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

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 […]

Aerial view of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig burning after an explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, off the southeast tip of Louisiana, 21 April 2010. Ten years after an oil rig explosion killed 11 workers and unleashed an environmental nightmare in the Gulf of Mexico, companies are drilling into deeper and deeper waters where the payoffs can be huge but the risks are greater than ever. Photo: Gerald Herbert / AP Photo

April 19, 2020

10 years after BP spill: Oil drilled deeper; rules relaxed – “I’m concerned that in the industry, the lessons aren’t fully learned — that we’re tending to backslide”

By Kevin Mcgill and Matthew Brown 18 April 2020 NEW ORLEANS (AP) – Ten years after an oil rig explosion killed 11 workers and unleashed an environmental nightmare in the Gulf of Mexico, companies are drilling into deeper and deeper waters, where the payoffs can be huge but the risks are greater than ever. Industry leaders and […]

Empirical relationship between system area and regime shift duration in freshwater, marine, and terrestrial systems. Graphic: Cooper, et al., 2020 / Nature Communications

March 12, 2020

Ecosystems the size of Amazon rainforest “can collapse within decades”

By Jonathan Watts 10 March 2020 (The Guardian) – Even large ecosystems the size of the Amazon rainforest can collapse in a few decades, according to a study that shows bigger biomes break up relatively faster than small ones. The research reveals that once a tipping point has been passed, breakdowns do not occur gradually […]

The Blue Acceleration: global trends in human exploitation of ocean resources. Graphic: Jouffray, et al., 2020 / One Earth

February 26, 2020

The “blue acceleration”: Study shows humans’ surging incursions into the sea

By Grace Dungey 13 February 2020 (Mongabay) – Humanity has depended on the ocean for millennia. Today, however, the rush to the sea is occurring with unprecedented diversity and intensity, propelled by population growth and demand for diminishing terrestrial resources. A study published in January in the new journal One Earth analyzed 50 years of data on 18 kinds […]

Spatial cumulative extents of the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil spill. (A) Cumulative NESDIS anomaly daily composites integrated from 20 April 2010 to 21 July 2010. Daily fishing closures are marked with gray lines; the cumulative fishing closure area is marked with a thick dashed yellow line. The black star represents the location of the DWH blowout. (B) Cumulative value of daily average oil concentrations (ppb), integrated across the same time span as (A) and across water depths. Vertical depth layers are 0 to 1 m, 1 to 20 m, and in 20-m increments down to 2500 m. Sediment and water samples with higher-than-background concentration are marked in bright green and dark blue circles, respectively. Red crosses in (B) represent approximate locations of DWH-related oil detections reported in previous studies. Daily fishery closures are marked with black polygons; the cumulative fishery closure area is marked with a dashed thick polygon. AB, Apalachee Bay; DP, Deep Plume; EFS, East Florida Shelf; FK, Florida Keys; LC, Loop Current System; TXS, Texas Shores; WFS, West Florida Shelf. (C) Categorization of the modeled oil spill are as follows: (i) nontoxic, PAH concentrations above background level and smaller than 0.5 and 1 ppb at the surface (depth, 0 to 1 m) and in the water column (depth, >1 m), respectively; (ii) toxic-to-biota and invisible, PAH concentrations 0.5 to 17 ppb at the surface and above 1 ppb in the water column; and (iii) toxic and visible, PAH concentrations above 17 ppb. In (C), categories were computed according to maximal concentrations across time. (D) Duration of toxic concentrations across the domain. (E) LC50 of 12 experiments examining the photoinduced toxicity to blue crab (31), fiddler crab (33), mahi mahi (29, 30), red drum (32), and speckled sea trout (32) (for more details, see table S2). (F) The spatial extent of the toxic concentrations from (E); color codes in (F) are according to bar colors in (E), representing concentrations exceeding LC50. In (F), toxic PAH of 0.5 ppb was concentrations were considered for surface waters only (depth, 0 to 1 m). Graphic: Berenshtein, et al., 2020 / Science Advances

February 17, 2020

The toxic reach of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill was much larger and deadlier than previous estimates – “Large areas of the Gulf of Mexico were exposed to invisible and toxic oil that extended beyond the boundaries of the satellite footprint and the fishery closures”

By Darryl Fears 12 February 2020 (The Washington Post) – The spread of oil from the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was far worse than previously believed, new research has found. As the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history approaches its 10th anniversary in April, a study by two University of Miami researchers […]

Polygrapha suprema (Schaus, 1920), a rare and endangered butterfly exclusive to the high mountains of Atlantic Forest (Brazil), is threatened by habitat loss. Photo: Augusto Rosa

February 11, 2020

Half-a-million insect species face extinction – Scientists warn humanity about worldwide insect decline – “The current insect extinction crisis is deeply worrying. Yet, what we know is only the tip of the iceberg.”

By Marlowe Hood 10 February 2020 (PhysOrg) – Half of the one million animal and plant species on Earth facing extinction are insects, and their disappearance could be catastrophic for humankind, scientists have said in a “warning to humanity”. “The current insect extinction crisis is deeply worrying,” said Pedro Cardoso, a biologist at the Finnish […]

Fireflies in Smoky Mountains National Park. Photo: Radim Schreiber

February 4, 2020

Fireflies face extinction threats of habitat loss, light pollution, pesticides

By Mike Silver 3 February 2020 MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, Massachusetts (Tufts Now) – Habitat loss, pesticide use and, surprisingly, artificial light are the three most serious threats endangering fireflies across the globe, raising the spectre of extinction for certain species and related impacts on biodiversity and ecotourism, according to a Tufts University-led team of biologists associated with […]

Desdemona Despair

Tag: habitat loss