By Shreya Dasgupta20 July 2015 (mongabay.com) – Your car tires may be treading over forests and wildlife in Southeast Asia. As the global demand for tires soars, so does the demand for natural rubber sourced from Hevea brasiliensis, the para-rubber tree. This rising demand is driving a rapid expansion of rubber plantations into biodiversity-rich forests […]
By Antônio Fonseca, Carlos Souza Jr., and Adalberto Veríssimo May 2015 (Imazon) – In May 2015, SAD detected 389 square kilometers of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon with a cloud cover of 39% over the territory. That represented an increase of 110% in relation to May 2014 when deforestation totaled 185 square kilometers and the […]
OAKLAND, CA, 14 July 2015 (Global Footprint Network) – Today marks the date the United States has busted its annual ecological budget, utilizing more resources and services than U.S. ecosystems can regenerate within the full year, according to a new report released by Global Footprint Network, an international sustainability think tank with offices in North […]
By John R. Platt9 July 2015 (Takepart.com) – California’s towering redwood trees are dying of thirst. “They require enormous amounts of water,” said Anthony Ambrose, a tree biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has been studying redwoods and giant sequoias for nearly two decades. “For the big, old trees, they can use more […]
By Sheila Pell11 July 2015 (San Diego Reader) – A ban on U.S. Pacific sardine fishing that took effect July 1 will mean more food for starving sea lions, pelicans, and other creatures. But there’s no shutting down the other forces rattling the food chain. Weird weather conditions are being linked to mass casualties and […]
By Nicholas St. Fleur9 July 2015 (The New York Times) – Climate change has narrowed the range where bumblebees are found in North America and Europe in recent decades, according to a study published Thursday. The paper, published in the journal Science, suggests that warming temperatures have caused bumblebee populations to retreat from the southern […]
By Gary Farrow10 July 2015 (NZ Herald) – Sea Shepherd Australia has launched a new campaign to protect a species much smaller than the whales it has generally focused on, but just as important to the Southern Ocean ecosystem. Krill play a crucial role in the Antarctic food chain, as they are consumed by whales, […]
By Richard Gray7 July 2015 (Daily Mail) – It has been found inside the digestive tracts of turtles, sea birds and whales, but it appears plastic litter in our oceans is also clogging up the insides of the tiny plankton that many larger sea creatures feed on. For the first time copepods – tiny creatures […]
By Niina Heikkinen and ClimateWire30 June 2015 (ClimateWire) – Pink salmon are providing researchers with sobering hints to how carbon dioxide-induced acidity could affect freshwater fish species by the end of the 21st century. A study published yesterday in Nature Climate Change showed that early exposure to high levels of CO2 during the larval stage […]
By Margaret Cronin Fisk, Laurel Calkins, and Del Quentin Wilber2 July 2015 (Bloomberg) – BP will pay a record $18.7 billion to resolve claims by the U.S. and five states along the Gulf of Mexico related to the 2010 oil spill. The payments will be spaced out over as long as 18 years, according to […]
