New Scientist25 September 2010 AGGRESSIVE tree-felling on mount Kilimanjaro could be partly to blame for its vanishing ice cap. The ice on Kilimanjaro’s summit has shrunk to just 15 per cent of its extent in 1912, leading campaigners to hold it up as a symbol of climate change. But other factors are also at play. […]
Mountain Pine Beetle in BC (1981-2005) 2, 3 The area of BC forest affected by the Mountain Pine Beetle (MPB) has more than doubled, from 4 million hectares in 2003 to 8.7 million hectares in 2006, with much of this in the Fraser Basin. The MPB reduces trees’ nutrient and water uptake, resulting in defoliation […]
ScienceDaily (Sep. 8, 2010) — The potential for outbreaks of spruce and mountain pine beetles in western North America’s forests is likely to increase significantly in the coming decades, according to a study conducted by USDA Forest Service researchers and their colleagues. Their findings, published in the September issue of the journal BioScience, represent the […]
By Jeremy Hance, www.mongabay.com September 19, 2010 It’s not easy to be a gibbon: although one of the most acrobatic, fast, and marvelously loud of the world’s primates, the gibbon remains largely unknown to the global public and far less studied than the world’s more ‘popular’ apes. This lack of public awareness, scientific knowledge, and, […]
ScienceDaily (Sep. 14, 2010) — Researchers have revealed an ominous finding: most of the world’s last remaining tigers — long decimated by overhunting, logging, and wildlife trade — are now clustered in just six percent of their available habitat. The securing of the tiger’s remaining source sites is the most effective and efficient way of […]
Beijing (AFP) Aug 31, 2010 – China will spend billions of dollars treating sewage and planting forests to arrest massive environmental degradation along the Yangtze river and its Three Gorges reservoir, officials said Tuesday. “Generally speaking, the ecological state (of the river) is still far from what the Communist Party and people are demanding,” forestry […]
www.wildmadagascar.orgSeptember 06, 2010 Despite government assurances that it would crack down on the rosewood trade, illegal logging continues in Madagascar’s rainforest parks, according to new information provided by sources on the ground. The sources report logging in three parks: Mananara, Makira, and Masoala. All three are known for their high levels of biodiversity, including endangered […]
Palo Alto, CA—By integrating satellite mapping, airborne-laser technology, and ground-based plot surveys, scientists from the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology, with colleagues from the World Wildlife Fund and in coordination with the Peruvian Ministry of the Environment (MINAM), have revealed the first high-resolution maps of carbon locked up in tropical forest vegetation and emitted […]
The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite detected 148,946 fires in this image on August 23, 2010. The fires are outlined in red. Most of the fires are concentrated in Bolivia, where the governments of two states had declared a state of emergency because of widespread fires three days earlier. Scores of […]
ScienceDaily (Sep. 4, 2010) — Global agricultural expansion cut a wide swath through tropical forests during the 1980s and 1990s. More than half a million square miles of new farmland — an area roughly the size of Alaska — was created in the developing world between 1980 and 2000, of which over 80 percent was […]
