Rhett A. Butler, mongabay.com Forest cover in the "Arc of Deforestation" of southern Amazonia will decline to around 20 percent 2016 due to continued logging and conversion of forests for cattle pasture and soy farms, report researchers writing in the journal Environmental Conservation. The results are independent of impacts resulting from climate change, which some […]
Although the Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP) significantly reduced cutting of old-growth forests on federal land, forests in the driest regions are now at greater risk of being lost to wildfire than to logging. A team of federal and university scientists recently completed a study and analysis of large-diameter forests and discovered that elevated fire […]
Group: Polar bears are starving, drowning, resorting to cannibalism By Marsha Walton (CNN) — Summer is over in the northern hemisphere, but it’s been another chilling season for researchers who study Arctic sea ice. "It’s definitely a bad report. We did pick up little bit from last year, but this is over 30 percent below […]
by Slim Allagui Thu Sep 25, 1:36 AM ET ILULISSAT, Denmark (AFP) – Dwindling shrimp stocks off Greenland’s coast have local fishermen and authorities fretting that one of the island’s main sources of income, known here as "pink gold", could soon vanish. "We must sound the alarm bells because it would be a catastrophe for […]
By REX SPRINGSTON, TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER Blue crab numbers have dropped so low in the Chesapeake Bay that federal officials declared the fishery a disaster yesterday. … The bay’s blue crab numbers have dropped nearly 70 percent in the past 15 years. Experts cite reasons including pollution and overfishing. Crab-fishery disaster declared Technorati Tags: crab,pollution,overfishing,extinction,End […]
By Morgan Erickson-Davis, mongabay.com Caspian Seal populations have declined 90% in the past 100 years, prompting the IUCN to switch their designation from Vulnerable to Endangered. A team from the University of Leeds performed a series of surveys in 2007 and 2008 which revealed that the birth rate has decreased from around 17,000 pups born […]
Billions of tons of carbon sequestered in the world’s peat bogs could be released into the atmosphere in the coming decades as a result of global warming, according to a new analysis of the interplay between peat bogs, water tables, and climate change. Such an atmospheric release of even a small percentage of the […]
WASHINGTON (AP) — Conservationists have taken the first detailed look at the world’s mammals in more than a decade, and the news isn’t good. "Our results paint a bleak picture of the global status of mammals worldwide," the team led by Jan Schipper of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature in Gland, […]
A U.S. study suggests the common insecticide malathion can decimate tadpole populations, killing them indirectly at doses too small to kill them directly. University of Pittsburgh researchers wanted to determine the environmental impact of the use of malathion — the most popular insecticide in the United States. The scientists discovered gradual amounts of malathion […]
By Richard Black, Environment correspondent, BBC News website, Barcelona The global economy is losing more money from the disappearance of forests than through the current banking crisis, according to an EU-commissioned study. It puts the annual cost of forest loss at between $2 trillion and $5 trillion. The figure comes from adding the value of […]
