Habitat protection, captive breeding, and research to fight life-threatening disease needed to halt a catastrophic decline in populations
A summit of leading scientists have agreed to an action plan intended to save hundreds of frogs, salamanders and other amphibians facing extinction from familiar threats such as pollution and habitat destruction, as well as a little-known fungus wiping out their populations.
The Amphibian Conservation Summit held Sept. 17-19 conclude
Beach management research based on the Angus, Scotland, coastline is causing ripples in California, thanks to the work of an Abertay postgraduate.
Andrew Staines, (age 26), researching beach management systems for his PhD, has forged a link with Pepperdine University in Malibu. The link could prove important not only for Scottish-Californian links, but also for bathing water quality in the North Sea and the Pacific in years to come.
Andrew’s research, currently funded by Ca
Broken sewers, flooded industrial plants and dead bodies are all likely to blame for poisoning the waters being drained from New Orleans.
But the water – and the muck it is leaving behind — also owes its contamination to a source as mundane as it is unexpected: Toxins common in most urban environments that made their way en masse into the water as it stagnated atop the city.
So says a University of Florida professor who has spent years studying the harmful contaminants
Scientists at the University of York have been awarded nearly £500,000 to help to establish a centre in the Atlantic Ocean to monitor gases in the atmosphere.
Dr Lucy Carpenter and Dr Alastair Lewis, of the University’s Department of Chemistry, have been awarded £487,070 by the National Environment Research Council (NERC) to set up an atmospheric observatory on the Cape Verde Islands.
The York chemists, who have been awarded the money under the NERC’s Surfa
Marine organisms hidden in caves, such as sponges, play an extremely important role in the nutrient cycle of coral reefs. Indeed they probably play the most important role of all, says Dutch biologist Sander Scheffers. And that is valuable information for nature conservationists who want to preserve the coral reefs.
In order to protect coral reefs it is important to understand how both the reefs and their environment function. Researchers often concentrate on subjects such as p
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina — probably the greatest natural disaster in U.S. history — a leading ecologist says that one of the best things that could happen to New Orleans and the rest of southern Louisiana and Mississippi would be more rain.
“People might think I’m kidding, but I’m not,” said Dr. Seth R. Reice, associate professor of biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s College of Arts and Sciences.
“The floodwater still covering much
How long does paper last?
A young Sydney researcher has been digging up landfill sites, and has shown that burying wood products, such as floor boards and furniture, can effectively prevent them from contributing to global warming.
The work shows that timber can be a greenhouse friendly material, if the products are properly disposed of at the end of their life.
For the past five years, Fabiano Ximenes and colleagues from the Cooperative Research Centre for Greenh
The Australian lungfish—one of the world’s oldest fishes and related to our ancient ancestors—may have been viewing rivers in technicolour long before dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
Recent work by postgraduate student Helena Bailes at the University of Queensland Australia, has found these unusual fish have genes for five different forms of visual pigment in their eyes. Humans only have three.
Helena is one of 13 early-career researchers who have presented their work to the
She went to investigate the local ecology. Yet during her field work on East Java, Dutch biologist Ansje Löhr became increasingly involved with the local residents, whose harvests failed and whose health was deteriorating due to extremely acidified and polluted river water. Löhr has recently received a second grant to help the Javanese population.
Löhr’s Ph.D. study was part of a larger project on the Ijen Crater Lake on East Java, Indonesia. This crater lake is the large
Marine organisms hidden in caves, such as sponges, play an extremely important role in the nutrient cycle of coral reefs. Indeed they probably play the most important role of all, says Dutch biologist Sander Scheffers. And that is valuable information for nature conservationists who want to preserve the coral reefs.
In order to protect coral reefs it is important to understand how both the reefs and their environment function. Researchers often concentrate on subjects such as p
Category 4 hurricane could cause a storm surge of as much as 25 feet in Tampa Bay, according to a University of Central Florida researcher who is looking at the risks Florida cities face from tidal surges and flooding.
Scott Hagen, an associate professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and his team of graduate students have started analyzing the potential effects of a Category 4 hurricane striking the Tampa Bay region. They ran their storm surge model with wind and pressure
The notion of sharing your grandmother’s new sexual partner might seem unappealing to us, but a study of wild greater horseshoe bats reveals that female relatives regularly share male mates, yet nearly always avoid their blood relatives.
The study, published in this week’s Nature, was led by Dr Stephen Rossiter as part of a long-term collaboration between scientists at Queen Mary, University of London, and the University of Bristol. The study used genetic analysis to look at bre
Friday (16 September) is International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer. This year scientists at British Antarctic Survey (BAS) commemorate their discovery of the Antarctic ‘ozone hole’ 20 years ago and commend the historic international agreement (the Montreal Protocol 1987) that will lead to its eventual recovery.
Jonathan Shanklin, one of the researchers who made the discovery says, “The 2005 hole is larger and deeper than the holes that formed when the discover
For the third time in as many years, glaciologist Lonnie Thompson has returned from an Andean ice field in Peru with samples from beds of ancient plants exposed for the first time in perhaps as much as 6,500 years.
In 2002, he first stumbled across some non-fossilized plants exposed by the steadily retreating Quelccaya ice cap. Carbon dating showed that plant material was at least 5,000 years old.
Then in 2004, Thompson found additional plant beds revealed by the co
As Hurricane Ophelia is set to make landfall on the North Carolina coast on Wednesday or Thursday (Sept. 14 or 15), analysis techniques developed by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Tropical Cyclones group in the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies are helping to predict the anticipated path of the storm.
Since 1982, the Tropical Cyclones group has been developing specialized tools used by forecasters with weather satellite data using i
A fossil record of the Tiger Salamander (Ambystoma tigrinum) shows population-wide changes in body size and morphology in response to climate change over the last 3,000 years. The observed changes offer predictions about the response of the species to future climate change, and the impact on the ecosystem. The research is published in the open access journal, BMC Ecology.
Researchers analysed a late-Holocene fossil record to track morphological traits in the Tiger Salamander through
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