Given the health social environmental and economic benefits associated with participating in and supporting urban green spaces it is critical to protect the viability of urban community gardens
while also ensuring a safe gardening environment. For more information including resources for urban farmers
The team noticed that on an annual basis the tropics are the most productive. But during the Northern hemisphere's growing season the U s. Corn belt really stands out Frankenberg said.
This needs to be accounted for going forward in trying to predict how much of the atmospheric carbon dioxide will be taken up by crops in a changing climate.
#Meeting climate targets may require reducing meat, dairy consumptiongreenhouse gas emissions from food production may threaten the UN climate target of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius according to research at Chalmers University of Technology Sweden.
On Monday 31 march the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) presents their report on the impacts of climate change.
Carbon dioxide emissions from the energy and transportation sectors currently account for the largest share of climate pollution.
However a study from Chalmers now shows that eliminating these emissions would not guarantee staying below the UN limit.
This alone would make meeting the climate target essentially impossible. We have shown that reducing meat
and dairy consumption is key to bringing agricultural climate pollution down to safe levels says Fredrik Hedenus one of the study authors.
We should already be thinking about how we can make our food more climate friendly.
or technology these growing numbers of people eating more meat and dairy entail increasing amounts of climate pollution from the food sector.
and will probably not suffice to keep us within the climate limit if meat and dairy consumption continue to grow.
Cheese and other dairy products will account for about one quarter of total agricultural climate pollution. Story Source:
The study was published December 2013 in Environmental science & Technology. The new estimate is about double the current estimate by the U s. Environmental protection agency
which suggests a cost of $47 per kilogram of ammonia. The scientists say the new estimate is on the high end of the spectrum
As such the particles are on the list of six common air pollutants regulated by EPA's National Ambient Air Quality Standards.
and if so whether this is linked to climate change. Our study is another significant piece in the puzzle
or farming provide the most reliable information on vegetation response to changes in our climate.
when we control for land cover changes across the globe a changing climate is significantly altering the vegetation growth cycles for certain types of vegetation.
Such changes may have consequences for the sustainability of the plants themselves as well as species which depend on them and ultimately the climate through changes to the carbon cycle.
The paper is published in the journal Remote Sensing of the Environment. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by University of Southampton.
and Menno Schilthuizen is to teach the students about how the rich tapestry of the tropical lowland rainforest's ecosystem is woven.
Besides charismatic species such as the orangutans that the students encounter every day in the forest the tropical ecosystem consists of scores of unseen organisms
A study conducted by the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) in the Gabayan watershed in eastern Bohol Philippines has shown that agroforestry systems create a more sustainably managed watershed that allows people living there to benefit from the ecosystem.
The benefits include higher crop yields increased income and resilience to climate change. Agroforestry is integrated an land-use management technique that incorporates trees and shrubs with crops and livestock on farms.
and the ecosystem services provided by the Gabayan watershed. The tool predicts the environmental impact of land use land management practices and climate change.
Watersheds are areas of land with streams and rivers that all drain into a larger body of water such as a bigger river a lake or an ocean.
but also provide a multitude of ecological and cultural services including water for irrigation and industry shelter habitats for biodiversity and in very poor areas sources of livelihoods.
In countries like the Philippines several watershed areas in the country are degraded now due to deforestation and soil erosion.
whose livelihoods depend on subsistence agriculturefarmers here have reported environmental problems such as floods droughts reductions in water quality and increases in soil erosion and downstream sedimentation of irrigation networks.
Saze and his team then started hybridizing the resistant-starch rice with local strains to genetically design a new strain of rice suited to Okinawa's climate.
#Major increase in West Antarctic glacial losssix massive glaciers in West Antarctica are moving faster than they did 40 years ago causing more ice to discharge into the ocean and global sea level to rise according to new research.
The amount of ice draining collectively from those half dozen glaciers increased by 77 percent from 1973 to 2013 scientists report this month in Geophysical Research Letters a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
Pine Island Glacier the most active of the studied glaciers has accelerated by 75 percent in 40 years according to the paper.
Thwaites Glacier the widest glacier started to accelerate in 2006 following a decade of stability.
The study is the first to look at the ice coming off the six most active West Antarctic glaciers over such an extended time period said Jeremie Mouginot a glaciologist at University of California-Irvine (UC-Irvine) who co
Almost 10 percent of the world's sea-level rise per year comes from just these six glaciers he said.
The researchers studied the Pine Island Thwaites Haynes Smith Pope and Kohler glaciers all of which discharge ice into a vast bay known as the Amundsen Sea Embayment in West Antarctica.
The amount of ice released by these six glaciers each year is comparable to the amount of ice draining from the entire Greenland Ice Sheet annually Mouginot said.
If melted completely the glaciers'disappearance would raise sea levels another 1. 2 meters (four feet) according to co-author and UC-Irvine Professor Eric Rignot.
Ice shelves are platforms of permanent floating ice that form where glaciers meet the sea.
In West Antarctica ice shelves prevent the glaciers investigated in the study from slipping more rapidly into the ocean.
Mouginot and his colleagues used satellite data to look at sequential images of the glaciers from 1973 to 2013.
The scientists then calculated how fast the ice was moving by tracking surface features such as cracks in the ice to determine the distance the glaciers traveled from month to month and year to year.
While the study considered the six glaciers collectively it also revealed unprecedented change on the individual glacier level.
Thwaites Glacier the largest of the six with a width of 120 kilometers (75 miles) experienced a decade of near-stability until 2006
This is the first time that such changes on Thwaites Glacier have been observed said Mouginot. Of all the glaciers in the study Pine Island Glacier accelerated the most since 1973 increasing by 1. 7 kilometers (one mile) per year.
That's a 75 percent increase in speed from approximately 2. 5 kilometers (1. 5 miles) per year in 1973 to 4 kilometers (2. 5 miles) per year in 2013.
Both Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers contribute the most to overall ice discharge--about three-fourths of the total amount documented in the study.
However scientists also documented even higher rates of increased discharge in some of the smaller glaciers.
Smith and Pope Glaciers nearly tripled the amount of ice they drained into the ocean since 1973.
The research team also found that the Pine Island Glacier is accelerating along its entire drainage system--up to 230 kilometers (155 miles) inland from where it meets the ocean.
This paper is important in showing that a glacier can actually'feel 'what is happening far downstream of itself said Thomas. It means that
if you disturb the ice sheet near the coast the glaciers will feel the push
This finding suggests that glacier acceleration models may need to be reevaluated Thomas added. Most current models only take into account isolated speed changes resulting from a local disturbance rather than representing how these changes affect the glacier as a whole.
This research was funded by a grant from the NASA's Cryospheric Science Program and MEASURES program.
which might explain their remarkable ability to adapt to harsh environments say researchers at Queen Mary University of London.
This is the first time that scientists have investigated how goats learn complex physical cognition tasks which could explain why they are so adaptable to harsh environments and good at foraging for plants in the wild for example.
This could explain why they are so successful in colonising new environments though we would need to perform a similar study with wild goats to be sure.
environment on plant traitslet's say plant scientists want to develop new lines of corn that will better tolerate long stretches of hot dry weather.
How can they precisely assess the performance of those new plants in different environmental conditions? Field tests can provide some answers.
But how can plant scientists get a true picture of a plant's growth and traits under a wide variety of controlled environmental conditions?
Hundreds of the chips-in-mini-greenhouses can grow thousands of plants at the same time each greenhouse providing different environmental conditions.
The research will appear in the April issue of Environmental Entomology. The researchers asked 15 gardeners to place stink bug traps at the ends of rows of tomatoes while another group of 14 placed no traps in their gardens.
when pests arrive in the general vicinity of a trap and rest on vegetation before entering
In the laboratory the researchers could see how the fungicide-exposed worms adapted to the toxic environment.
Still these reductions fall short of a 60%threshold planned by the EU. This mismatch may have important climate policy implications.
These forestry sustainability criteria included several environmental technical and social aspects. According to the study forest residue bioenergy must be used for 60 to 80 years before the emission savings reach the required 60%level in most European countries.
and reduce the interest in developing genuine low-emission climate-friendly practices of bioenergy production from forest residues.
The above story is provided based on materials by Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
#Ancient Indonesian climate shift linked to glacial cycleindonesian waters are major agents for global levels of atmospheric water vapor.
Brown researchers have compiled a detailed Indonesian climate record of the last 60000 years tracking telltale indicators in sedimentary cores:
Using sediments from a remote lake researchers from Brown University have assembled a 60000-year record of rainfall in central Indonesia.
The analysis reveals important new details about the climate history of a region that wields a substantial influence on the global climate as a whole.
Despite the region's importance in the global climate system not much is known about its own climate history says James Russell associate professor of geological sciences at Brown.
We wanted to assess long-term climate variation in the region Russell said not just to assess how global climate influences Indonesia
but to see how that feeds back into the global climate system. The data are published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study found that the region's normally wet tropical climate was interrupted by a severe dry period from around 33000 years ago until about 16000 years ago.
That period coincides with peak of the last ice age when glaciers covered vast swaths of the northern hemisphere.
Climate models had suggested that glacial ice could shift the track of tropical monsoons causing an Indonesian dry period.
If you reduce the water vapor content it should cool the climate globally. So the fact that we have this very strong drying in the tropics during glaciation would argue for a strong feedback of water vapor concentration to the global climate during glacial-interglacial cycles.
Surprisingly absent from the data Russell says is the influence of other processes known to drive climate elsewhere in the tropics.
In particular there was no sign of climate change in Indonesia associated with Earth's orbital precession a wobble caused by Earth's axis tilt that generates differences in sunlight in a 21000-year cycle.
There's very little indication of the 21000-year cycle that dominates much of the tropics he said.
Instead we see this very big set of changes that appear linked to the amount of ice on earth.
The rate of runoff is directly related to the rate of rainfall. In this case Russell and his colleagues looked at titanium an element commonly used to gauge surface runoff.
That finding was buttressed by another proxy of rainfall: carbon isotopes from plant leaf wax. Leaves are covered with a carbon-based wax that protects them from losing too much water to evaporation.
Tropical grasses which are adapted for dryer climates tend to have the C-13 isotope. Trees which thrive in wetter environs use the C-12 isotope.
The ratio of those two isotopes in the sediment cores is an indicator of the relative abundance of grass versus trees.
It's estimated that Lake Tuwuti sediments record up to 800000 years of climate data and Russell recently received funding to take deeper cores.
This provides the kind of fundamental data we need to understand how the climate of this region operates on long timescales he said.
whether on farms hospitals or in the environment they can infect humans through water food
#Climate change will improve survival rates of British bird--the long-tailed titclimate change may be bad news for billions
But new research suggests that warm weather during spring instead holds the key to their survival.
The surprise is that weather makes all the difference. The research discovered that birds trying to breed in warm and dry springs have much better chances of surviving to the next year--a novel result that counters common assumptions about the cause of death for small birds.
The study found no real effect of winter weather in recent years on adult survival
. However it seems that in most years autumn weather plays a bigger role perhaps acting as a filter that weeds out weaker birds before the real winter hits.
Looking ahead to the future our data suggests that every single plausible climate change scenario will lead to a further increase in long-tailed survival rates.
While many species struggle to adjust to climate change these delightful birds seem likely to be winners.
Case study on Austrian curd cheeseif food products are produced not in a hygienic environment consumers can face the threat of dangerous pathogens.
Listeria is a rod-shaped bacterium highly prevalent in the environment and generally not a threat to human health.
#Forests crucial to green growththe value of forests and tree-based ecosystems extends far beyond carbon sequestration;
while at the same time enhancing the conservation of forests and ecosystem services. Each year the International Day of Forests highlights the unique role of forests in the environment
and in sustaining livelihoods. The theme this year is Celebrating Forests for Sustainable Development. It is important day to remind us to save our planet as it is the only one we know which has trees says Tony Simons the Director General of the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF.
Amy Groesbeck an SFU alumna SFU professors Anne Salomon an ecologist and Dana Lepofsky an archaeologist and Kirsten Rowell a University of Washington biologist are the authors.
The School of Resource and Environmental Management assistant professor adds: Traditional knowledge by coastal First Nations members further revealed that their ancestors boosted these gardens'productivity by adding ground clam shell and pebbles to them.
Groesbeck a 2013 Faculty of Environment graduate and this study's lead author is now a University of Washington research assistant.
This study notes that some of today's benthic shellfish aquaculture practices have been shown to undermine near shore ecosystem resilience.
and invasion by nonnative plant species says Carol Horvitz professor of ecology in the University of Miami College of Arts
Similar links maybe found in other ecosystems between disrupted fauna and declining diversity of flora.
Our findings imply that management of overabundant grazing animals would be beneficial for conservation of plant biodiversity says Horvitz who is also a founding member of UM's Institute of Theoretical and Mathematical Ecology.
This demonstrates that the high population growth rate of the invader is caused by the high abundance of deer says Susan Kalisz professor of evolutionary ecology in the University of Pittsburgh's Department of Biological sciences and principal investigator of the study.
The team's results support an ecological theory that native species in communities can exert biotic resistance.
A study published today in the Journal of Ecology by a team from the LOEWE Biodiversity
and Climate Research Centre and the University of Halle-Wittenberg demonstrates the importance of this hitherto neglected ecosystem function for the restoration of montane rain forests.
and tested whether this ecosystem function may contribute to the restoration of deforested areas. The red lipid-rich aril a fleshy pulp surrounding the seeds of Clusia is highly attractive to many animals.
but very little is known about its impact in degraded forest ecosystems. The study reveals that ants reduce seed predation by rodents and increase germination success
--which confirms the importance of this ecosystem function for forest regeneration. The study has been carried out in two 3000 ha islands of natural mountain rain forest
and a doctoral student at the Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre (Bik-F) and the University of Halle-Wittenberg. 48 hours and again one month after establishing the depots the team searched for the seeds within a 2. 5
Due to the ecosystem service provided by ants in the degraded areas a faster and sustainable establishment of tree seedlings like Clusia may be expected.
and plant species and accelerate the regeneration of the mountain rain forest ecosystem. Schleuning concludes: Drought frequencies in the Andes are likely to increase in the future.
and ways to increase carbon sequestration and mitigate climate change said Sonny Ramaswamy director of USDA's National Institute of Food
Water footprints separate water use into green which is rainfall; blue from a freshwater resource;
whether it's from rainfall or irrigation makes all the difference in assessing water resource sustainability.
#Future heat waves pose threat to global food supplyheat waves could significantly reduce crop yields and threaten global food supply
if climate change is tackled not and reversed. This is according to a new study led by researchers at the University of East Anglia and published 20 march in IOP Publishing's journal Environmental Research Letters
which has estimated for the first time the global effects of extreme temperatures and elevated levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) on the production of maize wheat and soybean.
Earlier studies have found that climate change is projected to reduce maize yields globally by the end of the century under a business as usual scenario for future emissions of greenhouse gases;
however this new study shows that the inclusion of the effects of heat waves which have not been accounted for in previous modelling calculations could double the losses of the crop.
Lead author of the study Delphine Deryng from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia said:
however the increases are projected to be significantly offset by the effects of heat waves as these plants are still vulnerable to the effects of extreme temperatures.
The researchers from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research (University of East Anglia Norwich) Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment (London School of economics and Political science London
) and Global Environmental and Climate Change Centre (Mcgill University Montreal) arrived at their results using the global crop model PEGASUS to simulate crop yield responses to 72 climate change scenarios spanning the 21st century.
The study also identified particular areas where heat waves are expected to have the largest negative effects on crop yields.
Our results show that maize yields are expected to be affected negatively by climate change while the impacts on wheat and soybean are generally positive
Climate mitigation policy would help reduce risks of serious negative impacts on maize worldwide and reduce risks of extreme heat stress that threaten global crop production.
This introduction--viewed until now as an introduction of an alien species into a previously unoccupied ecosystem--was aimed at fostering a large breeding population at a safe site that could be used in restocking the mainland where historic land use decimated native bighorn sheep populations.
#Dry future climate could reduce orchid bee habitatduring Pleistocene era climate changes neotropical orchid bees that relied on year-round warmth
and genetic data to understand bee distributions during past climate changes. In previous studies researchers have tracked male and female orchid bees
The study published online in the journal Molecular Ecology has important implications for future climate changes.
if the tendency is to have lower precipitation in combination with deforestation the suitable habitat for the bees is going to be reduced said Margarita LÃ pez-Uribe the paper's first author and a graduate student at Cornell.
This is a possible mechanism bees could use to ameliorate the negative impacts of population isolation resulting from future climate changes and deforestation.
By looking at current climate and bee distributions LÃ pez-Uribe and colleagues assessed parameters of climate conditions that each of three bee species within the genus Eulaema could tolerate physiologically including temperature and precipitation variability.
She found that one of the three species Eulaema cingulata was three times more tolerant to a variety of climatic conditions.
By proceeding with the caveat that physiological tolerance has remained constant--species tend to be evolutionarily conservative about shifting their niches--the researchers used computer models to simulate past bee distributions based on climate conditions in the Pleistocene.
Climate and ecological niche computer model simulations were matched closely by genetic data of the two less-tolerant orchid bee species. The genetic data included mitochondrial markers
and fungi that decompose plant matter in healthy ecosystems are hindered by radioactive contamination. They showed a smaller effect for small invertebrates such as termites that also contribute to decomposition of plant biomass.
It's another facet of the impacts of low-dose-rate radioactive contaminants on the broader ecosystem Mousseau says.
study showsa forest in South carolina a supercomputer in Ohio and some glow-in-the-dark yarn have helped a team of field ecologists conclude that woodland corridors connecting patches of endangered plants not only increase dispersal of seeds
Gil Bohrer Ph d. an assistant professor in the Civil Environmental & Geodetic Engineering department at The Ohio State university and colleagues led by Ellen Damschen Ph d. an assistant professor of Zoology at the University of Wisconsin wondered
if similar interventions might aid plants that rely upon wind currents. The study How fragmentation and corridors affect wind dynamics
and corridors out of a longleaf pine plantation around the Savannah-river National Laboratory near Jackson S. C a network of sensors was erected to provide observations on wind speed turbulence temperature
These very large experimental efforts provided a novel dataset of observations of seed movement and wind in patch-corridors landscapes.
and the wind the scientists leveraged the physical model to generate a virtual and complete environment where every detail of the wind
The massive simulations used the Ohio Supercomputer Center to provide a detailed understanding of how corridors change the movement of the wind
The model resolves the wind flow and includes the effects of canopy leaves and tree stems on the wind.
The simulations include a virtual domain of roughly 6. 5 million pixels each representing a volume of air
We found that corridors could affect the wind direction and align the wind flow with the corridor that they accelerate the wind
and provide preferable conditions for ejection above the canopy where long distance dispersal could occur said Bohrer.
As society places increasing demands on agricultural land beyond food production to include ecosystem services we needed a new way to evaluate'success'in agriculture said Jason Kaye professor of biogeochemistry.
This research presents a framework for considering a suite of ecosystem services that could be derived from agricultural land
Our analysis shows how the effort to improve water quality with cover crops will affect other ecosystem services that we expect from agricultural land.
The research published in the March issue of Agricultural Systems quantified the benefits offered by cover crops across more than 10 ecosystem services.
Benefits included increased carbon and nitrogen in soils erosion prevention more mycorrhizal colonization--beneficial soil fungus that helps plants absorb nutrients--and weed suppression.
Lead researcher Meagan Schipanski explained that commonly used measurements of ecosystem services can be misleading due to the episodic nature of some services and the time sensitivity of management windows.
By integrating a suite of ecosystem services into a unified analytical framework we highlighted the potential for cover crops to influence a wide array of ecosystem services.
We estimated that cover crops increased eight of 11 ecosystem services. In addition we demonstrated the importance of
considering temporal dynamics when assessing management system effects on ecosystem services. Trade-offs occurred between economic metrics
and environmental benefits said Schipanski who was a postdoctoral scholar at Penn State when she led the cover crop study.
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011