which seems to prefer tropical and subtropical environments, has turned up on a wide variety of plant species,
It's just a really common fungus in the environment that mostly lives on dead and dying plant tissue,
or it may be spread northward by winds. The spores have based a static electricity ejection system designed to launch them into the air with ease.
an environment where the immune system has a very difficult time eliminating or even just controlling infection.
Hughes and his colleagues wrote in a 2011 BMC Ecology paper describing some of the latest findings.
(which provide energy and signals), according to the BMC Ecology research. Perhaps counterintuitively, when the infected ant bites onto the leaf vein in it's so-called death grip this atrophy causes it to have lockjaw,
Hughes and his colleagues noted in their BMC Ecology paper. The doomed ants do not wander too far afield, often ending up within meters of their familiar territory.
During that time period the region of Germany would have been similar in climate to the areas of Thailand where contemporary zombie-ant fungus has been documented.
It's really a little ecosystem in its own right. The zombie-ant fungus's doom, of course, is little consolation for the infected ant.
UK environment secretary Owen Paterson said at a press briefing in London this morning. Ash is the third most common tree in the United kingdom,
but Ian Boyd, chief scientific adviser for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural affairs (Defra) Â says that it is more likely that the spores arrived naturally.
the spores were blown probably on the wind from continental Europe, where the fungus has ravaged ash trees from Poland to France for more than a decade.
"We are going to have to re-prioritize the Department for Environment, Food and Rural affairs. We need to treat plant diseases as seriously as we do said animal diseases,
and a bit of a red herring, says Oliver Phillips, a tropical ecologist at the University of Leeds, UK.
which used satellite measurements to estimate forest greenness using reflected solar radiation is that the data can be muddied by clouds and atmospheric aerosols.
which are unaffected by clouds, from a NASA Â probe. When it passed over lush canopy,
Bare branches, thinned leaves and missing trees showed more roughness. The researchers found that more than 70 million hectares of rainforest in the western Amazon an area nearly twice the size of California were hit by the drought.
says Greg Asner, an environmental scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California.
It could change the drought outlook in the next report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
The most recent report, released in 2007 and based on climate-modelling experiments done before the droughts,
an elephant specialist at the environmental group WWF, seems to be a growing demand for ivory in Asia.
The trial s legitimacy was questioned in August by the environmental group Greenpeace. A three-month investigation, led by the Chinese Center for disease control
an ecologist who studies the environmental safety of genetically modified crops at Fudan University in Shanghai. Critics note that discrepancies remain over the full details of the trial.
7 december Climate negotiators end a fortnight of debate at the United nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Doha. go. nature. com/wnhovv12 December British scientists start 100
scientists fire lasers into the sky to measure the daily rise and fall of a dome of pollution that caps the valley.
and, ultimately, national climate initiatives. Early results presented this week at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San francisco, California,
when mandatory climate regulations seemed likely for many countries; that expectation has faded since, but scientific interest in monitoring and verification has increased only.
or identify neighbourhoods that would benefit from traffic initiatives or projects to make existing buildings more energy efficient."
says Romel Pascual, Los angeles deputy mayor for the environment. NIST has invested about $1. 1 Â million in the Los angeles initiative in the hope of advancing the science and making it more applicable to other cities.
which the team hopes will provide clues to the kind of life that exists in such extreme environments.
says a report from CE Delft, a Dutch environmental consultancy group. The European commission had hoped to bring intercontinental flights into its 30-nation emissions-trading scheme,
and Ecosystem Services set up in April 2012 to assess the state of the planet s ecosystems has selected a group of 25 Â international scientists
and ecology experts to safeguard the scientific quality and independence of its work. The appointments were made at a meeting ending on 27 january.
says John Vandermeer, an ecologist at the University of Michigan in Ann arbor, who has received"reports of devastation in Nicaragua, El salvador and Mexico.
says that the wet weather in some areas of Ceylon was ideal for the spread of the fungus,
The introduction of resistant strains, together with improved weather monitoring to help predict rust outbreaks,
Obama rekindles climate hopesthroughout his reelection campaign, US President Barack Obama rarely said the words climate change.
But in his second inaugural address, on 21 Â January, Obama renewed a commitment to address global warming,
The 2010 demise of a climate bill that would have enacted a cap -and-trade system to limit greenhouse-gas emissions remains one of the key failures of Obama s first term.
once Obama has replaced the retiring heads of three agencies key to the climate agenda (see Climate team change).
Turnover at the topeven as US President Barack Obama vows action against climate change, he is expected to lose the leaders of three agencies with important stakes in environment issues.
Reicher, an attorney by training, previously headed Google s $1-billion initiative for investing in energy and climate, where he guided investments into solar technologies and electric transport.
Lisa Jackson On entering office in 2009, Jackson (pictured) laid the groundwork for climate regulations by formally declaring carbon dioxide a dangerous pollutant.
but pulled Washington out of the Western Climate Initiative, a regional emissions-trading programme led by California.
Perciasepe, currently deputy administrator at the environment agency, developed a watershed-protection programme while previously at the agency under Bill clinton.
and overhauled the way the agency disseminated environmental data. She encountered criticism for the handling of findings related to the Deepwater horizon oil spill,
and she was unable to sell the idea of a federal agency for climate services.
Her successor will face questions about catch limits in ocean fisheries, and will need to resolve cost overruns
and delays that have plagued weather-and climate-satellite programmes. Candidate: Donald Boesch A biological oceanographer, Boesch is currently president of the Center for Environmental science at the University of Maryland in Cambridge,
where he studies ecosystem management and climate change. He was a member of the White house commission that investigated the 2010 Deepwater horizon oil spill.
As proof of what is possible, Obama can point to a welcome, if unexpected, reduction in US greenhouse-gas emissions during his first term.
The decline is in part a result of the economic slowdown and a shift in electricity production from coal to natural gas,
and the introduction by more than half of the states of significant energy and climate initiatives that could deliver further reductions  perhaps even the 17%cut by 2020 that Obama promised at the United nations climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009.
They"should give Americans confidence that climate policies can be effective, says Paul Bledsoe, an environmental consultant in WASHINGTON DC and A white house climate-change official under former president Bill clinton.
As a next step, Obama s administration is expected to impose two greenhouse-gas regulations targeted at power plants
The first, proposed last year by the Environmental protection agency but not yet finalized, would limit emissions from new plants,
Armond Cohen, executive director of the Clean Air Task force in Boston, Massachusetts, argues that Obama could attract conservative support for a strategic research programme focused on large-scale energy technologies such as carbon capture and storage
fuelling concerns over the future of glaciers that hold enough water to raise global sea levels by around 7 Â metres.
But it may be a good model of the man-made climate change expected over the coming centuries."
"We are in a similar climate regime as the world was in the early Eemian,
and it does have all the information we needed to reliably reconstruct the Eemian climate and ice-sheet history.
The results confirm the warmth of the Eemian climate: ratios of oxygen and nitrogen isotopes in the core show that some 6, 000 Â years after the onset of the Eemian,
"The good news is that Greenland is not as sensitive to climate warming as we thought,
and glaciers in western Antarctica have retreated at a worrying rate in the past few decades5. Furthermore, Eemian sea-level rise seems to have proceeded in drastic jumps,
In the United kingdom, for example, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural affairs (Defra) has commissioned field studies on the impact of the insecticides on bees.
The deal offered an extra year for electricity producers to claim 10 years of tax credits for wind, geothermal and biomass projects.
Switzerland, reached a US$1. 4-billion settlement with the US Department of justice on 3 Â January for charges related to the 2010 Deepwater horizon disaster, in
to support environmental restoration and protection and health research in the region. Source: MUNICH REAROUND 9, 500 people lost their lives last year in natural disasters less than one-tenth of the ten-year average.
Had it not been for Hurricane Sandy, material losses from storms, floods, droughts and earthquakes would also have been exceptionally low.
and moths, says Robert Raguso, a chemical ecologist also at Cornell. We don t know if they can perceive charge differentials,
a study shows, adding to concerns about the country s deteriorating environment.""Rapid economic growth in China has driven high levels of nitrogen emissions in the past few decades,
and then washed to Earth by rain and snow. The process, known as nitrogen deposition, can do great damage to ecosystems,
causing soil acidification, fertilizing harmful algal blooms and threatening biodiversity, says Zhang. But until his study"
The researchers went on to assess how this had affected ecosystems. They found that the leaves of a range of herbaceous
says Mark Sutton, an environmental scientist at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Edinburgh, UK."
Globally each year, around 140 million tonnes of nitrogen is lost to the environment as ammonia, nitrogen oxides and other compounds.
This is exacerbating climate change and having a whole range of effects on the environment and public health,
says Sutton. According to a report commissioned by the United nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and launched on 18 february by the Global Partnership on Nutrient Management and International Nitrogen Initiative, nitrogen pollution causes US$200-US$2, 000
billion of damage around the world each year3.""It s time to curb global nitrogen pollution, says Sutton,
"that technology would have alleviated a lot of environmental concerns, says Holman. Approaches dependent on switching will take considerable research, however;
Alert over South korea toxic leaksby Mid-december, the chill winter winds had stripped South korea s trees bare.
According to the Ministry of Environment, 26 Â businesses each handled around 10 Â tonnes of HF in 2001;
an occupational and environmental physician at Soon Chun Hyang University Hospital in Gumi, is leading a follow-up study of those exposed to the gas."
and South korea s government has promised to establish a centre that will work with local branches of the environment ministry to oversee the use of dangerous chemicals.
twigs and branches, says Bjã rn Lindahl, a fungal ecologist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala.
and quite a surprise, says Sandra Holden, an ecosystems ecologist at the University of California, Irvine.
It is not clear how the results might affect estimates of how carbon sequestration in a warming climate
a forest ecologist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences who wasn involved t in the study.
a warmer climate might lead to enhanced growth of the boreal forest s trees and shrubs,
As the extinction rate swells thanks to habitat loss, over-hunting and human-induced climate change,
and others, ranging from synthetic biologist George Church of Harvard Medical school to environmental gadfly Steward Brand of the Long Now Foundation
which once was so abundant it darkened the skies of eastern North america. A similar bid by scientists in South korea to revive the woolly mammoth an even more scientifically challenging feat
There is also the mammoth challenge of restoring the world or at least the ecosystems that the elephant relatives inhabited, among other hurdles.
Tropical forests unexpectedly resilient to climate changetropical forests are unlikely to die off as a result of the predicted rise in atmospheric greenhouse gases this century,
The analysis refutes previous work that predicted the catastrophic loss of the Amazon rainforest as one of the more startling potential outcomes of climate change.
They compared the results from 22 different global climate models teamed with various models of land-surface processes.
says lead author Chris Huntingford, a climate modeller at the UK s Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Wallingford.
For one, it remains difficult to predict how climate will change regionally. Moreover, each global climate model represents climate somewhat differently.
The single simulation that predicted biomass loss for the Amazonian and Central american rainforests in the current study used a model called Hadcm3
That same model produced the earlier prediction that climate change would lead to massive forest die off in the Amazon2.
Climate scientist Peter Cox at the University of Exeter, UK, was one of the authors on the earlier study
He explains that, unlike other climate models, Hadcm3 predicts extreme drying over the Amazon basin in the future,
says forest ecologist Daniel Nepstad, who directs the Amazon Environmental Research Institute in San francisco, "and the emerging view is that there is less sensitivity in tropical forests for climate-driven dieback.
But Cox points out that much uncertainty still exists in how forests will respond to changes in climate.
In another paper3, some of the same authors have shown that warming alone could have a massive impact on tropical forests;
for every 1 °C rise in temperature, around 50 billion tonnes of carbon would be released from the tropics.
The fertilizing effect of carbon dioxide, which boosts plant growth, counteracts the release completely if it is as large as suggested by the models used in the new study.
such as the United nations'REDD programme on reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. But warns Nepstad,
ESA s climate-eye dilemmasnow, trees or the air we breathe? Europe s environmental research community is facing the difficult task of settling
which of the three should be the priority for Europe s next Earth-observing satellite.
Around 250 Earth scientists and climate researchers will meet in Graz, Austria, this week to weigh up the scientific benefits of projects proposed for the roughly  300-million (US$390-million) seventh Earth Explorer mission of the European space agency (ESA).
Coreh2o, also a radar mission, would measure snow cover and snow-melt rates in cold regions around the world.
a region particularly important for climate. No satellites currently in orbit can match the sensitivity of the proposed missions.
And climate scientists have been warning of an impending data crisis after the 2010 retirement of NASA s ICESAT mission,
says Thomas Stocker, a climate researcher at the University of Bern, and a co-chair of a working group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."
"Findings such as those concerning ice-sheet changes in Greenland and Antarctica would have been impossible without space observations,
and Cryosat-2 is monitoring variations in sea-ice thickness and changes in the mass of large ice sheets and glaciers.
global wind profiles; and clouds, aerosols and radiation. The seventh Earth Explorer mission will provide scientists with yet another set of global data that are hard to come by on the ground.
The extent of seasonal snow cover for instance, is an important feedback in climate change because snow reflects sunlight, cooling Earth s surface,
and affects the supply of fresh water.""They will want to know what the future might hold for them.
That s why we need these data.""More than 1 billion people rely on glaciers and seasonal snow packs for their water supply,
says Helmut Rott, a meteorologist at the University of Innsbruck in Austria and lead scientist on the Coreh2o project."
"They will want to know what the future might hold for them. That s why we need these data.
To improve regional climate predictions, she says, "we need to better understand how the atmospheric circulation responds to rising greenhouse-gas concentrations.
-and climate-observation plans, there is little chance of that. Spain, France and Italy last year reduced their contributions to ESA,
and an expert in the epidemiology and ecology of avian flu viruses at the Free University of Brussels, says that
Jacob explained how feedback from the cell s environment changes the activity of the regulatory proteins.
and stabilize the climate, says a report from the International Energy Agency in Paris. In 2012,
global markets in solar photovoltaic technology and wind energy grew by 42%and 19%,respectively,
a salmon breeding and biotechnology company on the Queen Charlotte Islands in Canada, is disputing the legality of a search of its offices by the government agency Environment Canada last month.
Conducted by an agency within the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural affairs (DEFRA), it exposed 20 Â bumblebee colonies at three sites to crops grown from untreated,
what impact they might be having in the wider environment
Experiment aims to steep rainforest in carbon dioxideone of the wild cards in climate change is the fate of the Amazon rainforest.
Will it shrivel as the region dries in a warming climate? Or will it grow even faster as the added carbon dioxide in the atmosphere spurs photosynthesis
and allows plants to use water more efficiently? A dying rainforest could release gigatonnes of carbon into  the atmosphere, accelerating warming;
sucking up carbon and putting the brakes on climate change. Climate modellers trying to build carbon fertilization into their forecasts have had  precious few data to go on."
"The number one question is, how will tropical forests react if we put more CO2 into the atmosphere?
a climate scientist who heads research programmes at the Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation in Brasilia."
The experiment, the first of its kind in the tropics, would be modelled on free-air CO2 enrichment (FACE) experiments conducted over the past couple of decades in the young and biologically simpler temperate forests of the Northern hemisphere.
although other climate modellers disagreed. Since then, the Hadley team has lowered its estimates of the likelihood of drying and the resulting forest dieback2.
But the Hadley Centre s simulations, like all climate models, assume a substantial CO2-fertilization effect in the tropics.
The net result is that, at least in climate models, the extent of CO2 fertilization largely determines the Amazon s resilience to global warming."
Because of the sheer volume of carbon cycling through the tropics, the fertilization effect has a massive impact on the amount of carbon that forests take up globally and on how much remains in the atmosphere.
Using the Hadley Centre climate model, UK modellers showed last year3that atmospheric CO2 Â levels in 2100 depended largely on the magnitude of the fertilization effect,
In theory, the fertilization effect should be stronger in the tropics, where warmer temperatures work in concert with higher CO2 levels to increase the rate of photosynthesis
Nitrogen is also more plentiful in the tropics, although other nutrients, such as phosphorus, could be limiting factors.
The idea of conducting a FACE experiment in the tropics has been around for years, but proposals have tended to fizzle out amid concerns about the feasibility of working in a mature tropical forest.
says Evan Delucia, an ecologist at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and one of the principal investigators in a FACE experiment on young pines in South carolina.
says Jeff Chambers, Â an ecologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California. After two days of discussion, the group was able to converge on a basic design (see Gas ring.
Sensors would monitor background CO2 levels and winds, and CO2 would be injected from the towers as needed,
a pot of money that Brazil uses to combat deforestation and promote sustainable development. The tentative goal is to begin fieldwork next year
says Marius Gilbert, an expert in the epidemiology and ecology of avian flu viruses at the Universitã libre de Bruxelles in Belgium.
Organic pollutants poison the roof of the worldtoxic chemicals are accumulating in the ecosystems of The himalayas and the Tibetan plateau,
says Surendra Singh, an ecologist at the Forest Research Institute in Dehradun.""It s the first study to quantify the accumulation of persistent organic pollutants in ecosystems in the region.
Persistent organic pollutants (POPS) are based carbon compounds that are resistant to break-down. Some originate from the burning of fuel or the processing of electronic waste,
hitch a ride on winds, and then condense in cold regions, says Xu Baiqing, an environmental scientist at the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research in Beijing.
In 2008, Xu and his colleagues first reported the presence of DDT, hexachlorocyclohexanes (HCHS), and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHS) in the East Rongbuk Glacier near Mount Everest1."
"Their levels correlate well with human use of those chemicals, says Wang Xiaoping, an environment scientist at the ITP who was lead author of that study.
For instance, the amount of DDT fell sharply during the 1970s, when many European countries started to ban its use,
At the fourth Third Pole Environment Workshop, held on 1-3 april in Dehradun, India, Xu reported that ice cores from across The himalayas
They found that POPS in the western Tibetan plateau were transported by the westerly winds from Europe and Africa,
the researchers also detected large amounts of POPS in various components of the ecosystems such as soil, grass trees and fish in The himalayas and in the Tibetan plateau, especially at the highest elevations."
"There is very little specific information on the source of this particular virus strain, its ecology or reservoir,
Wild weather can send greenhouse gases spirallingclimate change has a disconcerting tendency to amplify itself through feedback effects.
And, as researchers discussed at a meeting last week in Seefeld, Austria, climate extremes heatwaves,
droughts and storms can hamper plant growth, weakening a major buffer against the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere."
"Heatwaves and droughts will very likely become more frequent in a warmer climate, and ecosystems will somehow respond,
says Philippe Ciais, a carbon-cycle researcher at the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental sciences in Gif-sur-Yvette, France."
"More storms will add an extra dimension to the problem. The meeting was organized by the CARBO-Extreme project, a  3. 3-million (US$4. 5-million) collaboration of 27 groups from 12  countries, funded by the European union.
Attendees showed off an array of tools for uncovering how extreme events affect terrestrial carbon cycles,
is to predict how the frequency of climate extremes will change, and to model the intricate physiological responses some
of which are understood poorly of plants and ecosystems. Land plants create a huge carbon sink as they suck CO2 out of the air to build leaves
And events such as droughts, wildfires and storms are likely to"cause a pronounced decline in the sink,
Climate anomalies have had already a detectable impact. Satellite observations and data from CO2 measurement towers suggest that extreme events reduce plant productivity by an average of 4%in southern Europe and 1%in Northern europe
Reindert Haarsma, a climatologist at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute in De Bilt, forecasts a surge in hurricane-strength storms such as 1999 s Lothar
storms similar to Lothar and another that caused huge damage in France in 2009 will become 25 Â times more common in Europe2.
"In some ecosystems, small disturbances can have a large impact, he adds.""In others, even significant anomalies seem to cause only little harm.
CARBO-Extreme teams have conducted field experiments that simulated drought in different climates and vegetation types, from Atlantic pine forests to alpine meadows.
an ecologist at the University of Innsbruck in Austria who oversees a grassland experiment. He simulated a series of droughts
Shanghai launched its own air-pollution plan on 1 Â April, providing emergency measures for when air quality declines below a set target.
Climate change More than 80%of Americans believe that the planet is warming and think that coastal communities should be prepared better for rising seas and stronger storms,
a survey published on 28 march has found. However, the poll, commissioned by scientists at Stanford university in California, also found that the US public does not want the government to pay for climate-change adaptation.
Most of the 1, 174 people surveyed said that those living in at-risk areas should bear the costs of making their communities more resilient.
Aurora Photos/Alamyus waterways in bad shape More than half of US rivers and streams are in a poor environmental condition,
according to a survey published by the Environmental protection agency on 26 Â March. The data from 2008-09 the most recent available show that 28%of the nation s waterways have excessive levels of nitrogen
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,
The US National Snow and Ice Data center in Boulder, Colorado, said that the data indicate"a more pronounced seasonal cycle
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