ocean conditionsmany people use tree ring records to see into the past. But redwoods--the iconic trees that are the world's tallest living things--have so far proven too erratic in their growth patterns to help with reconstructing historic climate.
This is really the first time that climate reconstruction has ever been said done with redwoods Jim Johnstone who recently completed a postdoctoral position at the UW-based Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and the Ocean.
so they actually may tell you more about what's happening over the ocean than they do about
When seawater evaporates off the ocean to form clouds some drops fall as rain over the ocean
Related research by Johnstone shows that the amount of West Coast fog is tied closely to the surface temperature of the ocean
so redwoods may be able to tell us something about the long-term patterns of ocean change such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.
Zebra mussels muscle-out native mussels in Lake Champlain. Burmese pythons devastate local wildlife in the Everglades.
Saving the world's forests requires us to close the massive gulf between international promises
tested cultures in the laboratory and water samples from California lakes ponds and streams. The Hyalella amphipods are aquatic crustaceans commonly used by scientists and agencies as an indicator species of a healthy unpolluted environment.
but runoff during rains can enter a lake pond or stream and contaminate a non-target species like H. azteca.
just add waterfrom a fish-eye view rice fields in California's Yolo Bypass provide an all-you-can-eat bug buffet for juvenile salmon seeking nourishment on their journey to the sea.
and laboratory director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at UC Davis. We still have some things to learn
Most former floodplain wetlands are inundated now only during major floods. The report said access to floodplain habitats
A land sea and space-grant university UNH is the state's flagship public institution enrolling 12300 undergraduate and 2200 graduate students.
#Hypoxia Issues in the Gulf of Mexicothe Mississippi river Basin is home to much of the United states'fertile crop land.
Increasing nutrient levels affects our rivers lakes and oceans. Single cell plants called phytoplankton feed off the increased nutrients
The dead zone in the Gulf of mexico where the Mississippi meets the ocean has received much attention in the last decade and led to the creation of the Mississippi river/Gulf of mexico Watershed Nutrient Task force.
--and specialized wetland systems also reduce nutrient export. Helmers admits the challenges are more complex than changing the inputs to our crops such as corn and soybean.
Since the otters were collected from counties all over Central Illinois the findings could indicate that some watersheds have a worse contamination problem than others Carpenter said.
and wildlife are being exposed to in different watersheds. More research is needed to understand the factors that contribute to the river otters'exposure to these chemicals Mateus-Pinilla said.
In some watersheds humans may have the same kind of risk because they're eating the same kinds of fish that the otters might be.
School of engineering and Applied sciences (SEAS. It is fully within our power as a nation to reduce our impact.
The team of scientists--comprising researchers from Harvard SEAS the National park service the USDA Forest Service the U s. Environmental protection agency
but they're integral for everything else that's dependent on them explains lead author Raluca A. Ellis who conducted the research as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard SEAS.
outbreak that is tied to long-term changes in sea-surface temperatures from the Northern Atlantic ocean a trend that is expected to continue for decades.
The strongest climate correlation to spruce beetle outbreaks was above average annual values for the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation or AMO a long-term phenomenon that changes sea-surface temperatures
In addition to AMO the researchers looked at two other ocean-atmosphere oscillations--the El nino southern oscillation and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation--as well as past temperatures precipitation and aridity to better understand the spruce beetle outbreaks.
#Wetland restoration in the northern Everglades: Watershed potential and nutrient legaciesto most people restoration of Florida's Everglades means recovering
and protecting the wetlands of south Florida including Everglades national park. But what many don't realize is how intimately the fortunes of the southern Everglades are tied to central Florida's Lake Okeechobee and lands even further north.
The Everglades at the southern tip of Florida--the remains of what was once a vast ecosystem--is interconnected with a large hydrologic system that really begins in Orlando with the northern Everglades says Patrick Bohlen a professor of biology at University of Central Florida.
The heart of the system is Lake Okeechobee he continues which collects water from the northern Everglades region.
This water then used to flow from the lake into the Everglades of the south. But this natural path of water has been altered greatly by people leading to a host of environmental problems that state and federal scientists policy makers conservationists
On Nov 4 Bohlen will present Wetland Restoration in the Northern Everglades: Watershed Potential and Nutrient Legacies.
and urbanization and agriculture now send runoff laden with fertilizers and other contaminants into Lake Okeechobee.
So much of the water that historically flowed south from Lake Okeechobee is diverted now to estuaries on Florida's east and west coasts.
while the coastal estuaries receive far too much from the lake. Although a connection hasn't been made definitively heavy flows of nutrient-rich freshwater into the estuaries are suspected in die offs of eelgrass manatees and pelicans;
huge blooms of algae; and zones of oxygen-starved water Bohlen says. The situation reached a crisis this summer
ever since problems with Lake Okeechobee first emerged in the 1980s. During his talk Bohlen will first summarize these issues
Cattle ranching is the main land use directly north of the lake. So one restoration practice is to pay ranchers to restore wetlands
or create ponds to hold water on their lands. This way water from the northern Everglades doesn't flow as quickly or in as large amounts into Lake Okeechobee taking pressure off the lake its dike and the estuaries.
It may also be cheaper to store water in this manner rather than in huge public works projects.
Restored wetlands are generally very good in fact at removing nitrogen from the system. Phosphorus is trickier.
and sea buckthorn according to a new study published today in the Canadian Journal of Plant science.
Thus our work supports the commercial development of buffaloberry chokecherry and sea buckthorn berries. According to the study:
but more than half are under-productive due to excessive saline content from the Aral sea basin. Egamberdieva has been studying soil bacterial communities for more than 10 years.
Blue water is found in lakes rivers reservoirs or aquifers. It is used for many purposes such as drinking water water for homes and businesses and irrigation water for agriculture.
or Okeechobee gourd an endangered wild relative of squash that grows only on the shores of Lake Okeechobee;
The downside of nitrogen fertilization is that run off of nitrates to the surface waters or leaching of nitrates to groundwater cause problems with water quality and eutrophication in lakes.
The recent algal blooms on Lake Winnipeg are a prime example of this nitrogen pollution.
#Caribou may be affected indirectly by sea-ice loss in the Arcticmelting sea ice in the Arctic may be leading indirectly to fewer caribou calf births and higher calf mortality in Greenland according to scientists at Penn State university.
Eric Post a Penn State university professor of biology and Jeffrey Kerby a Penn State graduate student have linked the melting of Arctic sea ice with changes in the timing of plant growth on land
The ongoing decline in sea ice now has been associated with increases in local temperatures inland in many parts of the Arctic.
We therefore hypothesized that sea-ice decline was involved in local warming and the associated advancement of the growing season for plants at the study site and so we set out to test that hypothesis Post said.
and Kerby used the statistically robust relationship between sea ice and the timing of plant growth to hindcast trophic mismatch to 1979
Post added that he and his team intend to study other ecological communities living near sea ice in future research.
Sea ice is part of a broader climate system that clearly has important effects on both plants and animals.
Exactly how sea-ice decline might affect species interactions in this and other types of food webs on land in the Arctic is a question that deserves greater attention Post said.
and pharmaceutical products into waterways is often based on a belief that as the compounds degrade the ecological risks naturally decline.
and makes its way into waterways mainly through runoff. The steroid has been considered safe due to its rapid degradation with studies pointing to an environmental half-life of less than a day.
and waterways by agricultural chemicals as well as carbon costs because of vehicles and artificial fertiliser necessary to maintain the pasture.
and more recently embedding ashes in ocean reefs --or even giving the departed a sendoff with a fireworks display that includes ashes.
The temporal and spatial scope of the study--15 years and entire watersheds--is unique
The researchers reported that trees in the calcium-treated watershed produced 21 percent more wood and 11 percent more leaves than their counterparts in an adjacent control site.
Moreover watersheds along the eastern corridor of the United states had been exposed to more acid rain because of the greater number of coal-burning power plants in the region.
and the Adirondacks of New york. For the Hubbard Brook study a helicopter spread 40 tons of dry calcium pellets over a 29-acre watershed over several days in October 1999.
The calcium was designed to slowly work its way into the watershed over many years. This was restoration not fertilization said Battles.
Researchers monitored the forest over the next 15 years comparing the treatment area with an adjacent watershed that had the same characteristics
The trees in the calcium-treated watershed were able to recover faster from a severe ice storm that hit the region in 1998.
Both Schindler and Battles noted that the high cost of adding calcium to the soil would likely limit its use to targeted watersheds rather than as a treatment for vast areas of affected forests Prevention is always preferable
In addition Makira's forests serve as a zone of watershed protection providing clean water to over 250000 people in the surrounding landscape.
and into lakes and streams) could harm aquatic life. Although conventional wastewater treatment processes were designed not to remove trace pyrethroid residues we found in an earlier study of our existing treatment processes that the treatment processes were quite effective at pyrethroid removal he explained.
while a second group from a lake in British columbia preferred hiding out and were less able to maintain the precisely parallel formation required for schooling.
Another way of envisioning the volume of the resource potentially available worldwide each year is to imagine 14 months watching the outflow from the Mississippi river into the Gulf of mexico.
which Endres holds a leadership role is looking at how the value of sustainability practices can be measured at the watershed eco-shed or air-shed level rather than on the scale of individual farms.
and is mediated by interactions with the ocean and atmosphere. The fast effects of aerosols on clouds have been studied intensely
but their long-term ocean-mediated effect has received little attention. A team of scientists at the IPRC and Scripps has provided now important new insights based on results from experiments with three state-of-the-art climate models.
Even though aerosols and greenhouse gases are concentrated in vastly different regions of Earth all three models revealed similar regional effects on rainfall over the ocean.
and greenhouse-gas-induced changes in rainfall appear to be mediated by the spatial patterns of sea surface temperature.
Although much of the aerosol research has focused on microphysical processes over the ocean the climate response to aerosols appears to be insensitive to details of the micro-processes in clouds Xie said.
and by aerosols share a common set of ocean-atmospheric feedback structures explaining the spatial resemblance between the two types of response.
We want to probe the ocean-atmosphere interaction mechanisms that mediate these rainfall patterns and to determine what forms the foundation.
Dr. Beth Middleton of the U s. Geological Survey National Wetlands Research center and Evelyn Anemaet of Five Rivers Services Inc. discovered a way to simplify the construction of dendrometer bands.
Baldcypress swamps are an ecosystem that once spread across the southeastern and eastern United states. They are currently being restored in some areas of the Gulf Coastal plain after years of degradation from agriculture saltwater intrusion and pests like the tent caterpillar.
We have some natural antacid in watersheds. In headwater streams that can be a good thing.
Nitrogen-rich fertiliser runoff is the primary cause of oxygen depletion in oceans lakes and rivers leading to aquatic'dead zones.'
and watershed improvement program leader based in Albuquerque N m. Red means high-severity fire she explained
--and the red areas were concentrated in a watershed drainage that fed communities west of Las Cruces N m
as soon as the flames die down to help protect reservoirs watersheds and infrastructure from post-fire floods and erosion.
The teams focus on areas at unacceptable risk she said which typically means that post-fire flooding would damage communities watersheds and infrastructure.
and topographical maps that identify steep slopes and watersheds. After the Silver Fire for example they identified severely burned areas upstream of a community campgrounds and forest roads.
It's how you figure out what the watershed response is going to be. For more information about Landsat visit:
Given the biomass of crocodiles in many subtropical and tropical wetlands and their capacity for ingesting large numbers of fruits we consider it likely that crocodilians function as significant seed dispersal agents in many freshwater ecosystems.
The fossilized R. eurasiaticus that Yuan and his team unearthed was preserved in lake sediments suggesting that the creature may have lived on the shores.
This research was financed co by the multidisciplinary research partnership'Biotechnology for a sustainable economy'of Ghent University the DOE Great lakes Bioenergy Research center and the'Global Climate and Energy Project'(GCEP.
field records showed that it occurred in a unique area of the northern Andes mountains at 5000 to 9000 feet above sea level--elevations much higher than the known species of olingo.
a combination of deep slow-moving backwaters and shallow fast-moving channels that provide important microhabitats critical to salmon in different developmental stages.
Funded by the Royal Society and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) the project was based in woodlands on the shores of Loch Lomond Scotland
Other examples include exhaust rising from a chimney sewage flowing into the ocean and the oil spilling underwater in the 2010 Deepwater horizon disaster.
In all these events a fluid rises into a density-stratified environment like the atmosphere or the ocean.
or how fast oil is gushing from a hole in the sea floor. Baines is now working with volcanologists in Britain to apply his model to historic eruptions like the Campanian event
or ponds instead of catching them from the oceans or streams--and scientists have been trying to figure out how to make growing fish sustainable.
#Disappearance of coral reefs, drastically altered marine food web on the horizonif history's closest analog is any indication the look of the oceans will change drastically in the future as the coming greenhouse world alters marine food webs
Scripps Institution of Oceanography UC San diego paleobiologist Richard Norris and colleagues show that the ancient greenhouse world had few large reefs a poorly oxygenated ocean tropical surface waters
and food webs that did not sustain the abundance of large sharks whales seabirds and seals of the modern ocean.
Aspects of this greenhouse ocean could reappear in the future if greenhouse gases continue to rise at current accelerating rates.
Tropical ocean temperatures reached 35 C (95 F) and the polar oceans reached 12°C (53°F)--similar to current ocean temperatures offshore San francisco. There were no polar ice sheets.
Scientists have identified a reef gap between 42 and 57 million years ago in which complex coral reefs largely disappeared
and the seabed was dominated by piles of pebble-like single-celled organisms called foraminifera. The'rainforests-of-the-sea'reefs were replaced by the'gravel parking lots'of the greenhouse world said Norris The greenhouse world was marked also by differences in the ocean food web with large parts of the tropical and subtropical ocean ecosystems supported by minute
picoplankton instead of the larger diatoms typically found in highly productive ecosystems today. Indeed large marine animals--sharks tunas whales seals even seabirds--mostly became abundant
when algae became large enough to support top predators in the cold oceans of recent geologic times.
The tiny algae of the greenhouse world were just too small to support big animals said Norris. It's like trying to keep lions happy on mice instead of antelope;
Notably despite the disruption to Earth's ecosystems the extinction of species was remarkably light other than a mass extinction in the rapidly warming deep ocean.
In many respects the PETM warmed the world more than we project for future climate change so it should come as some comfort that extinctions were limited mostly to the deep sea said Norris. Unfortunately the PETM also shows that ecological disruption can last tens of thousands of years.
and the atmosphere and oceans have already been heated. There is already some inertia in place Diffenbaugh said.
As a result the world overheats boiling its oceans and filling its atmosphere with steam
In addition nitrate pollution is a health hazard and also causes oxygen-depleted'dead zones'in our waterways and oceans.
Many marine fish species spend their larval stage near the ocean's surface#n environment completely different than the one they are in as adults.
#Are North Atlantic right whales mating in the Gulf of Maine? Using data obtained during six years of regular aerial surveys
and genetics data collected by a consortium of research groups scientists have strengthened evidence pointing to the central Gulf of Maine as a mating ground for North Atlantic right whales according to a study recently published online in the journal Endangered
A high proportion of potential mates aggregated in the central Gulf of Maine between November and January and these same individuals produced a calf a year later.
We are still seeing right whales in the central Gulf of Maine just not in the same numbers.
Increased ocean noise from coastal development could also impact the species by triggering behavioral changes that negatively impact reproduction.
#Rapid upper ocean warming linked to declining aerosolsaustralian scientists have identified causes of a rapid warming in the upper subtropical oceans of the Southern hemisphere.
and preceding cooling trends to ocean circulation changes induced by global greenhouse gas emissions and aerosols predominantly generated in the Northern hemisphere from human activity.
Mr Tim Cowan lead author of the study says his group was interested initially in the three decade long cooling below the surface of the Southern hemisphere subtropical oceans from the 1960s and 1990s.
But what really caught our eye was a rapid warming of these subtropical oceans from the mid-1990s most noticeably in the Indian ocean between 300 m to 1000 m depth said Mr Cowan.
This delay in the modelled Indian ocean warming is likely due to the presence of atmospheric aerosols generated through transport emissions biomass burning and industrial smog together with natural emissions of sea salt
This in turn increases the movement of heat from the Southern hemisphere oceans to the Northern hemisphere oceans via a global oceanic conveyor belt travelling south from the subtropical Indian ocean passing the southern tip of Africa into the south Atlantic
Together with a greenhouse gas-induced southward shift the Indian subtropical ocean gyres towards the Antarctic these processes delay the Indian ocean warming in the models Dr Cai said.
What makes this work fascinating is the fact that human-emitted aerosols have such a large impact on remote ocean temperatures says Mr Cowan.
despite the observed rapid ocean warming quantifying exactly how much is due to declining aerosols or increasing greenhouse gases remains difficult
The research has been supported by the CSIRO Wealth from Oceans National Research Flagship The Australian Climate Change Science Program and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Climate System Science.
In contrast large regions were deforested to very low carbon levels such as in the developed regions outside the protected watershed of the Panama canal.
and pollen content of mud collected from the bottoms of 14 deep lakes in the Yukon Flats.
which megafloods from glacial lakes perhaps half the volume of Lake erie drained suddenly and catastrophically through The himalayas when their ice dams failed at times during the last 2 million years.
It begins on the Tibetan Plateau at about 14500 feet or more than 2. 5 miles above sea level.
Evidence indicates that giant lakes were impounded behind glacial dams farther inland from Namche Barwa at various times during the last 2. 5 million years ago.
what happened with Lake Missoula in Western Montana 12000 to 15000 years ago. That lake was more than 10000 feet lower in elevation than lakes associated with the Tsangpo Gorge
though its water discharge was 10 times greater. Evidence suggests that Lake Missoula's ice dam failed numerous times unleashing a torrent equal to half the volume of Lake michigan across eastern Washington where it carved the Channeled Scablands before continuing down the Columbia river basin.
This is a geomorphic process that we know shapes the landscape and we can look to eastern Washington to see that Lang said.
which created Lake Volta the world's largest human-made lake by surface area and fourth largest reservoir by volume.
and unique species and contains the continent's highest mountain deepest lakes and large parts of two globally significant biodiversity hotspots the Eastern Afromontane and the Albertine Rift.
Sakinaw Lake in British columbia; the Etoliko Lagoon of western Greece; a sludge reactor in Mexico;
the Gulf of Maine; off the north coast of Oahu Hawaii the Tropical Gyre in the south Atlantic;
the East Pacific Rise; the Homestake Mine in South dakota; and the Great Boiling Spring in Nevada.
They occupy every conceivable environmental niche from the extreme depths of the oceans to the driest of deserts.
the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences University of British columbia the University of Nevada Las vegas the University of Western Greece Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
and fastest flowing glacier in the Antarctic and is now floating in the Amundsen Sea in the form of a very large iceberg.
However the Pine Island glacier which flows from the Hudson mountains to the Amundsen Sea was the fastest flowing glacier in the Western Antarctic with a flow speed of around 4 kilometres per year.
however and is more attributable to the fact that the wind directions in the Amundsen Sea have altered.
The wind now brings warm sea water beneath the shelf ice. Over time this process means that the shelf ice melts from below primarily at the so-called grounding line the critical transition to the land ice says the scientist.
which is deeper than sea level. Its bed tends towards the land. The danger therefore exists that these large ice masses will become unstable
If the entire West Antarctic ice shield were to flow into the Ocean this would lead to a global rise in sea level of around 3. 3 metres.
Shelf ice The shelf ice which is 200 to 1200 metres thick is created by glaciers sliding into the sea.
It is therefore an extension of the Antarctic land ice which thins at the edges and floats on the sea.
A special feature of the Western Antarctic is that large areas of land are below sea level.
and the No. 1 item found during cleanup of beaches and waterways worldwide. Story Source:
But if we are to stop the rising sea levels ocean acidification and the loss of production from agriculture CO2 emissions will have to fall even more sharply.
rising sea levels ocean acidification#which threatens coral reefs#and production on agricultural land. Realistic development pathsthe main culprit in relation to these environmental changes is the emission of the greenhouse gas CO2
and limitation of ocean acidification says Marco Steinacher the leading author of the study. And the researchers ask the crucial question of what would be required in order for all of the climate targets to be met.
The objective of limiting ocean acidification proved particularly challenging and is achievable only through a massive reduction in the emissions of CO2.
This information is needed to formulate many additional climate targets#for example to prevent the acidification of the oceans in the Tropics.
Animal waste is collected in lagoons where the gas is captured. The gas is transported through an internal combustion area that produces energy for heat and electricity.
They focused on the Yahara River watershed which covers much of central portion of Dane County
and parts of Columbia and Rock Counties in southern Wisconsin and includes the chain of Madison lakes.
Preliminary analysis of these win-win areas suggests that factors like flat topography a deep water table less field runoff soil with high water-holding capacity more adjoining wetlands
The results also show that nearly all of the land in the watershed provides a high level of at least one of the measured services
and making up just three percent of the watershed (largely parks and protected areas) provide high levels of at least six of the measured services.
The project aims to use a combination of contemporary and historical data to understand how the watershed may change over the next 50 to 60 years.
We ultimately want to be able to look at future scenarios for this watershed Turner says. If climate changes or land use changes what's going to happen to the values that we care about?
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