Joint study largely confirms earlier dire predictions of species loss from climate change

The Earth could see massive waves of species extinctions around the world if global warming continues unabated, according to a new study published in the scientific journal Conservation Biology.

Given its potential to damage areas far away from human habitation, the study finds that global warming represents one of the most pervasive threats to our planet’s biodiversity – in

A “dead zone” that formed in 2001 in Narragansett Bay left a lethal legacy, Brown University research shows. In a study of nine mussel reefs, published in Ecology, researchers report that oxygen-depleted water killed one reef and nearly wiped out the rest. A year later, only one of the nine reefs was recovering. The result was a sharp reduction in the reefs’ ability to filter phytoplankton, a process that helps control “dead zone” formation.

Fish kills, foul odors and closed beaches

In the last decade, the new theory of metabolic ecology has derived general predictions for a wide range of ecological patterns from fundamental physical and biochemical principles.

Predictions for tree growth, mortality and size distributions are particularly significant in light of their potential to help explain globally important carbon stores and fluxes of tropical forests. In a forthcoming pair of papers in Ecology Letters, Muller-Landau and collaborators associated

A special issue containing a number of articles in aspects of amphioxus genetics research, authored by leading international scientists, has just been published in International Journal of Biological Sciences.

The discovery in the 1980’s that animals as diverse as flies and mouse shared a toolkit of basic developmental genes helped to unite biologists, leading to the creation of the new discipline of evolutionary developmental biology that tries to explain the evolutionary c

Emissions under control in coal combustion with new technology

VTT is developing technology that will allow fuels including coal to be utilised more efficiently in energy production; even without emitting any carbon dioxide.

In the new technology fossil fuels are combusted with pure oxygen separated from the air. Combustion gas consists mostly of carbon dioxide and water vapour. Carbon dioxide can be liquefied after cooling and stored in geological formations.

Polar stratospheric clouds have become the focus of many research projects in recent years due to the discovery of their role in ozone depletion, but essential aspects of these clouds remain a mystery. MIPAS, an instrument onboard ESA’s Envisat, is allowing scientists to gain information about these clouds necessary for modelling ozone loss.

“The Michelson Interferometer for Passive Atmospheric Sounding (MIPAS) is unique in its possibilities to detect polar stratospheric clouds (PSCs)

Plants apparently do much less than previously thought to counteract global warming, according to a paper to be published in next week’s online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The authors, including Bruce Hungate of Northern Arizona University and lead author Kees-Jan van Groenigen of UC Davis, discovered that plants are limited in their impact on global warming because of their dependence on nitrogen and other trace elements. These elements are e

An enormous iceberg, C-16, rammed into the well-known Drygalski Ice Tongue, a large sheet of glacial ice and snow in the Central Ross Sea in Antarctica, on 30 March 2006, breaking off the tongue’s easternmost tip and forming a new iceberg.

This animation, comprised of images acquired by Envisat’s Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR), shows the iceberg and the ice tongue before and after the collision. On 26 March, C-16 was pinned at the southern edge of the ice tongue but had s

Brown University geologists have created the longest continuous record of ocean surface temperatures, dating back 5 million years. The record shows slow, steady cooling in the eastern equatorial Pacific, a finding that challenges the notion that the Ice Ages alone sparked a global cooling trend. Results are published in Science.

Using chemical clues mined from ocean mud, Brown University researchers have generated the longest continuous record of ocean temperatures on Earth.

Cracks and fins in the sand in an American desert look very similar to features seen on Mars and may indicate the recent presence of water at the surface, according to a new study by researcher Greg Chavdarian and Dawn Sumner, associate professor of geology at UC Davis.

“Recent, as in ongoing now,” Sumner said.

Images from the Mars rover “Opportunity” show patterns of cracks across the surface of boulders and outcrops. Some of these cracks are associated with long, thin fins tha

This year, spring is so late that the global climate warming is hardly believable. Is it applicable to Russia? Probably the fact is that weather cataclysms and anomalies are now occuring more and more frequently, and warm autumn gets balanced by frosts and cold spring? Phenologists from the Institute of Global Climate and Ecology of Rosgidromet (Hydrometeorological Committee), Russian Academy of Sciences, decided to find out what was happening in reality in European part of Russia, and analyzed obs

New projections hopeful

Deforestation and habitat loss are expected to lead to an extinction crisis among tropical forest species. Humans in rural settings contribute most to deforestation of extant tropical forests. However, “Trends such as slowing population growth and intense urbanization give reason to hope that deforestation will slow, regeneration will accelerate, and mass extinction of tropical forest species will be avoided,” report S.J. Wright, Smithsonian Tropical Resea

White sturgeon populations in the Columbia River may be declining due to the presence of elevated amounts of foreign chemicals including DDT and polychlorinated biphenyls in their bodies, according to new studies by researchers at Oregon State University.

The research by Carl Schreck and Grant Feist, biologists in OSU’s College of Agricultural Sciences, has been published in the journals Environmental Health Perspectives and Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology.

Animals bred in captivity for reintroduction to the wild are able to retain their defences against predators for several generations, ecologists have found. According to new research published in the British Ecological Society’s Journal of Applied Ecology, tadpoles of the Mallorcan midwife toad (Alytes muletensis) retain their ability to change their body shape – a defence they have evolved in the face of predators – even after being bred in captivity for three to eight generations. The

An international team of scientists are working at a rapid pace to study environmental conditions behind the fast-acting and widespread coral bleaching currently plaguing Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. NASA’s satellite data supply scientists with near-real-time sea surface temperature and ocean color data to give them faster than ever insight into the impact coral bleaching can have on global ecology.

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is a massive marine habitat system made up of 2,90

Fecal matter of red colobus monkeys collected in western Uganda has yielded a wealth of knowledge about human land-use change and wildlife health and conservation. The main lesson, researchers say, is that the intensity of tree removal translates directly to parasite populations and the risk of infection of their hosts.

In an effort to glean predictive power out of years of research on the effects of forest fragmentation on various species and ecological processes, researchers looked