habitat loss – Page 8 – Desdemona Despair

Forest degradation in the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve core area, 2002-2020. The presence of the Monarch butterfly in the Mexican hibernation forests decreased by 26 percent last December, occupying 2.10 hectares (ha) compared to the 2.83 hectares reported during the same month in 2019. Meanwhile, the core forest area in the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve (MBBR) where the lepidopteran establishes the main hibernation colonies recorded, between March 2019 and March 2020, 20.26 ha of degradation, four times more than in 2018-2019 when 5 ha were degraded. Graphic: WWF

February 28, 2021

Eastern Monarch butterfly population declined by 26 percent in 2020 – Degradation of temperate forests in the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve was four times higher than in 2019

By Wendy Caldwell 25 February 2021 MEXICO CITY (Monarch Joint Venture) – The presence of the Monarch butterfly in the Mexican hibernation forests decreased by 26 percent last December, occupying 2.10 hectares (ha) compared to the 2.83 ha reported during the same month in 2019. Meanwhile, the core forest area in the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere […]

Caribou and geese at Teshekpuk Lake in North Slope Borough, Alaska in 2019. The Trump administration, in its final days, decided to open millions more acres of land in the Alaskan Arctic to oil and gas drilling, including the wetlands around Teshekpuk Lake, which are a crucial breeding area for migratory birds and calving grounds for roaming caribou. Photo: Bonnie Jo Mount / The Washington Post

January 9, 2021

Trump administration opens millions more acres of Alaska to drilling – “A last-minute and irresponsible effort to open an enormous amount of land in a sensitive area”

By Dino Grandoni 5 January 2021 (The Washington Post) – The Trump administration, in its final days, decided to open millions more acres of land in the Alaskan Arctic to oil and gas drilling. The decision from the Bureau of Land Management on Monday, finalized just two weeks before President Trump is set to leave office, will […]

Satellite view of wildfires on the U.S. West Coast between 12 September 2020 and 16 September 2020. Video: Michael Benson / CIRA / NOAA

December 30, 2020

Watching Earth burn – “The war has started. We’re losing.”

By Michael Benson 28 December 2020 (The New York Times) – I have a pastime, one that used to give me considerable pleasure, but lately it has morphed into a source of anxiety, even horror: earth-watching. Let me explain. The earth from space is an incomparably lovely sight. I mean the whole planet, pole to […]

Projected geographical shift of the human temperature niche. (Top) Geographical position of the human temperature niche projected on the current situation (A) and the RCP8.5 projected 2070 climate (B). Those maps represent relative human distributions (summed to unity) for the imaginary situation that humans would be distributed over temperatures following the stylized double Gaussian model fitted to the modern data (the blue dashed curve in Fig. 2A). (C) Difference between the maps, visualizing potential source (orange) and sink (green) areas for the coming decades if humans were to be relocated in a way that would maintain this historically stable distribution with respect to temperature. The dashed line in A and B indicates the 5% percentile of the probability distribution. Graphic: Xu, et al., 2020 / PNAS

December 17, 2020

Broken societies put people and planet on a collision course, says UNDP – “No country in the world has yet achieved very high human development without putting immense strain on the planet”

NEW YORK, 15 December 2020 (HDRO) – The COVID-19 pandemic is the latest crisis facing the world, but unless humans release their grip on nature, it won’t be the last, according to a new report [pdf] by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which includes a new experimental index on human progress that takes into account countries’ […]

Biomass and anthropogenic mass estimates since the beginning of the twentieth century on a dry-mass basis. The green line shows the total weight of thebiomass (dashed green lines, ±1 s.d.). Anthropogenic mass weight is plotted as an area chart, where the heights of the coloured areas represent the mass of the corresponding category accumulated until that year. The anthropogenic mass presented here is grouped into six major categories. The year 2020±6 marks the time at which biomass is exceeded by anthropogenic mass. Anthropogenic mass data since 1900 were obtained from ref. 22, at a single-year resolution. The current biomass value is based on ref. 11, which for plants relies on the estimate of ref. 10, which updates earlier, mostly higher estimates. The uncertainty of the year of intersection was derived using a Monte Carlo simulation, with 10,000 repeats. Data were extrapolated for the years 2015–2025 (lighter area). Graphic: Elhacham, et al., 2020 / Nature

December 10, 2020

The mass of human-made materials now equals the planet’s biomass – “Anthropogenic” mass is doubling every twenty years

9 December 2020 (Weizmann Institute of Science) – Earth circa 2020: The mass of all human-produced materials – concrete, steel, asphalt, etc. – has grown to equal the mass of all life on the planet, its biomass. According to a new study at the Weizmann Institute of Science, we are right at this tipping point, […]

Overall state of all natural World Heritage sites in 2014, 2017, and 2020. Graphic: IUCN

December 7, 2020

Climate change now top threat to natural World Heritage sites – Great Barrier Reef declines to “critical” status

GLAND, SWITZERLAND, 2 December 2020 (IUCN) – Climate change is now the biggest threat to natural World Heritage, according to a report [pdf] published today by IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature). A third (33%) of natural World Heritage sites are threatened by climate change, including the world’s largest coral reef, the Great Barrier […]

Total summer (yellow bars; 1 April – 1 October), winter (gray; 1 October – 1 April), and annual (orange bars; 1 October – 1 October) honey bee colony loss rates in the United States across years of the Bee Informed Partnership’s national honey bee colony loss survey, 2007/2008-2019/2020. Results from the inaugural survey commissioned by the Apiary Inspectors of America and performed in 2006-07 are not included. Graphic: The Bee Informed Partnership

June 22, 2020

Annual U.S. honey bee survey shows Summer 2019 marked highest colony losses ever recorded

22 June 2020 (The Bee Informed Partnership) – The western honey bee, the species used across the country to support food production, to provide a natural sweetener, and to quite simply contribute to our leisure and free time, is among the most important of pollinators. To mark Pollinator Week, the Bee Informed Partnership (BIP) recently […]

Accumulated Amazon deforestation Jan-Apr, 2009-2020. Data: INPE. Graphic: Mongabay

June 14, 2020

14 straight months of rising Amazon deforestation in Brazil

By Rhett A. Butler 12 June 2020 (Mongabay) – Deforestation in Earth’s largest rainforest increased for the fourteenth consecutive month according to data released today by the Brazilian government. Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is currently pacing 83 percent ahead of where it was a year ago. Data from Brazil’s national space research institute INPE […]

Indigenous leader Davi Kopenawa Yanomami delivers a 30-page report at the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland, on Tuesday, 3 March 2020, in which he notes that indigenous peoples isolated in the Amazon are at serious risk of genocide if they continue to "explode deforestation on their land." Photo: Marcelo Seixas / Funai

May 30, 2020

Deforestation drives cases of Covid-19 among indigenous peoples – “There is no decreased effect of deforestation with coronavirus, quite the contrary”

By Mark Candido 25 May 2020 São Paulo (ECOA) – Indigenous lands with the largest deforested areas in the country are also among the most vulnerable to the advance of the new coronavirus. According to experts, invaders may have taken the city’s virus toward the Yanomami and Raposa Serra do Sol lands in Roraima. In […]

Dame Jane Goodall is known for her work with primates, but she’s also an avid animal rights and environmental activist. In a CNET interviews, she says, “It’s because of our lack of respect for the environment that this terrible COVID-19 virus has shut down the world”. Photo: National Geographic

April 26, 2020

Dame Jane Goodall: “It’s because of our lack of respect for the environment that this terrible COVID-19 virus has shut down the world”

By Bonnie Burton 23 April 2020 (CNET) – Jane Goodall has a lot to say about how human disregard for animals and the environment brought on the coronavirus pandemic. But the famed British primatologist believes there’s still a chance we can repair our relationship with the natural world, a point she stresses in the new National Geographic […]