18 November 2014 (Urban Water Blueprint) – Impacts on water quality are not limited to sedimentation rates. As watersheds are exploited for agricultural purposes, and as agriculture turns intensive, the use of fertilizers increases and more fertilizers end up in the water. The two most common nutrients that cause problems are excessive phosphorus and nitrogen, […]
17 August 2015 (UNZ) – The majority of New Zealand’s freshwater species are disappearing. That’s the message of the Society for Conservation Biology’s new report, which two of New Zealand’s leading freshwater ecologists Massey University’s Dr Mike Joy and Professor Russell Death have contributed to. The ‘Diagnosis and Cure’ report on managing New Zealand freshwater […]
By Kelly House2 September 2015 (The Oregonian) – The federal agency in charge of managing fisheries has ruled four stocks of Pacific Northwest salmon are being overfished. The National Marine Fisheries Service and the Department of Commerce on Wednesday posted a notice in the Federal Register of the excessive fishing pressures on Chinook and Coho […]
By Tim Dickinson 15 September 2015 (Rolling Stone) – In May this year, the nearly unthinkable happened in the Pacific Northwest: The rainforest of the Olympic Peninsula, one of the wettest places on the continent, caught fire. By August, an inferno was stirring in the forests east of the Cascades. A wind-whipped blaze near the […]
20 September 2015 (Desdemona Despair) – Here’s an update to last month’s post on wildfire data from the Western United States. Data from the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center (Fuels and Fire Danger [pdf]) show that the area burned by wildfires in the Northwest is well above average, and a spike in the number of wildfires […]
By Noah Seelam17 September 2015 (AFP) – Outdoor air pollution from sources as varied as cooking fires in India, traffic in the United States and fertiliser use in Russia, claim some 3.3 million lives globally every year, researchers said Wednesday. The vast majority of victims — nearly 75 percent — died from strokes and heart […]
By Fiona Harvey15 September 2015 (The Guardian) – Tuna and mackerel populations have suffered a “catastrophic” decline of nearly three quarters in the last 40 years, according to new research. WWF and the Zoological Society of London found that numbers of the scombridae family of fish, which also includes bonito, fell by 74% between 1970 […]
By Kathryn Hansen18 September 2015 (NASA) – At the end of summer 2015, the western United States continues to face a deep, ongoing drought. Conditions were particularly severe in California, Oregon, and Washington, where below-average precipitation has had a large, lasting effect on water supplies. The shortage is visible to satellites that detect the movement […]
By Seth Borenstein17 September 2015 WASHINGTON (Associated Press) – Earth’s record-breaking heat is sounding an awful lot like a broken record. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Thursday that August, this past summer and the first eight months of 2015 all smashed global records for heat. That’s the fifth straight record hot season in […]
16 September 2015 (Plastic Pollution Coalition) – A new international study published on 14 September 2015, led by a University of Queensland researcher, has suggested that more than half the world’s sea turtles have ingested plastic or other human rubbish. The study, led by Dr. Qamar Schuyler from UQ’s School of Biological Sciences, found the […]
