The growing popularity of farm-raised salmon has plunged the commercial fishing industry in the Pacific Northwest into a state of crisis, according to a new report by Stanford University researchers.

Writing in the October issue of ENVIRONMENT magazine, the research team found that, since the late 1980s, worldwide production of farm salmon has increased fivefold, while the market share of wild-caught salmon from Alaska, British Columbia and Washington state has steadily declined.

New research shows how extraction of whales has resulted in broad and devastating ecosystem impacts

A new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences hypothesizes that overfishing of whales in the North Pacific Ocean triggered one of the longest and most complex ecological chain reactions ever described, beginning in the open oceans 50 years ago, and leading to the decimation of Alaska’s kelp forest ecosystems today.

The paper, Sequential mega

Agriculture is responsible for 8% of the total emissions of greenhouse effect gases and so, given the EU adhesion to the 1997 Kyoto protocol, it is obliged to assume a certain percentage in the reduction of these emissions. 41% of nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions of human origin in Europe comes from agriculture. The soil, through microbic processes of nitrification and denitrification, is deemed to be mainly responsible for these N2O emissions, contributing to NO emissions also.

Meadowlands fo

A NERC-funded researcher is tracking a number of migrating marine turtles which could be sent off-course or washed ashore by Hurricane Isabel. Updates on the turtles’ progress can be followed on the web.

Dr Brendan Godley and colleagues from the University of Exeter are using satellite technology to track the endangered green and loggerhead turtles as they leave their nesting beaches in North Carolina and the Cayman Islands and start the long journey to their winter foraging grounds. They at

Do you really know what you are breathing when sitting at home? Europeans spend 90% of their time indoors. But closed environments are not always the healthiest. The latest studies on human exposure to indoor pollution, released today by the European Commission at its Joint Research Centre (JRC) facilities in Ispra (Italy), reveal that indoor environments pose their own threats to health and, in some cases, can be at least twice as polluting as outdoor environments. Hundreds of volatile components

Taking a proactive stance to address environmental concerns, leading engineers from business, academia, and government have united to draft principles to guide their trade.

Nine tenets of Green Engineering (below) were developed during a May 18-22, 2003, multidisciplinary conference entitled “Green Engineering: Defining the Principles” held in Sandestin, Florida.

Attendees from such diverse entities as the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, NSF, Siemans, and the

A CSIRO Livestock Industries researcher, Dr Caroline Kerr, will use an award from the Australian Government Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry to ascertain whether certain immune system molecules can be used to reduce livestock stress levels.

Dr Kerr is the Australian Wool Innovation winner and one of 18 researchers and innovators to be awarded the 2003 Science and Innovation Award for Young People in Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry.

Presented in Canberra by the

As Hurricane Isabel converges on the US East Coast, a veteran ESA spacecraft has provided meteorologists with crucial insights into the underlying pressure system powering the storm.

An entire flotilla of satellites is being kept busy tracking Hurricane Isabel in visible and infrared light, as well as gathering additional measurements of local sea surface temperature, wind and rainfall levels. ESA spacecraft ERS-2 has made the picture more detailed still by discerning the wind speed and dire

Awareness of the global warming effects of carbon dioxide (CO2) is relatively recent, but the greenhouse gas has been playing a critical role in warming our planet for billions of years, according to University of Maryland geologist Jay Kaufman and Virginia Polytechnic Institute geologist Shuhai Xiao.

Their results, which provide the best evidence to date of the age of the Calvin cycle—the photosynthetic cycle by which plants convert light energy and CO2 into cellular tissue—will be publishe

The ability of several of Colorado’s prime ski areas to respond to winter drought is threatened by acidic runoff from abandoned mines, according to researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Northwest Colorado Council of Governments.

Contamination known as acid-rock drainage enters waterways, such as Summit County’s Snake River, that are used for making artificial snow. When the snow melts, the water can run into streams not previously polluted, further spreading

The Ministers of the environment from Nigeria and Cameroon have established an agreement to protect the Cross River gorilla, the world’s rarest subspecies of gorilla that totals a mere 280 individuals throughout its entire range, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). The Cross River gorilla is only found in Cross River State, Nigeria and western Cameroon and is highly threatened from poaching and habitat fragmentation and loss.

The two countries – represented by Cameroon

Environmental engineering researchers have developed a novel two-part approach for cleaning up toxic chlorinated solvents spilled into underground water supplies from former dry cleaning and industrial operations.

The patent-pending technique, which uses a macroemulsion composed of alcohol and food-grade surfactants, simultaneously reduces the density of the pollutant – to keep it from sinking farther into the groundwater – and helps separate it from soil particles so it can be flushed out.

The dramatic loss of marine wildlife recorded last year in the Western Baltic Sea between Denmark, Germany and Sweden is largely the result of extreme weather conditions and an increase in man-made nutrients, according to the findings of a report recently released by the Helsinki Commission (HELCOM), to which the European Commission provided significant input. Last autumn, the two organisations joined forces to investigate exceptional oxygen depletion in the Western Baltic that had led to hundreds o

Three “Doppler On Wheels” (DOW) mobile radars developed partly at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) are heading toward the mid-Atlantic coast to intercept the eye of Hurricane Isabel as the powerful storm hits land. Meanwhile, the nation’s next-generation weather model, developed at NCAR and other labs, is training its electronic “eyes” on a virtual Isabel at NCAR’s supercomputing center in Boulder. The DOWs will deploy at or near the coast in the direct path of t

Plant life in the world’s oceans has become less productive since the early 1980s, absorbing less carbon, which may in turn impact the Earth’s carbon cycle, according to a study that combines NASA satellite data with NOAA surface observations of marine plants. Microscopic ocean plants called phytoplankton account for about half the transfer of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the environment into plant cells by photosynthesis. Land plants pull in the other half. In the atmosphere, CO2 is

Biological invasions have well-known direct effects on native ecosystems but may also unleash forces with complex, unexpected consequences. These ecological surprises may be especially common in simple systems, like islands, following introduction of ’megainvaders,’ like tramp ants.

In the September issue of Ecology Letters, O’Dowd, Green, and Lake show that impacts of invasion by the crazy ant Anoplolepis gracilipes ramify through the food web in rainforest on Christmas Isla