however, a furious debate has emerged among behavioural ecologists over whether the train of the male peafowl,
says Roslyn Dakin, a Phd student in behavioural ecology at Queen's university in Kingston, Canada. Dakin and a colleague, Robert Montgomerie, tracked three populations of feral peacocks and peahens during the spring breeding season,
Beginning in the 1980s, Marion Petrie, a behavioural ecologist at Newcastle University, UK, examined the role of the peacock's tail in mating rituals.
However, in 2008, a team of Japanese ecologists studying the same group of feral peafowl over seven years reported that, overall,
and Biocassava Plus to meet food safety and environmental regulations. These crops will not be used by farmers
could therefore contribute up to 10%of global carbon emissions from deforestation. Although carbon reserves in other types of tropical wetland forest have been assessed,
produces about a quarter of all deforestation emissions. The extent of mangrove forests has declined by as much as 50%over the past half century because of development, over-harvesting and aquaculture,
so estimating their carbon reserves will be important for future strategies to reduce climate change. To estimate the abundance of carbon in mangroves, lead investigator J. Boone Kauffman, an ecologist at the Northern Research Station of the US Forest Service in Durham
New hampshire, and his team sampled 25 mangrove sites across a broad territory that included Micronesia, Indonesia and Bangladesh.
and understanding the significant pool of carbon in mangrove ecosystems, says Shimon Anisfeld, an expert in coastal ecology at Yale university in New haven,
Connecticut. However, the numbers still only represent rough estimates, owing to a lack of information about geographic variation in soil depth,
most robust stands around, says Thomas Smith, an ecologist at the US Geological Survey in St petersburg, Florida.
an expert in coastal ecosystems at Mcgill University in Montreal, Canada. Hopefully, it will help arguments to extend REDD+to mangroves,
Robert Jackson, an ecologist at Duke university in Durham, North carolina, agrees with Chmura, adding: Mangrove forests are important for diversity, for coastal stability and for carbon, based on this paper.
China vows to clean up rural environment: Nature Newstackling pollution in rural areas, especially pollution from agricultural sources, will be a top priority for China in the coming years, Li Ganjie,
vice-minister of environmental protection, said on 28 march at a conference in Beijing on the rural environment.
This is the first time that the protection of the rural environment has been included in the country's five-year budget plan.
This is wonderful news for the course of environmental protection in China says Zhang. China's rural areas produce more than 9 billion tonnes of waste water and 280 million tonnes of household rubbish a year.
The ministry is set to promote public awareness and participation in environmental protection in rural areas, and performance in curbing rural pollution will be one of the criteria by
reports that the central government will spend 9. 5 billion renminbi (US$1. 5 billion) over the next few years to clean up the rural environment.
Smart-REDD plan targets causes of deforestation: Nature Newsa scheme to pay people in developing countries to curb carbon emissions from deforestation is plagued by'leakage'trees that aren't cut down in one forest are just cut down in another to provide people with the resources they would have foregone.
But a study by an international team of scientists has come up with a way of dealing with leakage.
Money set aside for conservation could be used to target the underlying drivers of deforestation-such as local people's need for food
an environmental economist at Princeton university in New jersey and lead author on the study, which is published today in Nature Climate Change1.
Fisher's team performed an in depth analysis of the area around the Eastern Arc Mountains of Tanzania-a biodiversity'hot spot'-to find out how the United nations'enhanced Reducing Emissions from Deforestation
and Forest Degradation (REDD+)programme might have an impact there. REDD+aims to provide developed countries with a cheap way to offset their carbon dioxide emissions-paying developing countries not to cut down their forests
So the researchers came up with a plan to reduce deforestation and meet the needs of local people by helping them to better use the resources they already had.'
says Doug Boucher, director of climate research and analysis at the Union of Concerned Scientists in WASHINGTON DC.
and other countries will almost certainly have different drivers of deforestation that need to be met.
Nature Newsradiation released by the tsunami-struck Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant could have long-lasting consequences for the natural environment in the vicinity of the damaged Plant scientists estimate that in the first 30 days after the accident on 11 march, trees,
Their results are published this week in Environmental science & Technology. The soil samples used for the analysis came from a contaminated forest area 25-45 kilometres northwest of Fukushima.
The team then plugged those concentrations into a piece of software called ERICA (Environmental Risk from Ionising Contaminants) to calculate the radiation dose that various groups of wildlife would have received.
We need many more samples before we can try to determine the full extent of Fukushima's ecological effects.
says Nick Beresford, a radioecologist at the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology in Lancaster, UK.
this is a very useful ecological assessment. Many land species, says Hinton, may get off relatively lightly
the Fukushima accident could help scientists to gain a better understanding of the effects of nuclear radiation on wildlife and the environment.
Radioecologists regret that the few ecological studies done after the Chernobyl reactor meltdown 25 years ago missed out on many research opportunities
Amid more pressing priorities, the Japanese government is preparing an environmental monitoring programme that involves around 300 experts from across the country.
the State Council, China's cabinet, has pledged to curb environmental deterioration in the area, and to tackle the pollution of water supplies downstream in the Yangtze river.
%And in Australia, an independent climate advisory body established by the government in February has published its first report.
The 23 may study from the Climate Commission, The Critical Decade, urges immediate action to cut carbon emissions.
Deforestation surges in the Amazon Brazil's environment minister Izabella Teixeira has vowed to crack down harder on loggers clearing trees in the Amazon rainforest, after a sudden rise in deforestation.
The company's share price has dropped by more than 80%since the earthquake and tsunami on 11 march.
Gr ae'Â msv ae'Â tn spewed a plume of material some 20 kilometres into the sky,
but 墉 thanks largely to prevailing winds 墉 it is expected that there won't be such a large impact on European flights.
the laureates signed a memorandum stating that economic and social development should go hand in hand with environmental protection.
and Bob Watson, a former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. See go. nature. com/bmauut for more.
Renewables report The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has released its first major report since 2007.
says Silas Siakor, a Liberian activist and Goldman Environmental prizewinner, who has been monitoring the negotiation of Liberia's VPA process.
a London-based non-governmental organization specializing in the investigation of environmental wrongdoings. That's why these bilateral agreements are so crucial.
Climate change curbs crops: Nature Newsfarmers have produced less food during the past three decades than they would have done were climate change not happening, according to a study published today1.
Global maize (corn) production, for example, is estimated to be about 3. 8%lower than it would have been in a non-warmed world the equivalent of Mexico not contributing to the maize market.
There has been a perception that a perfect storm of conditions led to higher food prices in recent years.
However, the authors assumed that most of these factors are linked not to the weather, making it possible to extract a model of how temperature
Additional rainfall, meanwhile, is beneficial up to a point. The authors used their modelling results to estimate the effect that temperature
and rainfall trends had on each nation's food production from 1980 to 2008. They estimate that
the negative effect of climate change on plant growth has cut wheat production by 2. 5,
They could be overestimating climate's effects, because the model doesn't account for the fact that farmers might switch to different crop varieties
that the model doesn't look specifically at extreme weather events such as droughts, floods and heatwaves.
because many richer nations are in colder climates that might benefit from warming, and are probably more adaptable to changing conditions.
the relatively high production per unit area in the developed world means that developed countries are actually more susceptible to the vagaries of the weather.
The results should add impetus for developed nations to take the effects of climate change on food production seriously,
in February, the US Department of agriculture invested $60 million in three studies on the effects of climate change on crops and forests.
and animals living in the vicinity of the damaged power plants, but they also give researchers a unique opportunity to study the effects of radiation on populations that would be impossible to recreate in the lab. Tim Mousseau,
together with an international team, is studying the long-term ecological and health consequences of the 1986 accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine.
or help the birds blend in to their environment, but they have a chemical cost. Making phaeomelanin consumes large amounts of a tripeptide called glutathione (GSH) which is an antioxidant molecule that can also protect tissues from radiation damage by mopping up free radicals.
Biologist Kevin Mcgraw of Arizona State university in Tempe says that pigments are good ecological tools:
designing interdisciplinary projects to tackle societal challenges such as adapting to climate change and combating childhood obesity
the 2010 climate-change programme awarded grants to researchers studying cereal crops such as maize (corn)
'But Rebecca Mcculley, an ecologist at the University of Kentucky, sees a high volume of requests as a sign of desperation in the face of so much uncertainty about what the AFRI will fund.
Meanwhile, a changing climate in WASHINGTON DC has created new challenges for the programme. Committees in the US Congress originally approved a 20%boost in NIFA's grants budget for 2011.
hoping that a lack of rainfall will accomplish what the Yemeni government probably cannot: prevent a large-scale outbreak of the fearsome desert locust (Schistocerca gregaria.
which the locusts follow the wind and devour everything in sight. Such swarms threaten agricultural production in some 50 countries across the Middle east, northern Africa and the Indian subcontinent.
when locust swarms from the Sahel darkened the skies over Cairo and devastated crops across Africa.
Wind could still carry the locusts across the Red sea and into northern Sudan (see'Breeding grounds'),
and satellite imagery for tracking rainfall and vegetation as well as hand-held global-positioning-system devices to monitor progress in the field.
and along ephemeral streams, says Pietro Ceccato, a remote-sensing scientist at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society who works with the FAO's locust team at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty
Sponsored by the United nations Environment Programme and the World meteorological organization, the report says that black-carbon emissions from vehicles,
Climate lawsuit The US Supreme court has dismissed attempts by six states and other parties to force utility companies to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions on the grounds that the emissions are a public nuisance.
Instead, the Supreme court pointed out that the Environmental protection agency already has the powers to impose such limits, through the Clean Air Act.
and that richer households are most likely to contribute to deforestation. Income from forests has been undervalued largely, particularly in assessments of poverty and income such as the World bank's Living Standard Measurement Survey
an environmental economist at the Norwegian University of Life sciences in Aas and a lead author of the study by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) based in Bogor, Indonesia.
%One unexpected discovery was that the poorest forest-dwelling people do not cause the bulk of deforestation.
In fact, the richest 20%of households at each study site caused 30%more deforestation than the poorest 20%.
Mike Speirs, an environment and climate-change adviser to the Danish government who was present at the Royal Society meeting
and poverty-reduction initiatives, including the United nations'extended Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+)scheme, will work
or in the environment might be enhancing the spread of Shiga-toxin-producing phage. Acheson worked on this question
but it's hard to show it happens in the environment. He is convinced it does, though.
The potential for the creation of new pathogens via phage release is absolutely a factor in the broader environmental danger of overuse of antibiotics.
Once the bacteria are out in the environment say in manure they are fed on by other microbes
Between 2005 and 2010, the amount of land in the tropics designated as permanently forested
The report moves beyond timber production to discuss ways of reducing deforestation through financial mechanisms such as UN REDD programme (reducing emissions from deforestation
head of the Tropical forest and Climate Initiative at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit organization based in Cambridge,
a London-based non-governmental organization that investigates environmental wrongdoings. Whereas the report suggests that Malaysia has made progress towards sustainable management
it makes no mention of the fact that recent independent remote-sensing analysis suggests that the deforestation rate in Sarawak (Malaysia's largest state) is the worst in the world,
The parties settled for a declaration of goodwill about the biodiversity, climate, economic and social importance of their regions.
despite its lack of tangible goals, would help with cooperation between the rainforest nations during the next round of UN climate talks in Durban,
when it comes to climate negotiations, says Paul Telfer, head of the Wildlife Conservation Society's Congo programme in Brazzaville.
Deforestation in the three regions has decreased by about a quarter in the last decade, but some 5. 4 million hectares more than twice the area of Massachusetts are lost still each year,
Henri Djombo, Congo's forestry and environment minister, has emphasized the benefit of the multilateral talks
Lasse Gustavsson, head of the delegation from conservation group WWF, had called for zero net deforestation by 2020,
says Marc Ona Essangui, a 2009 Goldman environmental prize winner and the head of Brainforest, an environmental non-governmental organization based in Libreville, Gabon.
Most governmental declarations focus on money and profits, but declarations must also account for the local and indigenous communities,
and persist in the environment. EHEC outbreaks usually only last around two weeks, but this outbreak has been going on
so it is possible that it could have come from straight from the environment into humans.
or after its use in the mining and electronics industries increased its presence in the environment.
According to Wieler, the strain's resistance characteristics could point towards an environmental source, such as water or soil.
UK ecosystem services declining: Nature Newsmany UK ecosystem services, including fish catches and soil quality,
are declining or have already become degraded as a result of over exploitation, poor management and habitat change,
according to the first national assessment of the United kingdom's ecosystems, released today. Over the past 60 years, there have been declines in around 30%of ecosystem services the benefits that humanity receives from the natural environment.
Only 20%of services got better, says The UK National Ecosystem Assessment, despite environment-improving measures such as the clean air act in the 1950s.
Crop production and species diversity in woodlands were among the few services that improved. Wheat yields doubled between the 1960s and 2010
reaching around 8 tonnes per hectare, owing to the use of more productive crop varieties and fertilizers.
Continued population growth and climate change in the country will probably put more pressure on ecosystems in the future, further reducing benefits and services.
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,
and co-chair of the assessment. The water systems in general are still in bad shape. They are better than they were
As drivers of change in ecosystem services, climate change and invasive species will become more and more important over the next 50 years,
The study assesses the services provided by eight habitat types across Britain including woodlands, urban environments and farmlands by assigning them a financial value.
That value takes into account a range of non-market goods provided by ecosystems, including flood and erosion control, recreational enjoyment and spiritual inspiration,
as well as market goods, such as energy and food. In doing so, it builds on previous studies,
such as The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB), a European effort to assess the global economic benefits of biodiversity,
The UK National Ecosystem Assessment is advanced the most interdisciplinary assessment of ecosystems and services yet anywhere in the world, says Ian Bateman, an environmental economist at the University of East Anglia, UK,
and one of the study's authors. Ecosystem services are ignored typically and given a value of zero in political decision-making,
the assessment says. You could make'UK plc'much better off if you are prepared to look at these wider values,
Steve Albon, an ecologist at the James Hutton Institute in Aberdeen, UK, and co-chair of the study,
says, The assessment would make big changes to the way we manage the natural environment.
in a statement, Caroline Spelman, the UK Environment Secretary, said that the assessment has played a big part in shaping a white paper on the natural environment that is set to be published this month.
Albon says that the assessment sets the standard for environmental valuations for other nations. He adds that other European countries,
Nature Newsfor tropical ecologist Greg Asner, it's all about seeing the forest through its trees.
The system will allow Asner to build on earlier work cataloguing forest carbon stocks in support of efforts to reduce deforestation (see'Taking stock of global carbon),
biochemistry and ecology, beginning with measuring subtle differences in the way the forest canopy absorbs
but ecologists many of whom have spent decades tramping through the jungle in muddy boots are lining up to find out.
It is going to change a variety of fields of tropical ecology, says Alan Townsend, an ecologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
How much and in what ways we don't really know, but there is no doubt that we are starting to walk down a new path.
an ecologist at Stanford university in California, says that he started off with the same mindset as many of his colleagues:
which the spectral data themselves led the researchers to discover an ecological interaction, rather than simply confirming data gathered on the ground,
says Oliver Phillips, an ecologist at the University of Leeds, UK, who coordinates RAINFOR. It's very exciting
Climate change ignites wildfire fears for Yellowstone: Nature Newsclimate change could increase the number of large wildfires in Yellowstone national park, Wyoming,
The area burned is correlated strongly with low rainfall severe droughts and high temperature, says Monica Turner, a landscape ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Many studies have hinted that climate change will alter the size, number and frequency of wildfires,
but no one has known how big the changes will be until now. Turner and her colleagues developed a model to estimate how climate change might affect the frequency of fires larger than 200 hectares in and around Yellowstone national park, one of the most pristine and well-studied ecosystems in North america.
The researchers compared temperature and precipitation data between 1972 and 1999 with the frequency of large fires.
and area burned will change from now to the end of the century in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, under three different climate models.
Before 1990, the fire rotation the amount of time needed to burn an area equal to an entire landscape of interest was more than 120 years in most of the Yellowstone ecosystem.
fire rotation will fall below 20 years for all but the most southeasterly portions of the ecosystem.
Cathy Whitlock, an ecologist at Montana State university in Bozeman who studies the effects of fire on the environment,
The decision allows Scotts to bypass the years of environmental testing and consultation typically required by the regulators for GM plants,
and potatoes that were planted a few weeks after rains showered the field with radioisotopes from Fukushima.
'and are not being washed away by rain. This might prevent the radioisotopes from entering groundwater,
soil burial sites would have to be monitored to make sure contaminated soil was exposed not by weather, he says.
Without the regulations, projects can't move forward into unconfined trials where crops are released into the environment
According to the regulations it will take a minimum of three months to get the green light for environmental release after permission is sought from the authorities.
For example, when seeking permission to release a transgenic product into the environment or place it on the market
The authority must inform the public of all applications for environmental release by, for example, publishing notices in a least two widely circulated newspapers,
Permission for environmental release is granted for a period of 10 years, after which consent must be sought re.
Once a product has been released for 20 years with no reported risks to human health and the environment
Francis Nang'ayo, an ecologist and regulatory affairs manager at the African Agriculture Technology Foundation based in Nairobi,
Nature Newsa tough-minded law has boosted Brazil's environmental record in recent years by helping to drive the rate of destruction in the Amazon rainforest to historic lows.
and push deforestation rates back up again. Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (INPE) began reporting spikes in deforestation in March,
two months before the nation's House of representatives passed a bill to change the law that governs forests,
The legislation includes clauses supported by agribusiness and small landowners that scale back federal authority and grant immunity from prosecution for all deforestation before 2008.
and bulldozers, says Dan Nepstad, a US ecologist who works with the Amazon Environmental Research Institute in Bras  lia.
Deforestation causes some 15%of global greenhouse-gas emissions and 75%of Brazil's. Rousseff's predecessor, Luis In ¡
cio Lula da Silva, promised during the 2009 climate talks in Copenhagen that Brazil would cut deforestation by 80%by 2020.
she has maintained Lula's pledge and sent hundreds of law-enforcement officers into the Amazon as deforestation spiked.
when the INPE releases its preliminary analysis of the annual deforestation season that ended in July.
deforestation was actually 42%lower this June than last. Deforestation is going to increase in 2011,
but it won't be a big jump, says Carlos Souza, a remote-sensing scientist who heads Imazon's satellite analysis. Imazon says that cumulative deforestation between August 2010
and June 2011 rose by 15%compared with the same period the season before. If that number holds up in the final analysis using higher resolution satellite data
a tropical ecologist at the Heinz Center in WASHINGTON DC, says that the bill is a recipe for Amazon dieback,
a feedback loop that decreases rainfall and could convert vast swathes of rainforest into savannah.
while their neighbours cleared more land. If the law can't be enforced he adds, the alluring profits of agriculture could lead to a new wave of deforestation.
Although rural interests have dominated the debate so far, most people share the concerns of the scientific community,
an ecologist at the University of S £o Paulo in Piracicaba who is analysing the legislation for senators.
A national poll conducted in June by environmental groups found that 85%of Brazilians rate forest protection above agricultural production.
Brazilian society is kind of sick of this deforestation drama, Martinelli says.
Scientists push for agricultural monitoring: Nature Newsa global agricultural monitoring network moved a step closer to reality this week with a meeting between a small group of academics and potential patrons at Columbia University in New york city.
We want to understand ecosystems and the people who are living in them, Sachs said, warning his colleagues not to count on their governments for funding or leadership.
and various philanthropic organizations to discuss ways to track both ecological and socioeconomic trends in agricultural areas.
Sandy Andelman, an ecologist with Conservation International in Arlington Virginia, discussed her work setting up a pilot project that began two years ago in southern Tanzania.
In addition to basic environmental data about soils, nutrients and land cover, the project tracks agricultural practices.
Robert ter Kuile, a senior director for environmental sustainability issues at Pepsico, based in Purchase,
an infectious-disease ecologist at Princeton university in New jersey who commends the project's focus. To control the increasing occurrence of diseases making the jump from animals to humans,
says William Dar, director-general of the Inter  national Crops Research Institute for the Semiarid Tropics in Andhra Pradesh,
but those data can reflect temporary heat waves and dry spells rather than long-term desertification. As a first step, in 2012, nations that are party to the convention will provide data on two measurable indicators:
'The convention's secretariat now wants to broaden its scope to include humid and wet lands that are at risk of future degradation through the effects of climate change, for example.
says Uriel Safriel, a desert ecologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. This move could make the convention more directly relevant to rich nations.
akin to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which advises the convention's sister body on climate change.
The panel would review the latest scientific data on the extent of land degradation, propose and assess efforts to combat it,
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011