Prehistoric vegetation helps predict future ecosystems – “If we allow climate change to go unchecked, the vegetation of this planet is going to look completely different than it does today”

By Mari N. Jensen 30 August 2018 (UA News) – As the last ice age came to an end and the planet warmed, the Earth’s vegetation changed dramatically, reports a University of Arizona-led international research team in the journal Science.The current warming from climate change may drive an equally dramatic change in vegetation within the […]

95 percent of all lemur species face high risk of extinction, experts say – “This is, without a doubt, the highest percentage of threat for any large group of mammals and for any large group of vertebrates”

2 August 2018 (Mongabay) – Together with other leading primate conservationists, Russell Mittermeier, Chief Conservation Officer for the NGO Global Wildlife Conservation and recently announced winner of the 2018 Indianapolis Prize, is sounding the alarm about the plight of lemurs.Mittermeier, who also serves as chair of the IUCN Species Survival Commission (SSC) Primate Specialist Group, […]

Southeast Asian forest loss much greater than expected, with negative implications for climate – 113,000 square miles of forest razed and converted to cropland between 2000 and 2014

By John Sullivan 3 July 2018 (Princeton University) – Researchers using satellite imaging have found much greater than expected deforestation since 2000 in the highlands of Southeast Asia, a critically important world ecosystem. The findings are important because they raise questions about key assumptions made in projections of global climate change as well as concerns […]

Earth Overshoot Day 2018 is August 1, the earliest date since ecological overshoot started in the early 1970s – “Our current economies are running a Ponzi scheme with our planet”

OAKLAND, California, 13 June 2018 (Global Footprint Network) – On August 1, humanity will have used nature’s resource budget for the entire year, according to Global Footprint Network, an international research organization that has pioneered the Ecological Footprint resource accounting metric. The Ecological Footprint adds up all of people’s competing demands for productive areas, including […]

As Colombia expands its palm oil sector, scientists worry about wildlife

By Taran Volckhausen 21 June 2018 (Mongabay) – The large-scale expansion of oil palm has been a major driver of deforestation and biodiversity loss in many areas of the tropics. In Malaysia and Indonesia, where 85 percent of the world’s oil palm is cultivated, rampant industry growth over the past several decades has replaced rainforest […]

Colombia palm oil plantations reduce species richness by 47 percent – Government says oil palm agriculture to double to one million hectares by 2020

30 May 2018 (James Cook University) – With palm oil production exploding around the world, a new study of a leading producer has found ways to make the process easier on the environment.James Cook University PhD candidate Lain Pardo studied the industry in Colombia – a country described as being on the “tip of the […]

Humans have destroyed 83 percent of wild mammals and reduced the total biomass of the biosphere to half of its pre-human value

By Damian Carrington 21 May 2018 (The Guardian) – Humankind is revealed as simultaneously insignificant and utterly dominant in the grand scheme of life on Earth by a groundbreaking new assessment of all life on the planet. The world’s 7.6 billion people represent just 0.01% of all living things, according to the study. Yet since […]

Origin of amphibian “apocalypse” finally found – “This is the worst pathogen in the history of the world, in terms of its impacts on biodiversity”

By Michael Greshko 10 May 2018 (National Geographic) – Many of the world’s amphibians are staring down an existential threat: an ancient skin-eating fungus that can wipe out entire forests’ worth of frogs in a flash.This ecological super-villain, the chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, has driven more than 200 amphibian species to extinction or near-extinction—radically rewiring […]

Increase of plant species on mountain tops is accelerating with global warming

By Peter F. Gammelby 4 April 2018 (Aarhus University) – It is not as lonely at the top as it used to be. At least not for plants which, due to global warming, are increasingly finding habitats on mountain tops that were formerly reserved for only the toughest and most hardy species. A large international […]

Unprecedented wave of large-mammal extinctions linked to ancient humans – “What we’re doing is potentially erasing 40 to 45 million years of mammal body-size evolution in a very short period of time”

By Scott Schrage 19 April 2018 (University of Nebraska–Lincoln) – Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and other recent human relatives may have begun hunting large mammal species down to size — by way of extinction — at least 90,000 years earlier than previously thought, says a new study published in the journal Science.Elephant-dwarfing wooly mammoths, elephant-sized ground […]

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