photo: Gabriel Legaré via flickr.
With all the focus on
tropical forest conservation and the amount of carbon emissions resulting from its deforestation, are we overlooking protecting the massive amount of carbon stored in the world's
boreal forests? That's the question asked in a new report,
The Carbon the World Forgot [PDF] -- and consider it shows that boreal forests store on average twice as much carbon per area as do tropical forests, it's a question certainly worth asking:...
A new article in the journal
Marine Biology brings to light the interesting feeding habits of the deep sea crab
Munidopsis andamanica, better known to the world (somewhat perplexingly) as the
squat lobster. It seems that the this particular animal eats exclusively discarded wood that sinks to the seafloor -- trees, leaves, old wooden shipwrecks are all fair game:...
photo: Drewe Zanki via flickr.
New figures from the
Australian Koala Foundation paint a dark picture for the future of the iconic marsupial. Just completed research shows that the current koala population is somewhere between 43,000-80,000 individuals, a decline from an estimated 100,000 in 2003, and without better conservation efforts they could all be extinct within 30 years:...
photo: Wikipedia.
There aren't too many good un-anticipated consequences when it comes to climate change, but here's one: Scientists from the
British Antarctic Survey have discovered that in areas of open water left exposed by rapid ice melting around the Antarctic Peninsula, large new blooms of
phytoplankton are occurring. As the blooms die off they sink to the bottom,
storing away carbon they've absorbed from the atmosphere:...
Scientists reconstructed the ancient climate at Maxwell Bay in the South Shetland Islands. Photo: Barry Thomas via flickr.
In case you wanted another piece of evidence that
current melting in Antarctica is really a product of global warming, researchers of the UK's
National Oceanography Centre, Southampton say that the widespread loss of glacial ice in the Antarctic Peninsula is unprecedented in the past 14,000 years:...
It looks like forest, but it's a palm oil plantation... photo: sampsadaily via flickr.
Three stories coming in focusing on
deforestation,
climate change and biodiversity: Scientists point out that when it comes to carbon emissions from peatland loss SE Asia leads the way; development of
palm oil plantations on Borneo is threatening several of the world's rarest cats; and (a small bright spot in this) palm oil producers in the rest of the world pledge to not create new plantations on peatlands:...
Yesterday the exhibition
Bits 'n Pieces launched at
Material Connexion in New York,
a dialogue between the analog and the digital technologies within design in a post-digital era. What grabbed our attention in the busy space during the opening, were the insects doing graphic design! A sophisticated machine transformed the movements of a few bugs into beautiful patterns and logos and printed them out as fast as the insects performed. ...
photo: Wagner T. Cassimiro via flickr.
New research published in
Nature Geoscience shows that the oft-used figure for the contribution of
deforestation towards total carbon dioxide is a bit too high. Rather than 20%, as was estimated by the 2007 IPCC report and which would mean that deforestation emissions were greater than the global transport sector, a more accurate estimate is 12%:...
The monitor lizard is under threat due to habitat loss and hunting by humans for food. All images: ICUN.
The latest update to the
IUCN Red List of Threatened Species is in and if you were expecting good news prepared to be disappointed. Of the more than 47,000 species surveyed, about 17,000 are at serious risk -- of those 21% of the world's mammal species, 12% of birds, 28% of reptiles, 30% of amphibians, 35% of invertebrates, 37% of freshwater fish and 70% of plants:...
You can't navigate through multiyear ice... photo: arcticroute.com via flickr.
You've probably seen all sort of predictions about when the
Arctic will see it's first ice-free summer in, umm, all of human history. Well, the University of Manitoba's
David Barber, just returned from an expedition to examine multi-year ice in the Beaufort Sea, has told
Reuters that, for all practical purposes we're already there:...
photo: Photos8.com via flickr.
Recently we heard that Africa's elephants face a bleak future, but it seems the world's tigers aren't long for this world either.
The Economic Times reports that at the
Kathmandu Global Tiger Workshop, the latest numbers show that the world population of 3,500 tigers could all be extinct in 15-20 years without better conservation efforts:...
Greater short-nosed fruit bat feeding on kapok, photo: Wikipedia.
New research published in the online journal
PLoS ONE demonstrates for the first time that a non-human adult animal species regularly engages in oral sex behavior. While the behavior has been seen in juvenile animals before, this is the first time it has been observed in adult animals.
Warning: While the following information is scientifically accurate, some of the descriptions are slightly graphic. ...
photo: Kevin Dooley/Creative Commons via flickr.
Between the brouhaha over
Super Freakonomics and an article from the
BBC, there seems to be a lot of discussion about whether or not the climate is actually warming now. It didn't seem to matter that
NOAA stats indicate warming, and that the
Union of Concerned Scientists, as well as numerous prestigious climate scientists' work all show that the trend is toward more warming. Well, the
Associated Press put their own statisticians on the case and found, yes, the world is indeed still warming: ...
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on 11.20.09
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