Ecology, The Environment and Conservation
This complex theme deals primarily with interactions between organisms and the environmental factors that impact them, but to a greater extent between individual inanimate environmental factors.
innovations-report offers informative reports and articles on topics such as climate protection, landscape conservation, ecological systems, wildlife and nature parks and ecosystem efficiency and balance.
EU research project proves that personal choice can dramatically improve urban air quality
Stop smoking and leave your car at home. Encouraging people in cities to make simple lifestyle changes, such as using alternative forms of transport to the car, can significantly reduce their exposure to harmful air pollutants. The findings of the first in a series of Europe-wide air quality studies was announced today in Brussels by European Research Commissioner Philippe Busquin and Didier Gosuin, Environment Minister of the Brussels-Capital Region. The first phase of the “Population Exposure to Ai
The flight of ICAROS
EU satellite research project tackles urban air quality from space
A three-year project led by the Commission with ten partners from Greece, Germany, Hungary and Italy has developed an innovative system for monitoring and managing urban air quality and the related health risks. Results of the “ICAROS NET” technique were presented today in Budapest. ICAROS uses satellite-borne sensors to monitor the concentration of harmful particles in the air, caused by heavy industry, traffic and ho
The EU joins forces with international partners on research to "clean up" fossil fuels
Today in Washington the European Commission, represented by Loyola de Palacio, Vice President in charge of Energy and Transport, signed an international charter on CO2 capture and storage (CO2/carbon sequestration).
This will create the “Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum” with Australia, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Italy, India, Japan, Mexico, Norway, the People’s Republic of China, Russia, the United Kingdom and the US. The Forum aims to stimulate research into carbon sequestratio
Researchers discover birds protect trees in neotropics by eating insects
High in the canopy of a Neotropical Panamanian forest, researchers have discovered that birds, especially native ones during the rainy season, protect trees by reducing the numbers of leaf-eating insects.
The finding — being published this week on the Online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — was a mild surprise, said researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. That birds help crops and low-lying plants in temperate forests by devouri
Simulated global environmental changes impact plant diversity
In a high-performance machine, each part is essential to the overall function of the whole. In ecology, species diversity is necessary to the smooth operation of the ecosystem. Until recently, little attention has been paid to the potential ecological effects on plant diversity from combined global environmental changes including increased atmospheric CO2, warming, elevated nitrogen pollution, and increased precipitation. Scientists from the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology in
Plant diversity threatened by climate change and buildup of greenhouse gas, study reveals
Doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in the air significantly reduces the number of plant species that grow in the wild, according to a newly released study on climate change in California.
The results, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), are the latest findings from the Jasper Ridge Global Change Project at Stanford University – a multiyear experiment designed to demonstrate how grassland ecosystems will respond to predicted increases in temperature an