Just days after Alex, the season’s first Atlantic-basin hurricane, brushed the U.S. coastline, William Gray and Philip Klotzbach of the Colorado State University hurricane forecast team issued a report this morning slightly reducing the team’s seasonal forecast. However, the researchers still call for above-average hurricane activity this year and expect slightly above-average tropical cyclone activity in August and September.
As detailed in today’s updated Atlantic seasonal hurrican
A novel and exciting study that will provide new insights into the key relationships between climate, water availability and human activities in the semi-arid regions of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is getting under way at the University of Reading. The research will help shape our perception of the past, present and future of one of the most complex – and often troubled – parts of the world.
With a major funding award of nearly £1,240,000 from the Leverhulme Trust, a uniq
The framework conditions for Norwegian research in Antarctica are completely changing. The Norwegian summer station, Troll, will be a year-round station, and the airstrip beside Troll will soon accommodate intercontinental flights. This will have enormous consequences for Norwegian research.
From February 2005, year-round operations at the Norwegian research station in Antarctica will commence. At the same time, the airstrip will be able to receive heavy intercontinental flights betw
There are 76 sites on the official list of historic sites and monuments in Antarctica. 11 of them are, or used to be, Norwegian. Cultural heritage is a non-renewable resource endangered by environmental pollutants and increased tourism.
We need a lot more research on Norwegian historic sites in Antarctica, says Susan Barr, special adviser at the Norwegian Directorate for Cultural Heritage. She is president of the International Polar Heritage Committee and has been to the South and No
It’s no secret that life in the 21st century moves at a rapid pace. Human inventions such as the Internet, mobile phones and fiber optic cable have increased the speed of communication, making it possible for someone to be virtually in two places at once. But can humans speed up the rate of one of nature’s most basic and slowest processes, evolution? A study by J. Todd Streelman, new assistant professor of biology at the Georgia Institute of Technology suggests that humans may have sped up the ev
Research from the University of Michigan shows that the current federal plan to reduce the “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico may not be enough to protect the region’s half billion dollar a year shrimp industry.
Researchers from U-M, Louisiana State University, and Limnotech Inc, an Ann Arbor-based firm, used three different models to analyze oxygen depletion and to answer two key questions: Is the expanded dead zone human-caused? Will a proposed goal of 30 percent nitrogen loa
Mount St. Helens 20 years after the eruption
When Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980, it set off an enormous avalanche, spewed out deadly hot steam, and buried a vast area with volcanic rock and ash, violently shattering its 123-year ’slumber.’ Ecologists used this once in a life-time chance to discover how ecosystems respond to such a natural disturbance.
The symposium “Ecological Recovery After the 1980 Eruptions of Mount St. Helens” will reveal how the surrounding lan
Symposium 5: Fighting the Odds: The Challenge to Save the Sagebrush Biome will be held in Oregon Ballroom 203 on Tuesday, August 3, 8:00 AM to 11:30 AM at the Oregon Convention Center
The sagebrush biome covers forty million hectares of the American West. Shaped by climate, fire, floods and volcanic eruptions since the Pleistocene era, the sagebrush biome now faces the impacts of increased cultivation, urbanization, exotic plant species, and altered fire patterns. In a session to be
By applying new mathematical techniques to river ecology, a University of Maryland biology professor has found that removing dams to reconnect rivers in a watershed like Oregon’s Willamette River could result in significant wildlife habitat restoration benefits at a comparatively small economic cost.
William Fagan, associate professor of biology at the University of Maryland, presented his findings at the Society for Conservation Biology’s Annual meeting, last week at Colum
In the next 100 years, Alaska will experience a massive loss of its historic tundra, as global warming allows these vast regions of cold, dry, lands to support forests and other vegetation that will dramatically alter native ecosystems, an Oregon State University researcher said today.
Polar regions such as Alaska will be among the first to illustrate the profound impacts of climate change, said Dominique Bachelet, an associate professor in the OSU Department of Bioengineering and
A huge, largely underground industry has been built on the moss that drapes some forest trees, raising ecological concerns, questions about export of potentially invasive species, and other issues that have scientists, land managers and businesses unsure about how to monitor, regulate or control this market amid so many uncertainties.
A report on this trade in forest moss – which is sometimes legal, often on the black market – was made today by a botanist from Oregon State Universit
For most of the past 4,500 years, cod was king in the Gulf of Maine’s coastal waters. Today, cod have given way to the Jonah crab with potential long-term consequences for coastal fisheries, according to a University of Maine research report published in the journal Ecosystems.
With crabs and lobsters at the top of the proverbial heap, the Gulf may have entered a new stable phase marked by the presence of expansive kelp beds and the near absence of sea urchins. These findings
Every family unit is a complex social network influenced by numerous inputs. In nature, social organizations at the family and small-group level can range from violent to peaceful, monogamous to polyandrous, segregated to sharing work. On Wednesday August 4, 2004, scientists will gather for the symposium, “Family Dynamics: the Evolution and Consequences of Family Organization.” The session, to be held during the Ecological Society of America’s 89th Annual Meeting in Portland, Oregon, will examine t
Love them or hate them, pocket gophers have an important effect on the soil and plants where they live. They serve as small “ecosystem engineers” generating major impacts on the physical environment.
Jim Reichman, director of the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at UC Santa Barbara, will present findings on North American pocket gophers, entitled “Bioturbation by subterranean mammalian herbivores and its impact on ecosystems,” at the annual meeting of th
In the nearest future we may witness global cooling in spite of increasing concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. That can happen, if the following hypothesis is correct: not the growth of greenhouse gases concentration provokes temperature to rise, but vice versa.
It is generally believed nowadays that greenhouse gases are responsible for the growth of temperature of the atmosphere, but that might be wrong. Recent climate change is similar to those regularly developed i
Scientists are embarking on a project which will explore how global warming is devastating one of the world’s most diverse ecosystems.
One sixth of the world’s coral reefs died due to bleaching in 1998, and the situation is getting worse. Bleaching occurs when tropical seas heat up above there normal maximums, killing the corals.
These events are equally catastrophic for the quarter of all known marine species which make their home in the reefs and for the coastal commun
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