Environment
Scientists who monitored skuas in Adélie Land and the Kerguelen Islands for ten years have found when these seabirds exhibit high mercury levels in their blood, their breeding success decreases.
The researchers from the Centre d'Etudes Biologiques de Chizé and from the Littoral, Environnement et Sociétés Laboratory (CNRS / Université de La Rochelle) say that this is the first time that toxicological measurements have been combined with a population study carried out over such a long period in the Antarctic and Subantarctic.
art of the mercury from industrial and domestic…
Can you put a price on ecological restoration? Of course you can. In fact, you must, or the discourse will be taken over by activists for whom price is no object. In the real world, an evidence-based price on clean water and soil fertility helps the United Nations set ecological restoration targets for degraded and deforested land.
Forests provide essential ecosystem services for people, including timber, food and water. For those struggling with the after-effects of deforestation, the main hope lies in rebuilding forest resources through ecological restoration.
Researchers at…
American farmers lead the world in productivity coupled with environmental responsibility, producing far more food on far less land than was even imagined decades ago. If the world had America's efficiency in agricultural dematerialization, an area the size of Amazonia could be reverted back to its natural state.
Satellite sensors which show photosynthetic activity during the Northern Hemisphere's growing season tell the tale; the Midwest region of the United States boasts more photosynthetic activity than any other spot on Earth. Healthy plants convert light to energy via…
Five environmental groups are alleging that NASA could be about to break the commitments it made in a 2010 agreement to clean up all the detectable contamination at its former Santa Susana Field Lab (SSFL) rocket testing site in the Simi Hills of California.
They claim that NASA may be laying the groundwork for a breach by falsely claiming that commenters on its draft Environmental Impact Study (EIS) on the cleanup were evenly divided on whether NASA should live up to its obligations in the cleanup agreements. When pressed by environmental groups to provide actual data to backup such a claim…
Hank |
When Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" was taking the country by storm 50 years ago, it was a puzzle to scientists and farmers who did not see the cultural future looming in front of them. Scientists dismissed it as anecdotal evidence while farmers recognized that if you don't use a pesticide according to instructions, bad things happen. Both knew that without pesticides, yields would be devastated.
But farmers also recognized that as America became less agrarian, there were more opportunities for misinformation about their work to spiral out of control. Today, environmental activists are…
Consuming foods grown in urban gardens has become a big fad, and those foods might even offer health benefits, unless a lack of knowledge about the soil used for planting poses a health threat to both consumers and gardeners.
A new paper the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future (CLF), researchers identifies a range of factors and challenges related to the perceived risk of soil contamination among urban community gardeners and found a need for clear and concise information on how best to prevent and manage soil contamination.
According to CLF researchers, urban soils are…
Greenhouse gas emissions from food production may threaten the UN climate target of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius, according to a paper from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. What is the data? No data needed.
Tomorrow, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is releasing another report on the impacts of climate change and while it isn't as aggressive in its claims as previous reports, there is still cause for concern.
Western nations like the United States have dramatically reduced greenhouse gas emissions from sectors like energy and those are far and…
Every dark cloud has a silver lining and the silver lining for a thawing permafrost is...still a dark cloud.
The climate is warming in the Arctic at twice the rate of the rest of the globe. That has led to a longer growing season and increased plant growth, which captures atmospheric carbon - that is good - but it is thawing the permafrost, which releases carbon into the atmosphere. Permafrost contains three to seven times the amount of carbon sequestered in tropical forests. A thawing permafrost which will result in the release of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere creating…
Radiological damage at Chernobyl doesn't just keep plant life from growing, it even keeps plant life from decomposing.
A paper in the journal Oecologia finds that microbes near the site of the Chernobyl disaster has slowed the decomposition of fallen leaves and other plant matter in the area. The resulting buildup of dry, loose detritus is a wildfire hazard that poses the threat of spreading radioactivity from the Chernobyl area.
Tim Mousseau, a professor of biology at the University of South Carolina, has done extensive research in the contaminated area surrounding the Chernobyl…
A team of agronomists, entomologists, agroecologists, horticulturists and biogeochemists have determined that planting cover crops in rotation between cash crops - widely agreed to be ecologically beneficial - is even more valuable than previously thought.
Writing in Agricultural Systems, the Penn State researchers quantified the benefits offered by cover crops across more than 10 ecosystem services. Benefits included increased carbon and nitrogen in soils, erosion prevention, more mycorrhizal colonization -- beneficial soil fungus that helps plants absorb nutrients -- and weed…