habitat loss – Page 13 – Desdemona Despair

Aerial view of brine pools at the SQM lithium mine on the Atacama salt flat in the Atacama desert of northern Chile, 10 January 2013. Photo: Ivan Alvarado / Reuters

August 24, 2019

Farmers in Chile losing freshwater battle with lithium mines – “We’ll be left here with no water, no animals, no agriculture – with nothing”

By Grace Livingstone 15 August 2019 SANTIAGO, Chile (BBC News) – Out of habit, Sara Plaza smiles when her photo is taken, but when she talks about what has happened to the land around her home, tears start to run down her face. “There used to be beautiful lagoons down there, with hundreds of flamingos,” […]

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured these images of several fires burning in the states of Rondônia, Amazonas, Pará, and Mato Grosso on 13 August 2019. Data: MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS/LANCE and GIBS/Worldview and VIIRS data from NASA EOSDIS/LANCE and GIBS/Worldview, and the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership Photo: Lauren Dauphin / NASA Earth Observatory

August 20, 2019

Image of the Day: Satellite view of forest-clearing fires in the Amazon, August 2019

By Adam Voiland 16 August 2019 (NASA) – In the Amazon rainforest, fire season has arrived. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured these images of several fires burning in the states of Rondônia, Amazonas, Pará, and Mato Grosso on August 11 and August 13, 2019. In the Amazon region, fires are rare for much […]

A bald eagle, one of the Endangered Species Act’s success stories, near Castle Dale, Utah. Photo: Brandon Thibodeaux / The New York Times

August 12, 2019

Trump Administration weakens protections for endangered species – “If we make decisions based on short-term economic costs, we’re going to have a whole lot more extinct species”

By Lisa Friedman 12 August 2019 WASHINGTON (The New York Times) – The Trump administration on Monday announced that it would change the way the Endangered Species Act is applied, significantly weakening the nation’s bedrock conservation law credited with rescuing the bald eagle, the grizzly bear and the American alligator from extinction. The changes could […]

Aerial view of Bristol Bay, Alaska. A controversial mining project that was all but killed by the Obama administration is now moving forward under President Trump's EPA. Photo: Jason Ching / CNN

August 11, 2019

EPA dropped salmon protection after Trump met with Alaska governor – Scientists dumbfounded at gold mine approval that will cause “complete loss of fish habitat” – “We were told to get out of the way and just make it happen”

By Scott Bronstein, Curt Devine, Drew Griffin, and Ashley Hackett 9 August 2019 (CNN) – The Environmental Protection Agency told staff scientists that it was no longer opposing a controversial Alaska mining project that could devastate one of the world’s most valuable wild salmon fisheries just one day after President Trump met with Alaska’s governor, […]

Species richness of freshwater megafauna in the year 1500 and in the 21st Century in Europe. Graphic: Fengzhi He, 2019

August 10, 2019

88 percent decline of big freshwater animals over 40-year period – “The results are alarming and confirm the fears of scientists involved in studying and protecting freshwater biodiversity”

By Nadja Neumann 8 August 2019 (IGB) – Rivers and lakes cover just about one percent of Earth’s surface, but are home to one third of all vertebrate species worldwide. At the same time, freshwater life is highly threatened. Scientists from the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB) and international colleagues have now […]

IBAMA environmental agency agents investigate illegal deforestation in Jamanxim National Forest in Pará state, Brazil. Photo: Mongabay

July 30, 2019

Brazil’s Amazon deforestation surge is real, despite President Bolsonaro’s denial – Brazil environmental agencies and deforestation controls “effectively dismantled”

By Philip M. Fearnside 29 July 2019 (Mongabay) – Brazil’s Amazonian deforestation in June 2019 was 88 percent greater than for the same month in 2018, and deforestation in the first half of July was 68 percent above that for the entire month of July in 2018. There is no reason to question INPE’s current deforestation numbers from the DETER (Detection […]

Lion population in Yankari National Park, 2006-2014, model fitted to time series (black squares are data, white circles are medians of the model-inferred true population sizes μt, and gray areas between dashes lines are 95 percent credible intervals). Graphic: Bauer, et al., 2015 / PNAS

July 21, 2019

Where lions once ruled, they are now quietly disappearing – Lion population has declined by 50 percent in 25 years

By Olivia Prentzel 18 July 2019 (National Geographic) – For every lion in the wild, there are 14 African elephants, and there are 15 Western lowland gorillas. There are more rhinos than lions, too. The iconic species has disappeared from 94 percent of its historic range, which once included almost the entire African continent but […]

Map showing the locations of Thompson and Chilcotin River steelhead trout in B.C. Graphic: G. Wilson / B.C. Ministry of Environment / COSEWIC

July 21, 2019

Canada rejects scientists’ emergency call to protect endangered trout on oil pipeline path – “They are mismanaging our fish right into extinction”

By Stephanie Wood 18 July 2019 (National Observer) – The federal government has turned down an emergency recommendation from scientists to use a federal law to protect endangered trout that live along the path of the existing Trans Mountain oil pipeline and its expansion project. The decision — described by one First Nations chief, Lee […]

Ohio statewide butterfly population trends of nine resident species with annual variation. Plotted are model predictions for each year based on the fixed effects of year (solid line) and annual random effects (dots) to show annual variation about the trend line. Shading shows 95 percent confidence intervals based on bootstrapped model fits in the poptrend package for the temporal trend and for the annual random effects. The first year’s estimate is set to a value of 1 as a baseline for relative population changes. Graphic: Wepprich, et al., 2019 / PLOS ONE

July 13, 2019

Decades-long butterfly study shows 33 percent population loss – “These declines in abundance are happening in common species”

By Steve Lundeberg 2 July 2019 CORVALLIS, Oregon (Oregon State University) – The most extensive and systematic insect monitoring program ever undertaken in North America shows that butterfly abundance in Ohio declined yearly by 2%, resulting in an overall 33% drop for the 21 years of the program. Though the study was limited to one […]

Total U.S. managed honey bee colonies loss estimates 2006-2019. For the entire survey period (1 April 2018 – 1 April 2019), beekeepers in the U.S. lost an estimated 40.7 percent of their managed honey bee colonies. This is similar to last year’s annual loss estimate of 40.1 percent, but slightly higher (2.9 percentage points) than the average annual rate of loss reported by beekeepers since 2010-11 (37.8 percent). Graphic: Bee Informed

July 10, 2019

Nearly 40 percent decline in honey bee population last winter “unsustainable” – Trump administration cuts funding for bee research

By Julia Jacobo 9 July 2019 (ABC News) – Scientists are researching the potential consequences of the rapid decline of the honey bee population in the U.S. and how to mitigate its effects before it causes dire problems for crop management and production. Honey bees are essential for the pollination of flowers, fruits and vegetables, and support about $20 […]