Prime growing areas for Canada oysters contain alarmingly high concentrations of plastic microbeads

23 May 2018 (SFU) – British Columbia’s premier shellfish farming region is heavily contaminated with microplastics, according to a new SFU study.New research from SFU’s Ecotoxicology Research Group shows Lambert Channel and Baynes Sound off Denman Island are awash with microbeads and other microplastics including fragments and fibres.The area is also home to approximately 130 […]

Mussels off Seattle coast test positive for opioids – “There’s a lot of people taking oxycodone in the Puget Sound area”

By Christina Capatides 26 May 2018 (CBS News) – As more and more American communities grapple with opioid addiction, the human toll of the epidemic has grown in both scope and severity. And now, scientists at the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife have found evidence that drug’s impact has literally flowed downstream to affect […]

Image of the Day: Light pollution from U.S. oil and natural gas fields

By Dipika Kadaba 21 May 2018 (The Revelator) – Humans increasingly live in a world of constant artificial lighting — so much so that it’s easy to forget about the environmental consequences of light pollution. “Light is a symbol of urbanity that changes the experience of any landscape from a human perspective,” says Travis Longcore, […]

Global warming to shift North American fish species north, disrupting fisheries – “Dislocations will happen all over the continent and on both coasts throughout the 21st century”

By Ken Branson 16 May 2018 (Rutgers Today) – Climate change will force hundreds of ocean fish and invertebrate species, including some of the most economically important to the United States, to move northward, disrupting fisheries in the United States and Canada, a Rutgers University-led study reports.The study, published today in the journal PLOS ONE, […]

Three recent studies challenge Indian government claim of increasing forest cover – “There is significant reduction in green cover in many natural forest and habitat types of India”

By T. V. Padma 23 May 2018 (Mongabay) – Natural forests across India are slowly disappearing, a set of new studies shows, contradicting recent government claims about increasing forest cover.The three studies, published over the past seven months, use a mix of satellite data, ground vegetation observations and historical maps. They show the Eastern Ghats, […]

Amazon deforestation in Brazil increased by 249 percent in March 2018, compared with March 2017

By Antônio Fonseca, Marcelo Justino, Dalton Cardoso, Júlia Gabriela Ribeiro, Rodney Solomão, Carlos Souza Jr., and Adalberto Veríssimo 20 April 2018 (Imazon) – In March 2018, SAD detected 287 square kilometers of deforestation in the Amazon forest. In this bulletin, the fraction of deforestation between 1 and 10 hectares was 18% of the total detected […]

Puget Sound microplastic pollution “everywhere we’ve surveyed for it”

By Tad Sooter 16 May 2018 BREMERTON (Kitsap Sun) – Walk any Puget Sound beach and you’re bound to find plastic garbage —  a soda bottle, a chunk of foam, maybe a dog’s lost chew toy. But that’s just the plastic pollution you can see. The results of a recent volunteer-powered research project suggest there […]

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 […]

Single-use plastic has reached the world’s deepest ocean trench

18 April 2018 (UNEP) – A new article, Human footprint in the abyss: 30 year records of deep-sea plastic debris, reveals human activities are affecting the deepest part of the ocean, more than 1000km from the mainland.Plastic pollution is emerging as one of the most serious threats to ocean ecosystems. World leaders, scientists and communities […]

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 […]

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