December 21 (AFP) – Ecologists have warned production of frankincense, one of the three gifts the Wise Men gave to the baby Jesus in a key part of the Nativity story celebrated at Christmas, is in dramatic decline. A research team from the Netherlands and Ethiopia says a new study has shown numbers of the […]
White dots indicate documented localities with forest mortality related to climatic stress from drought and high temperatures. Background map shows potential environmental limits to vegetation net primary production (Boisvenue and Running, 2006). Only the general areas documented in the tables are shown—many additional localities are mapped more precisely on the continental-scale maps. Drought and heat-driven […]
By Jim Forsyth; Editing by Corrie MacLaggan and Greg McCune20 December 2011 SAN ANTONIO (Reuters) – The massive drought that has dried out Texas over the past year has killed as many as half a billion trees, according to new estimates from the Texas Forest Service. “In 2011, Texas experienced an exceptional drought, prolonged high […]
By Alan Buis, Alan.buis@jpl.nasa.gov, 818-354-0474, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CADecember 14, 2011 PASADENA, California – By 2100, global climate change will modify plant communities covering almost half of Earth’s land surface and will drive the conversion of nearly 40 percent of land-based ecosystems from one major ecological community type – such as forest, grassland or […]
By JUSTIN GILLIS12 December 2011 Scientists trying to understand the future of forests on a warming planet have a strange problem: They do not know how to kill trees. I don’t mean the trees in their backyards. I would bet that the average climate scientist, especially one who studies forests, is better with a chain […]
By Sarah Yang, Media Relations 12 December 2011 BERKELEY – Trees are dying in the Sahel, a region in Africa south of the Sahara Desert, and human-caused climate change is to blame, according to a new study led by a scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. “Rainfall in the Sahel has dropped 20-30 percent […]
Global phytoplankton decline over the past century. Observed phytoplankton declines have occurred in eight out of ten ocean regions. The global rate of decline is estimated to be ~1% of the global median per year. ABSTRACT: In the oceans, ubiquitous microscopic phototrophs (phytoplankton) account for approximately half the production of organic matter on Earth. Analyses […]
By Craig Welch, The Seattle Times14 November 2011 SAWTOOTH RIDGE, Wash. — The bug lady scoots through stick-straight lodgepole and ponderosa, and marches uphill toward the gnarled trunk of a troubled species: the whitebark pine. The ghostly conifers found on chilly, wind-swept peaks like this may well be among the earliest victims of a warming […]
Contact: Elisabeth (Lisa) Lyons, elyons@cell.com 617-386-212127 October 2011 As the planet continues to warm, it appears that seaweeds may be in especially hot water. New findings reported online on October 27 in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, based on herbarium records collected in Australia since the 1940s suggest that up to 25 percent of […]
BY RAMIT PLUSHNICK-MASTI, ASSOCIATED PRESS13 October 2011 HOUSTON — In a 30-mile area of the Texas Panhandle, biologists found 76 white-tailed deer — but zero babies. Not far away, they located only three quail on a stretch of road where they would see 15 in a normal year. In South Texas, a biologist reports a […]
