A futuristic Duke University simulation of forest growth under the carbon dioxide-enriched atmosphere expected by 2050 does not reinforce the optimism of those who believe trees can absorb that extra CO2 by growing faster, said a spokesman for the experiment.
During seven years of exposure to carbon dioxide concentrations 1½ times higher than today’s, test plots of loblolly pines have indeed boosted their annual growth rates by between 10 and 25 percent, found the researchers. But “the
A growing body of evidence questions calculations by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that the land will automatically provide a significant, long-term carbon “sink” to offset some of the effects of greenhouse gas emissions. Scientists reported these findings today at the 2004 AAAS (Triple-A-S) Annual Meeting.
The latest information about carbon dioxide fertilization – by which plants soak up carbon from the atmosphere – “really paints a different picture of the way the world w
High tech tools may help find solutions to animal-human conflicts in the sea — Sea turtles, porpoises, albatrosses and tunas could see brighter days ahead
How can scientists follow leatherback sea turtles that dive to crushing depths a half-mile below the surface and swim across 80% of the world’s ocean? Or tunas that race faster than most boats? Or albatrosses that soar halfway across the Pacific without sleep or a meal — unlike their human observers? Science is beginning to m
A study led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, has linked population declines of California’s desert bighorn sheep with the effects of climate change. What’s more, many of the state’s remaining bighorn populations could face extinction if certain global warming forecasts for the next 60 years come true.
In the study, which is published in the current issue of Conservation Biology, the authors found that of the 80 groups of desert bighorn sheep known to
Scientists have shed new light on the impact of global environmental changes on remote tropical forests with studies that show that the rates of growth and death of trees in pristine forests across the Amazon have accelerated substantially in recent decades. The scientists also demonstrate that the tropical forests globally have warmed by half a degree in the last 20 years and warn that this is expected to increase by a further three to eight degrees by the end of the century, with dangerous implicat
During the last decade, Val Beasley of the University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine has led a team wanting to know why the world’s amphibian populations have been dwindling or riddled with limb deformities.
Evidence from his and other teams points to increasing numbers of common parasites as an important cause. However, the problems facing amphibian habitats really pose a poignant example of ecosystems out of balance because of human activity, according to Beasley, a professor o
Woodpeckers carry fungus in beaks that promotes tree decay
A new study in the journal Condor by the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and Arkansas State University suggests that a woodpecker’s beak is a virtual petri dish of fungal spores that play a key role in the decay of dead trees, or “snags.”
The authors examined several species of woodpeckers living in ponderosa pine forests in northern California and Oregon, finding that over 60 percent of the sa
It’s not just football supporters who join together in a rousing chorus to celebrate a victory. Winning a fight also appears to put the tropical boubou, an African bird, in the mood for a song. Research published in BMC Ecology describes a rare example of a context-specific birdsong and identifies the tropical boubou as the first bird species known to sing a ’victory duet’. The birds probably sing to deter other birds from intruding into their territory. According to
Scientists agree that coral reefs are in an alarming global state of decline. However, determining the main cause or causes of this decline has proven a much more contentious issue. In the current edition of the Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology (JEMBE), Harbor Branch marine scientist Dr.Brian Lapointe and colleagues present new evidence they hope will help settle one major debate: whether pollution or overfishing is the main cause of the coral-smothering spread of seaweed on many re
Unless the wildlife trade can be controlled, Asia will lose much of its unique biodiversity, experts of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) said today in Kuala Lumpur at the 7th Conference of the Parties for the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP-7), convened to address the world’s priority conservation issues.
“Asia’s wildlife is being sold on a massive scale throughout the region for food, medicines and pets, and populations of many species are declining or facing local
Oil spills are a real disaster. They cause worst troubles to sea birds and animals. A risk of an accident always exists within areas of oil mining and transporting, especially, in the sea. Beginning the exploitation of oil and gas fields on the sea shelf, our country is to face inevitable ecological problems, and it would be helpful to know in advance how to solve them.
An international conference on the impact of oil industry on wild animals was held in Hamburg in October of 2003. There, re
Research shows potential warming unmatched over past 48,000 years
The new century may bring hundreds or even thousands of plant and animal extinctions to the Andes Mountains of Peru according to new research by Florida Institute of Technology Paleo-Ecologist Mark Bush. Bush’s findings, chronicled in the Feb. 6 issue of the prestigious journal Science, result from the study of the first continuous record of Andean climate change during the past 48,000 years. The Andes region of Pe
Scientific exploration to measure scat in the rainforest
Insect feces and leaf litter in the rainforest may provide important clues to better understanding global climate change, according to a group of scientists conducting research in the Panamanian rainforest on a JASON Project expedition.
Clues to determining how these factors contribute to global climate change lie in scientists investigating how plant and animal activity in the rainforest treetops, known as the canopy,
The transformation of terrestrial and coastal ecosystems by humans is well known, but only recently have the impacts of anthropogenic forces in the open ocean been recognized. In particular, intense exploitation by industrial fisheries is rapidly changing oceanic ecosystems by drastically reducing populations of many marine species. For most oceanic species we lack a historical perspective.
In an important article to shortly appear in Ecology Letters, Baum and Myers demonstrate that the ini
Solitary organisms can minimise fitness loss from parasitism with a facultative change to an earlier reproduction. Such a shift of the reproductive effort gives the host a chance to compensate for the cost on future reproduction resulting from the infection. In the case of social insects, where brood care and reproductive effort are shared between the queen and her workers, adjustments of the reproductive effort would depend on collective decision-making.
In the February issue of Ecology L
A promising new way of controlling the mites that can cause asthma and other allergies is now under development.
It could lead to dramatic progress in preventing these conditions and reduce the estimated £700 million a year spent in the UK on treating them.
The technique uses a computer model to assess how modifying a domestic environment can reduce numbers of house dust mites in beds, carpets and elsewhere.
Development of the model has been led by University College Londo
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