew beyond the proposed seawall borders by a few hundred metres.
they would cost much less than a sea wall, be easier to secure approval for, and could eradicate the cordgrass in the entire reserve while retaining natural tidal rhythms.
But"factors other than conservation were likely to be involved in the decision-making process that led to the plan for a permanent sea wall,
Reclaiming land from the sea is seen as an easy and cheap option. Researchers such as Li are pragmatic about the possibility that part of the reserve might one day be coopted for farming."
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