Archive for March 8th, 2010

World’s nature ‘becoming extinct at fastest rate on record’, conservationists warn

Telegraph: Despite hope that nature was fighting back, it appeared that the global wipeout of species was accelerating, they said. Speaking ahead of two next week on the state of British and European wildlife, Simon Stuart, from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, admitted that the rate of extinction had not slowed. Previously research has shown that world was currently in the midst of a "sixth great extinction" of species, which was being driven by natural habitat ...

United Kingdom: Environment Agency debuts map of hydropower hot spots

Business Green: The Environment Agency will later today release a new map designed to show areas in England and Wales where viable hydropower resources are going untapped. The hydropower opportunities and environmental sensitivities map forms part of a major new report from the agency, which found close to 26,000 locations where a hydropower turbine could generate renewable electricity. The agency said that taken as a whole, these unused sites could generate about three per cent of the UK's ...

Global climate change and biodiversity

New Nation: Dr. Mohammad Ibrahim, an eminent scientist of Bangladesh and nature lover notes that about 40 per cent of about 44 thousand species of the world are at stake due to climatic and other disasters. Human-induced climate change tends to reduce the genetic diversity of individual species. Again, successful adaptation to climate change may depend to a greater extent on the ability of species to disperse to new areas but this ability is also increasingly impeded by human-induced landscape change. ...

Frog in Australia goes from ‘extinct’ to very, very endangered

Mongabay: Facing habitat loss, pollution, climate change, and the devastating chytrid fungus, there has been little positive news about amphibians recently. However, a story out of Australia brings a much needed respite from bad news. In 2008 Luke Pearce, a fisheries conservation officer, stumbled on a frog that had been thought to be extinct for over thirty years. Not recorded since the 1970s, Pearce rediscovered the yellow-spotted bell frog (Litoria castanea) on rural Australian farmland in ...