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A Rallying Cry for Naming All Species on Earth
Posted by New York Times: Rachel Nuwer on January 24th, 2013
New York Times: Most species will go extinct before they are ever discovered -- or so some researchers believe. It is something that conservationists agonize over at professional meetings and in scientific papers. But the situation may not be so hopeless after all, one team argues. Naming all of earth’s species is an endeavor well within science’s grasp, they say, if only researchers will focus their efforts.
In a paper published in Science, the team delivers good news in three-fold. Taxonomy, or the branch of...
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Hobbled on Energy, India Ponders a Multitude of Dams
Posted by New York Times: Rachel Nuwer on January 7th, 2013
New York Times: As we noted here last week, over 600 million people lost power in India last summer, setting a modern record for the number of people affected by a blackout. Well before that, though, India’s government was grappling with growing pressure to increase the dependability of its electricity service -- for the growing numbers who have intermittent power and the 400 million who live without it.
As a solution, the government proposed constructing 292 dams throughout the Indian Himalayas -- roughly a...
A Biodiversity Map, Version 2.0
Posted by New York Times: Rachel Nuwer on December 22nd, 2012
New York Times: University of Copenhagen Researchers have produced a new biodiversity map divided into 11 large biogeographic realms.
Tigers and pandas live in Asia, kangaroos and koalas in Australia and polar bears and snowy owls in the Arctic. The world can be divided into regions based upon the unique types of animals that live there. Or so the thinking went when Alfred Russel Wallace published the scientific world`s first global biodiversity map in 1876.
More than a century has come and gone since Wallace...
Tracking a Worrisome ‘Dead Zone’
Posted by New York Times: Rachel Nuwer on October 15th, 2012
New York Times: For over a quarter-century, the marine ecologist Nancy Rabalais, the executive director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, has worked to understand and to spread awareness of the so-called dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Shrimpers trawling the Gulf of Mexico first began noticing a decline in their catch rates in the 1950's. By the time Dr. Rabalais entered the scene in 1985, fishermen and scientists knew that marine life there was suffering recurring, devastating bouts of death by...
Romania: From Ancient Deforestation, a Delta Is Born
Posted by New York Times: Rachel Nuwer on September 14th, 2012
New York Times: Humans were tampering with nature long before the Industrial Revolution’s steam and internal combustion engines arrived on the scene. The invention of agriculture around 8,000 years ago, some argue, significantly changed ecosystems as it spread around the globe.
Although scientists are only just beginning to understand how these ancient alterations shaped our world today, a new study in Scientific Reports suggests that millennium-old development along the Danube River in Eastern Europe significantly...
Fracking Did Not Sully Aquifers, Limited Study Finds
Posted by New York Times: Rachel Nuwer on July 9th, 2012
New York Times: A new study enters the debate over the safety of hydraulic fracturing: researchers report that naturally occurring paths in the rock bed in northeastern Pennsylvania allowed some contaminants to migrate into shallow drinking aquifers. They found no direct connection between the contamination and shale-gas drilling operations in the region, however.
"The good news is there is no direct link between this finding with saline water and shell gas extraction," said Avner Vengosh, a geochemist at Duke...
United States: Wild Salmon Are Not Holding Up, Study Shows
Posted by New York Times: Rachel Nuwer on February 9th, 2012
New York Times: Since 1964, the Mokelumne River Fish Hatchery in California has supplied the watershed with four to 10 million juvenile Chinook salmon each year. The hatchery began the practice as a way of countering the effects of dams that block migration and making sure that the salmon population remained viable. But recent research shows that the massive influx of hatchery-raised fish is masking the fact that wild fish populations are not holding up.
“Without distinguishing hatchery from wild fish, the perception...
Not All Wetlands Are Created Equal
Posted by New York Times: Rachel Nuwer on January 24th, 2012
New York Times: To many, it’s a familiar scenario: a strip mall suddenly pops up in what was once a desolate quagmire or boggy boondock.
But people are coming to realize that these seemingly wasted plots where land meets water provide a valuable ecological service. In addition to nurturing biodiversity, wetlands purify water, produce fish, store carbon dioxide that would otherwise contribute to global warming, and protect shorelines from floods, storm surges and erosion.
Since the early 20th century, development...
United Kingdom: No One-Size-Fits-All for Climate Change
Posted by New York Times: Rachel Nuwer on November 3rd, 2011
New York Times: As we noted here in a recent post, a substantial body of research indicates that species tend to become smaller as a result of global warming and other climate change patterns.
So researchers in California were surprised to find that West Coast birds, on the contrary, have been growing larger in recent decades.
“We went into this expecting to find that birds are getting smaller, because that’s what’s been seen before,” said Rae Goodman, a biologist and the lead author of a new paper detailing...
A Salmon Virus: Where Do We Go From Here?
Posted by New York Times: Rachel Nuwer on October 23rd, 2011
New York Times: If anything is certain about the recent discovery of infectious salmon anemia in two wild juvenile salmon in British Columbia, it’s the extent of the uncertainties. Questions range from whether its discovery will be confirmed in additional lab tests to whether it has spread widely to how to contain it. Filling in the unknowns is the first order of business.
Representatives of the aquaculture industry argue that the two cases may be false positives. Daniel Pauly, a fisheries biologist at the University...