Here road building ranks far lower as a threat than issues such as climate change poverty high population densities
and deforestation particularly north of the park in Kenya Røskaft says. The communities surrounding the northern part of the park are among the poorest in Tanzania with an annual per capita income of just over $100.
With few exceptions this and other ultra-small frogs are associated with moist leaf litter in tropical wet forests--suggesting a unique ecological guild that could not exist under drier circumstances.
Lightning Roaches? Lucihormetica luckae Country: Ecuadorglow-in-the-dark cockroach: Luminescence among terrestrial animals is rather rare and best known among several groups of beetles--fireflies
and as diverse species as possible so that ecosystems are resilient to whatever stresses they face in the future.
Largest ever to be mappedswedish scientists have mapped the gene sequence of Norway spruce (the Christmas tree)--a species with huge economic and ecological importance
Understanding environmental footprint is resource intensive. The key is need you to put your analytical effort into the areas that matter Kirchain says.
and geographic footprint has come under great pressure regarding its social and environmental impact. In response companies have started to take account of their products'greenhouse-gas contributions in part by measuring the amount of carbon dioxide associated with every process throughout a product's lifecycle.
Professor Bill Kunin Professor of Ecology at the University of Leeds said: Most observers have been saying that the 1992 Rio Earth Summit targets to slow biodiversity loss by 2010 failed
Relying on a few species could be risky in a changing environment he added. The study published in the journal Ecology Letters found a 30 per cent fall in local bumblebee biodiversity in all three countries between the 1950s and the 1980s.
However that decline slowed to an estimated 10 per cent in Britain by 2010 while in Belgium and The netherlands bumblebee diversity had stabilised.
the conservation work and agri-environment programs paying farmers to encourage biodiversity may be having an effect.
Environmental protection and restoration of the forests have so far been hindered severely by the irregularity of the mass flowering intervals
#Climate change and wildfireconcerns continue to grow about the effects of climate change on fire. Wildfires are expected to increase 50 percent across the United states under a changing climate over 100 percent in areas of the West by 2050 as projected by some studies.
Of equal concern to scientists and policymakers alike are the atmospheric effects of wildfire emissions on climate.
A new article published in the journal Forest Ecology and Management by U s. Forest Service scientists synthesizes recent findings on the interactions between fire and climate and outlines future research needs.
Authored by research meteorologists Yongqiang Liu and Scott Goodrick from the Forest Service Southern Research Station (SRS) and Warren Heilman from the Northern Research Station the article homes in on the effect
of emissions from wildfires on long-term atmospheric conditions. While research has focused historically on fire-weather interactions there is increasing attention paid to fire-climate interactions says Liu lead author
and team leader with the SRS Center for Forest Disturbance Science. Weather the day-to-day state of the atmosphere in a region influences individual fires within a fire season.
In contrast when we talk about fire climate we're looking at the statistics of weather over a certain period.
Fire climate sets atmospheric conditions for fire activity in longer time frames and larger geographic scales.
Wildfires impact atmospheric conditions through emissions of gases particles water and heat. Some of the article focuses on radiative forcing from fire emissions.
Radiative forcing refers to the change in net (down minus up) irradiance (solar plus longwave) at the tropopause the top of the troposphere where most weather takes place.
Smoke particles can generate radiative forcing mainly through scattering and absorbing solar radiation (direct radiative forcing)
and modifying the cloud droplet concentrations and lifetime and hence the cloud radiative properties (indirect radiative forcing).
The change in radiation can cause further changes in global temperatures and precipitation. Wildfire emissions can have remarkable impacts on radiative forcing says Liu.
During fire events or burning seasons smoke particles reduce overall solar radiation absorbed by the atmosphere at local and regional levels.
At the global scale fire emissions of carbon dioxide contribute substantially to the global greenhouse effect. Other major findings covered in the synthesis include:
Wildfire is a disturbance of ecosystems says Liu. Besides the atmospheric impacts wildfires also modify terrestrial ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration soil fertility grazing value biodiversity and tourism.
The effects can in turn trigger land use changes that in turn affect the atmosphere. The article concludes by outlining issues that lead to uncertainties in understanding fire-climate interactions
and the future research needed to address them. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by USDA Forest Service#Southern Research Station.
and we believe they are less toxic for patients result in less biohazardous waste for the environment
#Reading rock to understand how climate change unfoldswhat happened the last time a vegetated Earth shifted from an extremely cold climate to desert-like conditions?
And what does it tell us about climate change today? John Isbell is on a quest to coax that information from the geology of the southernmost portions of the Earth.
An expert in glaciation from the late Paleozoic era Isbell is challenging many assumptions about the way drastic climate change naturally unfolds.
He attributes that to different conditions across Gondwana such as mountain-building events which would have preserved glaciers longer.
which is so central for applying the work to climate change today. Documenting the particulars of how the carbon cycle behaved so long ago will allow them to answer questions like'What was the main force behind glaciation during the late Paleozoic?
Was it mountain-building or climate change?''Another characteristic of the late Paleozoic shift is that once the climate warmed significantly
and atmospheric CO2 levels soared the Earth's climate remained hot and dry for another 200 million years.
These natural cycles are very long and that's an important difference with what we're seeing with the contemporary global climate change says Gulbranson.
Today we're seeing change in greenhouse gas concentrations of CO2 on the order of centuries and decades.
Ancient trees and soilin order to explain today's accelerated warming Gulbranson's research illustrates that glaciers alone don't tell the whole story.
Many environmental factors leave an imprint on the carbon contained in tree trunks from this period.
and give off oxygen there are other environmental processes to consider says Gulbranson. For example CO2 emissions also come from soil as microbes speed up their consumption of organic matter with rising temperatures.
If we figure out what happened with the glaciers says Isbell and add it to what we know about other conditions--we will be able to unlock the answers to climate change.
Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length h
Investigators rom Qinghai University BGI and other institutes now provide evidence of genetic factors that may be associated with the species'adaption to harsh highland environments.
Tibetan antelope is sized a medium antelope with the unique adaptations to against the harsh high-altitude climate.
#Climate change may have little impact on tropical lizards: Study contradicts predictions of widespread extinctiona new Dartmouth College study finds human-caused climate change may have little impact on many species of tropical lizards contradicting a host of recent studies that predict their widespread extinction in a rapidly warming planet.
The findings appear in the journal Global Change Biology. Most predictions that tropical cold-blooded animals especially forest lizards will be hard hit by climate change are based on global-scale measurements of environmental temperatures
which miss much of the fine-scale variation in temperature that individual animals experience on the ground said the article's lead author Michael Logan a Ph d. student in ecology and evolutionary biology.
To address this disconnect the Dartmouth researchers measured environmental temperatures at extremely high resolution and used those measurements to project the effects of climate change on the running abilities of four populations of lizard from the Bay Islands of Honduras. Field tests on the captured lizards
which were released unharmed were conducted between 2008 and 2012. Previous studies have suggested that open-habitat tropical lizard species are likely to invade forest habitat
and drive forest species to extinction but the Dartmouth research suggests that the open-habitat populations will not invade forest habitat
The overall results suggest that global-scale predictions generated using low-resolution temperature data may overestimate the vulnerability of many tropical lizards to climate change.
Whereas studies conducted to date have made uniformly bleak predictions for the survival of tropical forest lizards around the globe our data show that four similar species occurring in the same geographic region differ markedly in their vulnerabilities to climate warming the authors wrote.
Many communities in the tropics today particularly in Borneo and Indonesia but also in eastern India still rely on flour derived from palms.
In addition the study indicated that seasonal and environmental factors can be crucial: the results of the experiments are affected significantly by organisms'initial fitness and lipid reserves.
#Helping forests gain ground on climate changeuniversity of Alberta researchers have developed guidelines that are being used by the timber industry
and government foresters to get a jump on climate change when planting trees. Maps developed by Laura Gray a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Renewable Resources at the U of A provide projections of climatically suitable habitat for tree species based on climate predictions for the 2020s 2050s and 2080s.
Currently Alberta forestry companies and government agencies plant 80 million spruce fir and pine seedlings to reforest more than 50000 hectares of harvested land annually.
or in the future actually lag behind their optimal growing environment because of changing temperature and precipitation conditions.
The work is the first of its kind to tackle multiple potential climate scenarios for a large number of tree species across western North america.
and 18 different future climate-change scenarios was published recently in the journal Climatic Change. The U of A study also considers patterns of climate change observed from the 1970s until recently.
The researchers found that on average populations already lag behind their best climate niche by 130 kilometres in latitude or 60 metres in elevation.
Gray and Hamann's study has produced several maps and tables that document recent species habitat shifts
Generally Gray said forest managers should consider using seed from more southern climates or lower elevation environments.
The seed should still be of the same tree species rather than introducing a new species into a foreign environment she added.
and productivity of Alberta's forests under changing climate Hamann said. The study was funded by the Natural sciences
when scientists are grappling with how best to detect the signature of evolutionary history from a deluge of genetic data.
when scientists are grappling with how best to detect the signature of evolutionary history from a deluge of genetic data.
and 7 were from environmental samples. The complete genome of three H7n9 isolates from a chicken pigeon
and environmental sample was sequenced and deposited into the GISAID database (http://platform. gisaid. org/epi3/frontend).
The study was published online today in the scientific journal Environmental Health Perspectives. Conventional antibiotic-free
and other factors increase the severity of cheatgrass invasion in sagebrush steppe one of North america's most endangered ecosystems.
The work was published today in the Journal of Applied Ecology by researchers from Oregon State university Augustana College and the U s. Geological Survey.
and head of the OSU Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society and co-author on the study.
and bunchgrass ecosystem Doescher said. That type of community will protect the native plant and wildlife species and benefit sustainable rangeland use at the same time.
The study outlines the complex ecological processes that can promote cheatgrass invasion and the indirect role overgrazing plays in that process.
and in most cases the native ecosystem never recovers Reisner said. Many of the plant and animal species that were there can disappear mostly replaced by cheatgrass that offers poor forage for cattle.
Continued research is needed to quantify the threshold levels of cattle grazing that would still maintain a healthy native ecosystem.
Beginning around two million years ago early stone toolmaking humans known scientifically as Oldowan hominin started to exhibit a number of physiological and ecological adaptations that required greater daily energy expenditures including an increase in brain
In addition modern studies in the Serengeti--an environment similar to KJS two million years ago--have shown also that predators completely devour antelopes of this size within minutes of their deaths.
#No-win situation for agricultural expansion in the Amazonthe large-scale expansion of agriculture in the Amazon through deforestation will be a no-win scenario according to a new study.
Published today 10 may in IOP Publishing's journal Environmental Research Letters it shows that deforestation will not only reduce the capacity of the Amazon's natural carbon sink
but will also inflict climate feedbacks that will decrease the productivity of pasture and soybeans.
a business-as usual scenario where recent deforestation trends continue and new protected areas are created not;
and a governance scenario which assumes Brazilian environmental legislation is implemented. They predict that by 2050 a decrease in precipitation caused by deforestation in the Amazon will reduce pasture productivity by 30 per cent in the governance scenario and by 34 per cent in the business-as usual scenario.
Furthermore increasing temperatures could cause a reduction in soybean yield by 24 per cent in a governance scenario and by 28 per cent under a business-as usual scenario.
Through a combination of the forest biomass removal itself and the resulting climate change which feeds back on the ecosystem productivity the researchers calculate that biomass on the ground could decline by up to 65 per cent for the period 2041-2060brazil faces a huge
however as the natural ecosystems sustain food production maintain water and forest resources regulate climate
and air quality and ameliorate infectious diseases. Lead author of the study Dr Leydimere Oliveira said:
We were interested initially in quantifying the environmental services provided by the Amazon and their replacement by agricultural output.
or off put but it was a surprise to us that high levels of deforestation could be a no-win scenario--the loss of environmental services provided by the deforestation may not be offset by an increase in agriculture production.
The researchers from the Federal University of Viã§osa Federal University of Pampa Federal University of Minas gerais and the Woods Hole Research center show that the effects of deforestation will be felt most in the eastern Parã¡
and changes in land cover would drastically affect the local climate possibly to a point where agriculture becomes unviable.
scientists at the Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory (Coweeta) located in Otto North carolina published online in the journal Ecological Applications and available now in preprint format.
and plant communities in riparian habitats but ecosystem function throughout these areas. The study was conducted at the U s. Forest Service Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory in the Nantahala Mountains of western North carolina.
Coweeta is one of the oldest continuous environmental studies in North america. Since 1934 precipitation temperature and stream flow have been recorded continuously at Coweeta a U s. Forest Service Southern Research Station facility.
Environmental and social advocacy groups should be included at some level in the process. For example we're discussing what standards the aviation sector should recognize to meet their sustainability expectations.
and transparency standards development observes and particularly whether a standard meets environmental groups'governance demands.
and how it relates to the environment? Endres asked. For example environmentalists would like to see improvements at the watershed scale.
Environmental groups don't want to see a race to the bottom--adopting requirements that are bare minimum Endres said.
and to improve the environment. Adopting European standards is not a simple task for U s. growers Endres said.
and wind Endres said. So even though we think we're achieving rural development receiving carbon reductions
or climate mitigation benefits or that we're having increased energy security people may still be suspicious of biomass fuels
The above story is provided based on materials by University of Illinois College of Agricultural Consumer and Environmental sciences (ACES.
The above story is provided based on materials by University of Illinois College of Agricultural Consumer and Environmental sciences (ACES.
finds state-by-state analysisfrom New york city's Central park to Golden gate Park in San francisco America's urban forests store an estimated 708 million tons of carbon an environmental service with an estimated value
In the study published recently in the journal Environmental Pollution Dave Nowak a research forester with the U s. Forest Service's Northern Research Station
and well-being of our environment and our communities said U s. Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell.
I hope this study will encourage people to look at their neighborhood trees a little differently
#Plants talk to plants to help them growhaving a neighborly chat improves seed germination finds research in Biomed Central's open access journal BMC Ecology.
Bad neighbors such as fennel prevent chilli seed germination in the same way. We believe that the answer may involve acoustic signals generated using nanomechanical oscillations from inside the cell
and even beer--as the perfect crop for helping to feed a continent where growing conditions in many regions are deteriorating in the face of climate change.
Whiteflies Ambush a Climate-Resilient Cropinterest in cassava has intensified across Africa as rising temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns caused by climate change threaten the future viability of food staples such as maize and wheat.
Cassava has been called the Rambo root for its extraordinary ability to survive high temperatures and tolerate poor soils.
and food safety where none need exist say scientists for The Nature Conservancy writing in the Ecological Society of America's journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.
Farming practices for food safety that target wildlife are damaging valuable ecological systems despite low risk from these animals said lead author Sasha Gennet.
and environmental advocates to make farm edges slim sanctuaries for wildlife as well as buffers between agricultural fields and waterways.
Wetlands and buffers of trees grasses and shrubs help to keep runoff from fields out of the waterways slowing erosion of soil and blooms of algae downstream.
An overabundance of fertilizer has created problems for domestic drinking water as well as the ecosystems of the Salinas River watershed and its outlet Monterey Bay.
The policies that these distributors are forming are very narrow said Lisa Schulte Moore an agricultural ecologist at Iowa State university who is affiliated not with the Nature Conservancy study.
and not asking does the food system create a healthy human environment? Schulte Moore works with Iowa farmers to incorporate native grassland habitat alongside corn and soy fields.
The above story is provided based on materials by Ecological Society of America. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
#As climate changes, boreal forests to shift north and relinquish more carbon than expectedit's difficult to imagine how a degree
Will it rain less? What will happen to the area's vegetation? New Berkeley Lab research offers a way to envision a warmer future.
It maps how Earth's myriad climates --and the ecosystems that depend on them--will move from one area to another as global temperatures rise.
The approach foresees big changes for one of the planet's great carbon sponges. Boreal forests will likely shift north at a steady clip this century.
Along the way the vegetation will relinquish more trapped carbon than most current climate models predict.
Boreal ecosystems encircle the planet's high latitudes covering swaths of Canada Europe and Russia in coniferous trees and wetlands.
This vegetation stores vast amounts of carbon keeping it out of the atmosphere where it can contribute to climate change.
Scientists use incredibly complex computer simulations called Earth system models to predict the interactions between climate change and ecosystems such as boreal forests.
This means that boreal ecosystems are expected to store even more carbon than they do today. But the Berkeley Lab research tells a different story.
The difference lies in the prediction that as boreal ecosystems follow the warming climate northward their southern boundaries will be overtaken by even warmer
and drier climates better suited for grassland. And that's a key difference. Grassland stores a lot of carbon in its soil but it accumulates at a much slower rate than is lost from diminishing forests.
I found that the boreal ecosystems ringing the globe will be pushed north and replaced in their current location by
Koven's results come from a new way of tracking global warming's impact On earth's mosaic of climates.
The method is based on the premise that as temperatures rise a location's climate will be replaced by a similar but slightly warmer climate from a nearby area.
The displaced climate will in turn shift to another nearby location with a slightly cooler climate.
It's as if climate change forces warmer climates to flow toward cooler areas making everywhere warmer over time.
This approach can help determine where a given climate is going to in the future and where a given climate will come from.
Koven applied this approach to 21 climate models. He used simulations that depict a middle-of-the-road climate change scenario meaning the range of warming by the end of this century is 1 0°C to 2. 6°C above a 1986 to 2005 baseline.
Climate models divide the planet into gridcells that cover tens or hundreds of square kilometers.
In each model Koven identified which gridcells in a warmer climate have a nearby gridcell with a similar climate in terms of average monthly temperature and precipitation.
A good match for example is a neighboring gridcell that has similar rainfall patterns but is slightly warmer in the summer and winter.
Koven then calculated the speed at which a gridcell's climate will shift toward its matching gridcell over the next 80 years.
He also investigated how this shift will transport the carbon stored in the vegetation that grows in the gridcell's climate.
In general he found that climates move toward the poles and up mountain slopes. In parts of South america warmer climates march westward up the Andes.
In the southern latitudes warmer climates head south. But the most dramatic changes occur in the higher latitudes.
Here boreal ecosystems will have to race poleward in order to keep up with their climates. They'll also be encroached by warmer climates from the south.
By the end of this century a forest near Alberta Canada will have to move 100 miles north
in order to maintain its climate. And it will gain a climate that is now located 100 miles to the south.
Forests can't adapt this quickly however meaning that in the short-term they'll be stressed.
And in the long-term they'll be forced to move north and give up their southern regions to grassland.
Only one of the Earth system models shows this precipitous loss of carbon in southern boreal forests.
Koven says that's because most models don't account for random events such as fire drought and insects that kill already-stressed trees.
His climate analogue approach does account for these events because they're implicit in the spatial distribution of ecosystems.
In addition Earth system models predict carbon loss by placing vegetation at a given point and then changing various climate properties above it.
But this approach misses the fact that the whole forest might shift to a different place says Koven.
This research was supported by the U S. Department of energy's Office of Science. Explore the#oeclimate Analog Tracker#an online tool that enables users to see how climates may shift in the decades to come.
Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Note:
The most resistant of all olive treescontrary to its cultivated counterpart the Laperrine's olive tree did not choose the mildness of the Mediterranean climate.
In order to survive in this inhospitable environment over the past several million years it had to adapt to extremely arid conditions.
A genetic resource for cultivated plantsa symbol of Saharan mountain ecosystems the Laperrine's olive tree is a source of wood for local populations.
This combination of factors leads to the gradual erosion of the genetic diversity which lowers the ability of the Laperrine's olive tree to adapt to environmental changes
This research into the ecology and evolutionary history of the Laperrine's olive tree helps to better identify the danger facing this tree--endemic to the Sahara desert
But a ban of a broad variety of pesticides may be required to protect bees humans and the environment.
He suggests that we should be tracking pesticides use in the environment just like we monitor drug use in patients.
It says the results cannot be replicated in the environment. But he also agrees more monitoring of pollinators is needed.
There are several alternatives to using neonicotinoids and other pesticides according to Simon Potts professor of biodiversity and ecosystem services at Reading University UK.
but it shouldn't be at the cost of damaging the environment Potts said adding:
but will almost certainly have much greater long-term costs for food production and the environment.
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