"They are one of the big ecological mysteries out there, says Walt Koenig, a behavioural ecologist at the Cornell University Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca,
New york. They are also an entomological rarity. Of the thousands of cicada species known around the world, only the seven Magicicada species,
With the warm weather this month, the nymphs have been crawling out of the ground before moulting for one last time and taking wing.
but Koenig notes that one factor could be the flood of dead cicadas, whose bodies are 10%nitrogen.
four years before the city was inundated with the expected 17-year cicadas of Brood X. The arrival of cicadas in the same place this year might mean that an environmental change such as global warming is causing them to emerge early,
and natural resources and the environment. Laura Leon/Polaris/eyevineendangered ecosystems get listed The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) on 8 may updated the criteria for its Red List of Ecosystems (D. Â A. Â Keith et
 al. PLOS ONE 8, e62111; 2013). ) Based on its successful Red List of Threatened Species,
the new list ranks ecosystems using factors such as rate of shrinkage, disruption to wildlife and risk of ecosystem collapse.
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,
Stalled nominee Eight Republican senators boycotted a 9 Â May vote on the nomination of Gina Mccarthy as administrator of the US Environmental protection agency (EPA
Mccarthy would oversee US efforts to implement regulations targeting global warming and other environmental issues.
The senators, from the Committee on Environment and Public works, suggest that they will vote once the EPA has responded to their questions over the proposed regulations.
But Dominique Berteaux, an Arctic ecologist at the University of Quebec in Rimouski, Canada, cautions that the team has not definitively proved a link between mercury contamination
Its data will be used to aid distribution of disaster relief and for environmental monitoring, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported.
On 26 april, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) closed a public consultation on its finding that the engineered fish pose no significant environmental concern.
the fish pose no significant environmental threat to the United states when grown in landlocked tanks,
Aquabounty completes its FDA submission. 2010 â The FDA says that GM salmon is safe to eat. 2012 The FDA completes its draft environmental assessment in May,
but does not release it to the public until December. 2013 The public-comment period for the draft environmental assessment is extended by two months
Environmental groups are preparing to take the battle to consumers by fighting the sale of the fish in grocery stores across the country.
and gauge the environmental risk of the sterile fish escaping its tanks and successfully mating with wild salmon.
the approval process would require only an environmental evaluation, says Jaffe. Yet even with regulatory approval, the battle over Aquabounty s salmon will be far from over.
but the study by Mikhail Beketov, an aquatic ecologist at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig, Germany,
Emma Rosi-Marshall, an aquatic ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook
We are at a crisis point, with species loss on a global scale, especially in freshwater ecosystems.
and not apply to the entire environment. The second paper from biologist Dave Goulson of the University of Sussex, UK, reviews the environmental risk posed by neonicotinoid insecticides2.
Its publication on 14 june in The Journal of Applied Ecology comes soon after the European commission's April announcement of a two-year ban on three commonly used neonicotinoids over concerns that they are killing bees.
Goulson's work includes data from agrichemical companies and suggests that neonicotinoids accumulate in soil at levels that can kill soil invertebrates such as Eisenia foetida, a type of earthworm.
Both papers demonstrate the importance of conducting ecosystem assessments after pesticide use, says ecotoxicologist Ken Drouillard of the University of Windsor in Ontario,
Unfortunately during a global economic crisis, budget cuts come at the cost of ecosystem health monitoring.
Skeletons show rickets struck the Medici familyas the wealthy rulers of Tuscany and patrons of Leonardo Da vinci and Galileo,
As protesters descended on the nation s capital last week, the chief scientific adviser of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural affairs (Defra),
Years in production, the document shows that the country has made dramatic progress in reducing deforestation,
The analysis reports a 76%drop in cumulative emissions from deforestation between 2005 and 2010, with decreases not only in the Amazon but also in the surrounding savannahs.
a climate scientist who heads research programmes at the Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation in Brasilia.
The rate of deforestation in Brazil has continued to fall since 2010, and the country is now just shy of meeting its international commitment to reduce Amazon deforestation by 80%from 1990 levels by 2020.
Deforestation accounted for just 22%of Brazil s total emissions in 2010 a far cry from the time when tree felling drove roughly two-thirds of the country s greenhouse gas output.
But rising emissions from agriculture and industry industry threaten to offset some of the gains from forest protection.
Brazil is still on track to meet climate goals announced by President Luiz In ¡
cio Lula da Silva at the United nations climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009. Lula committed Brazil to reducing its greenhouse-gas emissions by 36-39%by 2020,
Despite its incredible success in reducing deforestation, the country is yet to get serious about its overall climate targets,
The finding helps to explain prior reports that urban songbirds adopt more nocturnal lifestyles2-4 data that prompted Davide Dominoni, an ecologist at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Radolfzell, Germany,
"It could make them better at coping with city environments that are not as predictable as the wilderness,
"I d be interested really in seeing an experiment where urban birds are transplanted to a rural environment,
Planks of tropical ip wood that were torn asunder by last year s Hurricane Sandy lie in grey stacks behind him,
But some researchers fear that a knee-jerk shift away from tropical timber could backfire on the environment."
"There s a real danger of pushing people towards things with higher environmental impacts. The scant data available suggest that plastic wood typically a composite of waste wood and plastic exacts a higher climate-change cost than natural wood,
which has the benefit of pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere as it grows. One 2011 study, funded by the timber industry but independently peer-reviewed,
a nonprofit environmental consultancy based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The first generation of plastic timber had problems with sagging and rot;
And without solid data on the lifetimes of different types of plastic timber, it is difficult to assess their environmental impacts,
but suggests that the industry has an outsize environmental impact. According to the International Tropical Timber Organization, tropical countries supply about 10%of the world s industrial wood, much of it from plantations.
As such, logging often serves as a precursor to large-scale deforestation. The simple solution is to avoid tropical wood,
EPA delay ends The US Senate voted on 18 Â July, after a 133-day delay,
to confirm Gina Mccarthy as administrator of the Environmental protection agency (EPA). The wait is faced the longest by any chief in the EPA s 43-year history (see Nature 497,418-419;
2013). ) Senate Republicans had used procedural tactics to delay formal votes on Mccarthy and on several other nominees proposed by President Barack Obama s administration to head federal agencies.
At the EPA, Mccarthy will oversee regulations to limit greenhouse-gas emissions and to improve water and air quality.
making it ideal for erosion control and land reclamation. Since then the weed has spread rapidly across the country s coastal regions,
says Donald Strong, an ecologist at the University of California, Davis."It s a piece of ecological engineering that has gone out of control.
The threat of cordgrass is especially acute on Chongming Island, 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.
Millions of migratory birds overwinter here, and it is a precious spawning and feeding ground for more than 60 Â fish species including the critically endangered Chinese sturgeon (Acipenser sinensis).
ecologist Li Bo at Fudan University and his colleagues found that if the plants are cut to the ground
says Wang Tianhou, a wetlands ecologist at East China Normal University in Shanghai.""It s unrealistic to conserve habitats without any compromise.
given the current political climate. Although he expects that Europe will eventually come round politically, for now,
Weeds warrant urgent conservationfaced with climate change, plant breeders are increasingly turning to the genomes of the wild, weedy relatives of crops for traits such as drought tolerance and disease resistance.
and elevated temperatures expected in the future as a result of climate change. Crop wild relatives are one of the most valuable genetic resources to improve crops,
is bridging the divide that exists between environmental and agricultural interests.""The problem is that the conservation of crop wild relatives in the wild is under the jurisdiction of the environmental people,
but is of much more interest to the agricultural people yet the two sectors seldom talk to each other,
Losing a single pollinator species harms plantsremoving even a single bee species from an ecosystem has serious effects on plant reproduction,
Wielding his butterfly net, ecologist Berry Brosi of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, set out to test these models in the field with his colleague Heather Briggs from the University of California,
says ecologist Jane Memmott of the University of Bristol, UK. Memmott was a co-author of the simulation studies that the latest work contradicts,
But Memmott also notes that the latest study did not look at a whole ecosystem, and so should not serve as a basis for sweeping statements.
12 18 july 2013biofuels brake Biofuels made from food crops are on course to be curbed in Europe after an 11 Â July vote by the environment committee in the European parliament.
DLRGIANT iceberg cut adrift Antarctica s Pine Island Glacier shed a massive iceberg last week (to the left of the crack),
Researchers hope that careful charting of the latest event will improve their understanding of how climate change may affect ice loss by calving.
and Chemistry of the Earth s Interior. go. nature. com/9cbgun  21-25 july Current research in viral ecology,
USDA, MONSANTOMONSANTO had shipped MON71800 seed to breeders around the country for crossing with commercial varieties optimized for each region s climate, day length and disease profile.
we should just assume that they are going to stay in the environment
Rinderpest research restartsresearch is set to resume on the rinderpest virus, the cause of a deadly cattle disease that was declared eradicated in 2011
as Tim Searchinger, who studies environmental economics at Princeton university in New jersey, noted in an influential 2008 article (T.  Searchinger et  al.
In the United states, the Environmental protection agency did take the land-use effect into account in 2010, when it set standards for which fuels count as renewable.
The environment committee will vote on its preferred policy on 10 july: its lead negotiator on this issue, Corinne Lepage, agrees with the Joint Research Centre
based largely on what the environment and energy committees recommend. Then Europe s energy ministers will have to reach a compromise on the legislation.
It would take a concerted effort the researchers calculated that farmers would need to reduce their pumping of the aquifer by roughly 80 percent to withdraw water at the rate that could be replenished naturally by rainfall.
however, it left the ground vulnerable to the region s severe winds. In the 1930s long-term drought led to massive dust storms that rendered the Plains barren.
In the late 1950s with the advent of groundwater pumping and sprinkler irrigation, farmers returned to the land to grow corn
says Samuel Sandoval Solis, an assistant professor and specialist in environmental and water resources at the University of California,
"In general they are informed more about the environment, and that s good. People are starting to think ahead and act proactively.
This is a very different influenza ecosystem from other countries says Guan. Guan's team sampled wild birds and poultry markets around Shanghai in April,
says Camille Lebarbenchon, a viral ecologist at the University of Reunion Island in St Denis, France,
  But now a study led by Lu Baorong, an ecologist at Fudan University in Shanghai, challenges that view:
"This is one of the most clear examples of extremely plausible damaging effects of GM CROPS on the environment.
Climate change threatens crunchy, tart applesthose who find satisfaction in the crunch of a hard apple have reason to be worried about climate change:
a 40-year study of Japanese apple orchards has found that global warming is producing softer but sweeter apples.
joins a growing body of research that describes how changes in climate are affecting iconic foods.
"Climate changes are impacting the everyday lives of real people, says Christopher Field, an ecologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California,
who was not involved with the work.""It is not just an abstraction. Previous work had shown that rising temperatures could make apple trees flower earlier.
Gregory Jones of Southern Oregon University in Ashland, who studies the effects of climate change on wine grapes,
The findings will help to inform efforts to breed new varieties of fruit crops that can cope better with the changing climate,
and benefits of easing climate change, adds Field:""If climate change is causing this damage,
we need to put that into our equation about how willing we are to take steps to minimize that damage
Stormy Atlantic The current Atlantic hurricane season, which began on 1 Â June, could be said unusually active
There have been named four storms so far this year. The agency calculates a 70%chance that a total of 13-19 Â named storms,
including 3-5 Â major hurricanes, will develop before the Atlantic season ends on 30 Â November.
These projections would exceed the 30-year seasonal average of 12 named storms including 3 major hurricanes.
GM rice row Protesters uprooted a field of genetically modified (GM) golden rice at a Philippines Department of agriculture compound in Camarines Sur on 8 Â August,
citing concerns over future marketing and potential health effects. The crop is engineered to contain à Â-carotene
when climate change threatens their ability to survive in their natural habitats is steeped in controversy.
an ecologist at the Missouri Botanical garden in St louis. Smith presented a preliminary version of the plan this week at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Minneapolis, Minnesota,
moving between gardens following a dispersal path that would be considered an evolutionarily realistic response to climate change.
although not in a coordinated fashion that takes climate change into consideration. Managers at the gardens have the horticultural expertise to provide ongoing screening for invasiveness,
Smith has attempted also to understand how botanical gardens around the world will shift into different climate zones as the planet warms,
His calculations, based on the worst-case scenario for warming produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, show that the climate regime for the Chicago Botanic Garden in Illinois in 2075 will resemble today s conditions at the Missouri Botanical garden.
The number of gardens that can accommodate relocating species will decrease as warming progress and cold climates shift poleward."
Ecosystem productivity is rising at high latitudes, with a roughly 50%increase in the amount of carbon cycling through northern landscapes since the 1950s,
in spite of climate change, says Philippe Ciais, a carbon-cycle researcher at the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental sciences in Gif-sur-Yvette, France,
while confirming that ecosystem productivity has continued to rise in the north. The researchers used models to analyse the carbon cycle and atmospheric circulation,
But the current work suggests that the change in the seasonal CO2 signal is too big to be explained by ecosystem shifts that far north.
including the expansion of forests in a warmer climate and a shift towards younger, faster-growing trees in areas where old-growth forests have died off."
Now it is up to climate scientists to explain the data
If hunger doesn't kill you, it doesn't make you strongerpeople who were undernourished during infancy
"A lot of ecological studies in animals have shown that a bad start in life, such as low food or high population density around the time that you re developing, is essentially bad for your fitness,
says Adam Hayward, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Sheffield, UK, and first author of the study."
and were heavily dependent on rye and barley crops in an unfavourable growing climate. The researchers analysed data on crop yields over a 50-year period that culminated in a severe famine in the 1860s
when ice cover fell to 5. 1 Â million square kilometres, the US National Snow and Ice Data center in Boulder,
Climate closures Australia s new government is shutting the Climate Commission, an independent agency set up in 2011 to provide information on climate change.
But its chair Tim Flannery says the organization will continue, as the Climate Council, with private funding.
The government also aims to close the Climate Change Authority which advises on carbon pricing and emissions cuts,
and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, a green bank that was due to invest Aus$10 Â billion (US$9. 4 Â billion) over the next five years in renewable-energy projects.
US power plants Regulations proposed on 20 Â September by the US Environmental protection agency would limit carbon dioxide emissions for future fossil-fuel power plants in the United states. To meet the emissions limits,
27 september In Stockholm, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change releases a summary of its fifth assessment of the basic scientific evidence for climate change.
Grass gets greenerindustrial power plants take most of the flack for climate change. But nature s plants are not blameless:
Agriculture s climate problem is a nitrogen-fertilizer problem. Fertilizer contains ammonium (NH4+;+when it is laid first down,
wreaking environmental havoc. They convert ammonium to nitrate (NO3 Ë), which washes into ponds and causes ecologically harmful algae blooms.
nitrous oxide emissions will be 50%higher in 2020 than in 1990, according to the US Environmental protection agency.""The nitrogen dilemma is a huge issue,
and co-author of the chapter about agriculture in a 2007 report on climate mitigation by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."
are much worse climate offenders. To tackle that problem, CIAT geneticists are trying to isolate the brachialactone genes,
for example, they can avoid lots of nitrogen being washed away when snow melts. Tilling less and periodically planting crop fields with nitrogen-fixing legumes can also help to keep nitrogen in the soil."
says Joan Casey, an environmental-health scientist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public health in Baltimore, Maryland,
published in Ecology Letters1, not only offer hope to farmers battling the beetle, but also provide an incentive to protect wildlife habitat:
says Matthew Johnson, a conservation ecologist at Humboldt State university in Arcata, California. He and his colleagues have previously found that birds help to protect the famous Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee crop from the borer beetle2,
as San francisco s characteristic fog burned off, about 40 protesters stood in front of the UCSF campus
That these reasons hold little water with the protesters highlights an emerging fissure among environmentalists and ecologists.
For some, a hardline devotion to preserving native ecosystems is giving way to a more postmodern idea of
says Richard Hobbs, an ecologist at the University of Western australia in Crawley.""What some people see as a weed-filled blot on the landscape,
People are increasingly moving away from the belief that a native ecosystem is always best.
That idea grates with many restoration ecologists, says Hobbs. Yet studies increasingly suggest that altered ecosystems need not be bad for biodiversity or ecosystem function.
with altered ecosystems such as Mount Sutro s providing a case in point. In the late 1880s, Adolph Sutro, a mayor of San francisco, planted the treeless hill with imported blue gum eucalyptus,
an ecologist at Stanford university in California who has been publicly critical of UCSF s management plans,
says that Mount Sutro has given long since way to a completely new ecosystem.""Restoring it to an original state would be borderline impossible,
Resistance to such a heretical idea runs deep among ecologists, but growing numbers are embracing altered ecosystems in the name of pragmatism."
"You can reach more win-win situations if you don t insist on purity, says Katharine Suding, an ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley,
who specializes in restoring human-affected areas.""It doesn t have to be a natural versus nonnatural dichotomy.
The finding suggests that climate change is driving their relocation, and raises major concerns about food security.
Climate change is expected to cause changes in the distributions of species around the world, with an overall shift away from the equator and towards the poles.
Ecologists have documented already such a shift in many wild species, including some birds and insects1, 2,
3. The changing climate is raising major concerns about food security in many countries, and pests may contribute to making matters worse."
or pesticide resistance, says ecologist Dan Bebber of the University of Exeter, UK, who led the new study.
the pests range could appear to move into the tropics. Instead, the team found that, on average,
which is very close to the rate of climate change5. However the rate of shift varied significantly for different groups and among individual species. Fungi, beetles, true bugs, mites,
"Many studies have shown that climate change is affecting the distribution of wild species populations. This is the first one to show that a similar process is happening in pest species,
Her team's study is published today in Nature Climate Change6. Chris Thomas, a biologist at the University of York, UK, notes that the overall rate of movement is quite similar to that found in a meta-analysis he led on the movement of wild species1."
Farmers dig into soil qualityefforts to bring chemical fertilizers to Sub-saharan africa are met often with concerns over harmful environmental and economic side effects.
but the ecological and health effects of fertilizer chemicals raise serious concerns. China in particular, is facing a major pollution problem from overuse of nitrogen fertilizer,
Field trials to assess the ecological efficiency of organic and chemical fertilizers in different geographic and climatic settings are under way in Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Uganda and Tanzania.
and most economical use of fertilizers a practice that would help to avoid the ecological and monetary costs of fertilizer overuse."
says Johannes  Kotschi, a soil scientist at the Association for Agriculture and Ecology in Marburg, Germany,
But an organic-only solution, favoured by environmental groups such as Greenpeace, will also fall short, says Sommer."
So ecologist Rafael Barbieri, a graduate student in the lab of Philip Lester at Victoria University of Wellington, wondered
if the Canadian government is to face up to the massive problems the planet faces due to climate change.
Congo carbon plan kicks offthe data will also enhance scientists understanding of tropical forests role in global climate regulation."
"We know very little about the tropics, says Sassan Saatchi, a remote-sensing scientist at NASA s Jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, California,
to combat the kind of tropical deforestation that today accounts for up to 15%of the world s carbon dioxide emissions.
and then establish a system to monitor deforestation from space.""The country is so huge,
an environmental group that is managing the project with the DRC.""If the Democratic republic of the congo can do it,
who has mapped already out carbon across the world s tropics, but at relatively low resolution of 1 kilometre.
but its system for monitoring deforestation is the world s most advanced. Scientists with the country s National Institute for Space Research in S £o Josã dos Campos are now helping the DRC to set up a similar system, based on freely available Landsat data,
to track deforestation and ultimately to verify reductions in such losses and sell carbon offsets.
Much of the deforestation by urban dwellers seeking wood and charcoal and by farmers clearing small plots of land is small-scale and difficult to see by satellite.
Constant clouds also complicate the kind of monitoring that Brazil has pioneered. Large-scale deforestation, which would be easier to monitor,
has yet to take off in the Congo Basin, owing in part to political instability. But Hansen fears that could change
as well as the leaves and pollen of an entire fossilized ecosystem. The goal of the US$970, 000 drilling project is to stitch together a complete picture of most of the middle and late Triassic period, a turbulent interval that saw both a mass-extinction event and the emergence of dinosaurs.
Because of surface erosion, for example, the core will not capture the very end of the Triassic around 200 Â million years ago,
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