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.
Researchers find invasive species are healthy species –– They leave their parasites behind
Globalization of commerce, especially by ships and air traffic, transports hitchhiking plants and animals around the world and in many cases they become pests in the new location –– according to an article in the February 6 issue of the journal Nature. One advantage that could explain their success is that the invaders often arrive without the parasites that hold them in check at home.
First author Mark E. Torchin, assistant research biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara,
All change for Europe’s mountains: new research to guide future
The face of Europe’s mountains is changing and could be altered forever if declining agricultural trends continue, warn scientists behind a major new EU research project announced today.
The Euro3.2 million “BioScene” project co-ordinated by the Wye campus of Imperial College London and sponsored by the European Union will evaluate the threats and the opportunities for wildlife conservation resulting from declining agriculture and seek ways of reconciling conservation of biodiversity wi
Nanocluster catalysts aim to clean up fossil fuels
Scientists from the University of Aarhus, Denmark, have developed a technique that could improve the commercial processes used to remove environmentally harmful sulphur from fossil fuels. This is currently done using a catalyst, which binds the harmful sulphur molecules to it, in much the same way as a car’s catalytic converter works.
In a paper published today in the Institute of Physics journal Nanotechnology the Danish team explain how they have studied the chemical reactions which
The dollars and sense of protecting the ocean
Groundbreaking research released on the economics of marine protected areas
For the first time anywhere, the analysis of leading economists and ecologists worldwide has been brought together in one place, to examine the economics of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs). Two special issues of the international research journal Natural Resource Modeling (Vol. 15 Nos. 3 &4) have just been published, within which the editors, Ussif Rashid Sumaila (University of British Columbia) and Anthony Char
Marketing ‘cool’ life-styles key to selling clean and green products
Psychologists and human behaviorists are being enlisted by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in a pioneering new initiative to save the planet.
Experts believe that the traditional messages from governments and green groups, urging the public to adopt environmentally-friendly life-styles and purchasing habitats, need to be overhauled.
There is concern that many of these messages are too ‘guilt-laden’ and disapproving and instead of ‘turning people on’ to the env
Distant attraction
Sopow and colleagues report in the February issue of Ecology Letters that a chemical stimulus from a galling insect changes the morphology and physiology of its host to benefit these specialized plant feeders.
Galls are atypical plant growths that provide nourishment and shelter for gall-inducing insects. Previous studies could not determine whether insect galls are induced by mechanical or chemical stimuli because gall formation occurred at the sites where the insects were active.