what ecologists call a mutualism. Theoretical studies predict that mutualisms should be stronger under resource-poor conditions
In a paper scheduled for online publication Nov 5 in the journal PLOS Biology University of Michigan ecologist Elizabeth Pringle
All plant-animal mutualisms may employ a similar insurance model according to Pringle a postdoctoral fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows and an assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and at the School of Natural resources and Environment.
if droughts become more severe with climate change she said. We show that trees and their defensive ants invest more in one another in drier more stressful conditions Pringle said.
It's important that the key environmental factor in this system is rainfall which is likely to change dramatically over the coming years with climate change Pringle said.
As the climate changes the increased frequency of extreme weather events such as drought may act together with rare biological events such as outbreaks of insect pests to profoundly alter the ecology and evolution of plant-animal interactions.
Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by University of Michigan. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
and avoiding starvation'said Damien Farine'It's a good example of how animals alter their behaviour to respond to constantly changing environmental conditions.
This later star-forming phase could have been caused by minor mergers with gas-rich neighbors which provide the fuel for new stars.
The study being discussed at 12:30 p m. Tuesday during the American Public health Association's annual meeting in Boston examined the health impact of developing a grocery store in a low-income urban neighborhood on the east side of Indianapolis.
The neighborhood which has no full-service grocery store is on the east side of the Indiana State Fairgrounds bounded by 38th and 42nd streets and Fall Creek Parkway and Sherman Drive.
The USDA's Economic Research Service estimates that 23.5 million people in the U s. live in food deserts in urban neighborhoods and rural towns without ready access to fresh healthy and affordable food.
In the eastside neighborhood many residents depend upon public transportation. Traveling to the closest grocery stores takes 30 to 45 minutes each way.
Stone said interviews were conducted with neighborhood association members and officials as well as representatives of other agencies working in the community.
The survey showed neighborhood residents would be very supportive of a grocery store in their neighborhood
#Global map provides new insights into land usein order to assess the global impacts of land use on the environment
and help provide appropriate countermeasures a group of researchers under the leadership of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) has created a new world map of land use systems.
Based on various indicators of land-use intensity climate environmental and socioeconomic conditions they identified twelve global patterns called land system archetypes.
The scientists from UFZ with colleagues from the Humboldt-University Berlin and University Bonn have published recently their results in the journal Global Environmental Change.
animal and plant communities change ecosystem functions disappear carbon emissions contribute to climate change. Whatever happens regionally has global consequences.
This system is characterized by high density of cropland high inputs of nitrogen fertilizers temperate climate high crop yields large capital investments in the agricultural sector low proportion of GDP originating from agriculture and good
For example we didn't know before which regions had unfulfilled an potential for agricultural intensification given the environmental and socioeconomic conditions or in
If we had analyzed only the environmental indicators we could not identify where viable opportunities for yield improvements exist.
clavã k. According to the co-author and the head of the Department of Computational Landscape Ecology at UFZ Leipzig Prof.
many areas in these regions are classified as'degraded forest/cropland systems in the tropics'characterized by extremely high soil erosion.
and apply erosion control measures for these regions. Only then the agricultural yields could increase without negatively affecting the environment.
In other land systems the situation is quite different. The extensive cropping systems of Eastern europe
The above story is provided based on materials by Helmholtz Centre For Environmental Research-UFZ. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
Scientists have identified now regions in Antarctica they say could store information about Earth's climate
The results are published today in Climate of the Past an open-access journal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU.
By studying the past climate scientists can understand better how temperature responds to changes in greenhouse-gas concentrations in the atmosphere.
This in turn allows them to make better predictions about how climate will change in the future. Ice cores contain little air bubbles
and thus represent the only direct archive of the composition of the past atmosphere says Hubertus Fischer an experimental climate physics professor at the University of Bern in Switzerland
A 3. 2-km-long ice core drilled almost a decade ago at Dome Concordia (Dome C) in Antarctica revealed 800000 years of climate history showing that greenhouse gases
At the root of their quest is a climate transition that marine-sediment studies reveal happened some 1. 2 million years to 900000 years ago.
The Mid Pleistocene Transition is a most important and enigmatic time interval in the more recent climate history of our planet says Fischer.
Earth's climate naturally varies between times of warming and periods of extreme cooling (ice ages) over thousands of years.
Climate scientists suspect greenhouse gases played a role in forcing this transition but they need to drill into the ice to confirm their suspicions.
As snow falls and settles on the surface of an ice sheet it is compacted by the weight of new snow falling on top of it
and is transformed into solid glacier ice over thousands of years. The weight of the upper layers of the ice sheet causes the deep ice to spread causing the annual ice layers to become thinner and thinner with depth.
To constrain the possible locations where such 1. 5 million-year old--and in terms of its layering undisturbed--ice could be found in Antarctica we compiled the available data on climate
Climate of the Past study. These results confirm those of another study also recently published in Climate of the Past.
Crucially they also found that an ice core extending that far into the past should be between 2. 4 and 3-km long shorter than the 800000-year-old core drilled in the previous expedition.
The findings are published online ahead of the print issue of Environmental Health Perspectives a journal of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences part of the National institutes of health.
Since endometriosis is driven an estrogen condition we were interested in investigating the role of environmental chemicals that have estrogenic properties such as organochlorine pesticides on the risk of the disease she said.
The take-home message from our study is that persistent environmental chemicals even those used in the past may affect the health of the current generation of reproductive-age women with regard to a hormonally driven disease.
Camera traps on the other hand sit silently in the forest often working for months on end come rain or shine.
All five cat species mentioned are charismatic and important components of the forest ecosystems and predators of a wide range of other animals.
Many of the measurements for the study such as the measures of protein activity using mass spectrometry were done at EMSL the DOE's Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory on the PNNL campus. Wright's team included Lindsey
which convert the organic matter into nutrients says Mary Scholes who is a Professor in the School of Animal Plant and Environmental sciences at Wits University.
In Africa where much of the future growth in agriculture must take place erosion has reduced yields by 8%and nutrient depletion is widespread.
because humankind depends heavily on it for food production says Bob Scholes who is a systems ecologist at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research.
but also contributed to global warming and the pollution of aquifers rivers lakes and coastal ecosystems.
Replacing the fertility-sustaining processes in the soil with a dependence on external inputs has made also the soil ecosystem and humans vulnerable to interruptions in the supply of those inputs for instance due to price shocks.
Given the large additional area it would require such an approach would also not avert climate change spare biodiversity
and environmental security we need an agricultural soil ecosystem that more closely approximates the close and efficient cycling in natural ecosystems
but gaps remainnew policy changes have led to decreased exposure to environmental tobacco smoke at work yet workers in some occupations still experience a high prevalence of secondhand smoke according to new research released today at the American Public health Association's 141st
According to the study overall the prevalence of exposure to environmental tobacco smoke at work decreased from 8 percent in 2003 to 5. 4 percent in 2010.
Workers in installation repair and maintenance had the highest prevalence in exposure to environmental tobacco smoke with 37.4 percent.
Additionally exposure to environmental tobacco smoke at work was more prevalent among male non-white and younger workers.
Findings like these that combine information about occupation and environmental tobacco smoke provide helpful information for evaluatingcomprehensive statewide smoke-free workplace laws
and so incredibly productive said Noah Fierer a fellow at CU-Boulder's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental sciences (CIRES)
Today only remnants of the tallgrass prairie remain covering just a few percent of the ecosystem's original range.
For the study Fierer an associate professor of microbial ecology and his colleagues used samples of soil collected from 31 different sites spread out across the prairie's historical range.
The samples--which were collected by study co-author Rebecca Mcculley a grassland ecologist at the University of Kentucky--came largely from nature preserves and old cemeteries.
when it was still an intact ecosystem the researchers built a model based on climate information and the data from the samples.
and data from the few remaining snippets of this vanishing ecosystem said Katherine Pollard an investigator at the Gladstone Institutes in San francisco
of which can be used as models to decipher the genetic fundaments of environmental interaction and evolutionary innovation.
#Warm winters let trees sleep longerin the temperate zones vegetation follows the change of the seasons.
Since warmer winters can be expected as the climate changes the spring development phase for typical forest trees might start later
and primary settlers such as birch trees--and among species like locust and walnut that have moved in from warmer climate zones.
Advantage for shrubs and new tree speciesthere may be consequences for the forest ecosystem. After mild winters the native species run a higher risk of developing their leaves too late.
The native tree species in our forests have limited only a ability to adapt themselves to climate change.
Shortened winter in the climate chamberfor their experiments the researchers used twigs around 30 centimeters long from 36 different trees and shrubs
which they exposed to different temperature and light conditions in climate chambers. Each climate chamber experiment lasted six weeks.
The twigs came from the Weltwald or World Forest near Freising in which Bavarian state foresters have planted stands of trees from different climate regions.
The cold effect showed most strongly with the beeches the hornbeams and the North american sugar maple.
Many of the cultivated species that are at home today in Central europe come originally from warmer climate zones.
#Redwood trees reveal history of west coast rain, fog, 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.
and carbon atoms in the wood to detect fog and rainfall in previous seasons. 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.
He is corresponding author of a study published online Oct 24 in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Biogeosciences.
While coastal redwoods are not the longest-lived trees on the West Coast they do contain unique information about their foggy surroundings.
The new study used cores from Northern California coastal redwoods to trace climate back 50 years.
When seawater evaporates off the ocean to form clouds some drops fall as rain over the ocean
Fog on the other hand forms near shore and blows on land where it drips down through the branches until the trees use it like rainwater.
By looking at the proportion of O-16 and O-18 in the wood from each season the team was able to measure the contribution of fog and rain.
if a particular summer was foggy with a little rain foggy with a lot of rain and various combinations of the two Johnstone said.
Understanding of the natural variability cycles could also help to better distinguish natural and human-caused climate change.
These are what ecologists call keystone species: critters that control an ecosystem and have a disproportionate impact on other species. And in the forests of New england
what are the keystone species? Put earthworms on the list. Kudzu vines grow madly covering power lines.
and reshaping local ecosystems. And in the forests of New england what are the invasive species?
He and Gorres know the worms are upsetting forest ecosystems --and they also think the worms have a role to play in global climate change.
But what that role is--good guy or villain? --they're not sure. Earthworm excretawhich is why on a gentle hillside in the town forest of Hinesburg Vt.
otherwise contribute to the greenhouse effect--and global warming. But for all the carbon being stored in these trees aboveground a roughly equal amount of carbon is stored belowground.
The presumption is that the first agricultural immigrants brought earthworms with them says historical ecologist Charlie Cogbill one of the scientists on this project
and regulate climate change. Credits in these markets generally depend on being able to show that carbon is being sequestered out of the atmosphere--and held long-term.
Garcia-Algar and Antonella Chiandetti members of the Childhood and Environment Research Group of the Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute (IMIM.
in order to analyse the relationship between environmental factors and childhood asthma development in different phenotypes. On January 1 2006 a law that set anti-tobacco regulations in Spain came into force.
Professor Martã n RÃ os states that asthma is caused an illness by several factors (genetic propensity environment food etc.
and asthma is not a cause-effect one but tobacco even environmental smoke or the one that remains on clothes favours asthma episodes in children.
In the case of children maternal smoking and environmental tobacco smoke are some of the main risk factors for inducing new cases of asthma.
rivals that of professional forestersas global forest and climate experts gather at the Oslo REDD Exchange 2013 to ramp up international efforts to protect carbon-storing forests in the developing world a recent study
At the same time the study found that nearly half of official REDD+(Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) projects which pivot on the accurate measurement of carbon trapped in forests do not engage communities in this data gathering
and realities on the ground said Finn Danielsen the study's lead author and senior ecologist at the Nordic Foundation for Environment and Development in Copenhagen Denmark.
if more REDD+projects were to include community monitoring we would see a more just global effort to fight climate change that meaningfully incorporates insight from people who depend on forests for everything from their incomes to their food
It was published in a special issue of the journal Ecology and Society. The study is part of the EU-funded project Impacts of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation
and Forest Degradation and Enhancing Carbon Stocks (I-REDD+).+To determine if communities can provide accurate monitoring of aboveground forest-carbon stocks researchers trained community members in simple measuring tactics
The authors also state that data gathered by communities meet the high standards of the United nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC.
--and larger global efforts to address climate change said Subekti Rahayu an analyst at ICRAF who conducted fieldwork for the study.
The legitimacy of international efforts to reduce emissions from deforestation rests on community involvement said Meine van Noordwijk Chief Science Advisor at ICRAF.
and fight climate change. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Burness Communications.
The above story is provided based on materials by University of Illinois College of Agricultural Consumer and Environmental sciences (ACES.
and become an entirely unreliable source of information about ecosystem health. Gary Wellborn professor of biology in the OU College of Arts and Sciences and director of the Oklahoma Biological Station;
The Hyalella amphipods are aquatic crustaceans commonly used by scientists and agencies as an indicator species of a healthy unpolluted environment.
H. azteca a species common across North america may prove to be an unreliable indicator in other agricultural states where biomonitoring programs use H. azteca as a principal species for monitoring and environmental policy decisions.
Insecticides for agricultural crops are regulated by the Environmental protection agency but runoff during rains can enter a lake pond
or stream and contaminate a non-target species like H. azteca. The evolution of H. azteca in this study occurred
The team led by Carnegie's Greg Asner in close collaboration with officials from the Peruvian Ministry of Environment used the Carnegie Landsat Analysis System-lite (CLASLITE) to detect
and disrupting the ecological balance for centuries to come. Co-author Ernesto Raez Luna Senior Advisor to the Minister Peruvian Ministry of the Environment remarked:
Obtaining good information on illegal gold mining to guide sound policy and enforcement decisions has been particularly difficult so far.
and science the Fraunhofer Institute for Molecular biology and Applied Ecology IME has optimized the cultivation and production engineering over the past few years.
It's because the rubber extraction from the dandelion root is affected markedly less by weather than the rubber obtained from the rubber tree.
Since we can grow it in much closer proximity to our production sites we can further reduce both the environmental impact as well as our logistics costs by a substantial margin.
And finally it does not require a subtropical climate and can be planted on domestic croplands.
The idea prevails as trees cannot continue to grow until they reach the sky there must obviously be a yield ceiling.
The yield of a crop depends on the genetic characteristics of the variety soil climate and crop management.
whether this is due to changing climate soil quality modified crop management or a combination of these factors.
#Disrupted phenological cues undermine ant/plant mutualismtemperature rainfall soil composition and sunlight may not be the only contributors to a plant's success. Ants in their role as seed dispersers may play an equally important part in determining
when climate response differs between interacting species the authors assert Timing is everything when species interact.
All ecological communities are based on interactions between species said Warren. Climate change is disrupting phenological synchrony.
While much climate-change research focuses on how climate change directly affects species this research suggests that by disrupting the synchrony between species it has an important indirect effects on species. Local
Given the economic and ecological impacts of Paratrechina longicornis discovering a close relative may provide us with insights into the biology of one of the world's worst invasive ant species. For instance
The species is found almost in every urban center in the tropics as well as in greenhouses and other humanmade structures in cool temperature climates.
The remarkable ability of this ant to survive even in extremely human changed environment also makes it a well-known pest in tropical climates commonly called crazy ant due to its erratic movements.
Outside of agro-ecological systems many studies have indicated that even flowering plants considered as invasive may have positive effects on insects especially on nectar
of these ecosystems said WCS conservationist Edward Okot Omoya the lead author of the study.
Their loss would permanently alter two of Africa's great ecosystems. The crisis in lion conservation in Uganda reflects the status of the species across Africa where lion populations have dropped by 30 percent over the past two decades as a result of illegal killing and the loss of both habitat and prey.
Most former floodplain wetlands are inundated now only during major floods. The report said access to floodplain habitats
and a poor ecosystem called a dead zone. 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.
It's a more targeted way of searching for minerals that reduces costs and impact on the environment.
#A functional forest ecosystem is more than just treesin 2011 the University of Jyvã¤skylã¤held an academic conference on the ecological restoration of forests.
This kind of activity is called ecological restoration. For example the European union has committed politically to restore 15 per cent of weakened habitats by 2020 if necessary.
In the publication the researchers suggest that to successful ecological restoration should be planned and implemented at the landscape level.
A restoration process should also take into account the environmental changes conflicting land use pressures and social problems in the future.
For example the prevention of climate change the collection of wood for bioenergy and conflicting financial interests complicate the optimal use of ecological restoration.
The main message of the researchers is that a functioning forest ecosystem is much more than just trees.
A natural forest ecosystem consists of a huge amount of different species and functions. For example species dependent on old trees decayed wood
or burned wood have disappeared in many areas says researcher Panu Halme from the Department of Biological and Environmental science at the University of Jyvã¤skylã¤.
¤Halme is the leading author of the article. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Suomen Akatemia (Academy of Finland.
ramo grasslands and especially the adjoining dense cloud forests in steep remote regions where the bears are seen rarely.
The wide-ranging Andean bears once had a safe haven in the undeveloped habitat of Andean cloud forests
and thanks to the Bolivian government they live in one of largest continuous protected patches of cloud forest across three national protected areas:
In the 1980s surveys by the U s. Environmental protection agency and the U s. Geological Survey showed that nitrate contamination had impacted probably more public and domestic water supply wells in the U s. than any other contaminant.
Mayer is recognized an internationally expert in the use of stable isotopes to track contaminants in the environment.
and nitrogen retention in the soils although Alberta's comparatively dry climate and different geology might slow the rate of nitrate seeping towards the groundwater.
Nitrate contamination of aquatic ecosystems can be reduced by farmers following the 4rs of nutrient stewardship:
#Grazers, pollinators shape plant evolutionit has long been known that the characteristics of many plants with wide ranges can vary geographically depending on differences in climate.
These findings help us understand how differences in environmental conditions influence the evolution of genetic differentiation among plant populations says Professor Jon Ãren at the Evolutionary Biology Centre.
study suggestsa new study suggests the southern portion of the Amazon rainforest is at a much higher risk of dieback due to stronger seasonal drying than projections made by the climate models used in the latest report by the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). If severe enough the loss of rainforest could cause the release of large volumes of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Using ground-based rainfall measurements from the past three decades a research team led by Rong Fu professor at The University of Texas at Austin's Jackson School of Geosciences found that
The new results are in stark contrast to forecasts made by climate models used by the IPCC.
and therefore the risk of climate change-induced rainforest dieback should be relatively low. The report appears this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The length of the dry season in the southern Amazon is the most important climate condition controlling the rainforest says Fu.
To see why the length of the dry season is such a limiting factor imagine there is heavier than usual rainfall during the wet season.
which inhibits rainfall in two ways. First it makes it harder for warm dry air near the surface to rise and freely mix with cool moist air above.
And second it blocks cold front incursions from outside the tropics that could trigger rainfall. The climate models used by the IPCC do a poor job representing these processes
which might explain why they project only a slightly longer Amazonian dry season says Fu. The Amazon rainforest normally removes the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the atmosphere
and more fragmented forests resulting from ongoing human-caused deforestation could eventually convert much of southern Amazonia from rainforest to savanna.
Earlier studies have shown that human-caused deforestation in the Amazon can alter rainfall patterns. But the researchers didn't see a strong signal of deforestation in the pattern of increasing dry season length.
The dry season length increase was pronounced most in the southwestern Amazon while the most intense deforestation occurred in the southeastern Amazon.
Because the northwestern Amazon has much higher rainfall and a shorter dry season than the southern Amazon Fu and others think it is much less vulnerable to climate change.
Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by University of Texas at Austin. Note:
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