EVANSTON, Illinois, January 25, 2011 (ENS) - Extinction cascades are often observed following the loss of a key species within an ecosystem. As the system changes to compensate for the loss, availability of food, territory and other resources to each of the remaining species can fluctuate wildly, creating a boom-or-bust environment that can lead to even more extinctions.
New research at Northwestern University has found that more than 70 percent of these extinctions are preventable, assuming that the ecosystem can be brought into balance and no new factors are introduced.
Northwestern University physics professor Adilson Motter and his student, Sagar Sahasrabudhe, have developed a mathematical model to describe interactions within ecological food webs that could rescue fragile ecosystems and halt complex cascade events.
Published in the January 25 issue of the journal Nature Communications, their study illustrates how human intervention may be effective in species conservation.
"Our study provides a theoretical basis for management efforts that would aim to mitigate extinction cascades in food web networks," Motter said.
The scientists found evidence that some extinctions are caused not by a primary disturbance but as the result of a cascade.
"We find that extinction cascades can often be mitigated by suppressing, rather than enhancing, the populations of specific species," he said.
Motter and his team conclude that large-scale failures can be avoided by focusing on preventing the waves of failure that follow the initial event. …
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Extinction cascades can be prevented, scientists find
Monday, October 11, 2010
After oil spill, Alabama, Mississippi landowners paid to create artificial marshes
By George Altman, Press-Register
Monday, October 11, 2010WASHINGTON — Alabama and Mississippi are paying landowners $6.75 million in total to create artificial marshes, typically by flooding farm fields, for birds deprived of natural marshland by the oil spill, according to government information.
Top conservation officials in both states said that the decision to launch the federal program, dubbed the Migratory Bird Habitat Initiative, was made in the early stages of the spill, when no one knew how much oil would gush or for how long.
Although the surface of Gulf waters and shores appears to have escaped a worst-case scenario, they say the program is still doing good.
“Had we done nothing and then the worst would have happened, where would we be?” said Alabama State Conservationist William Puckett. …
Homer Wilkes, state conservationist for Mississippi, said that the “ounce of prevention” represented by the program is far better than the “pound of cure” that would have been required had birds been limited to oiled marshes. …
Puckett said that regardless of the program’s initial spill-related mission, new places for migratory birds to rest are beneficial. “The positive is, we did create thousands and thousands of acres of additional bird habitat,” he said. …
After oil spill, Alabama, Mississippi landowners paid to create artificial marshes
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Potomac River: 10-fold increase in native submerged vegetation reflects improved water quality
ScienceDaily (Sep. 7, 2010) — The Potomac River in Washington, D.C. is showing multiple benefits from restoration efforts, newly published research suggests.Reduced nutrients and improved water clarity have increased the abundance and diversity of submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV) in the Potomac, according to direct measurements taken during the 18-year field study.
Since 1990, the area covered by SAV in the lower Potomac has doubled, the area covered by native SAV has increased ten-fold, the diversity of plant species has increased, and the proportion of exotic species to native species has declined as nutrients have declined, according to the study by the U.S. Geological Survey and England's National Oceanography Centre (NOC) in Southhampton, UK.
"Improvements to plant communities living at the bottom of the river have occurred nearly in lock step with decreases in nutrients and sediment in the water and incremental reductions in nitrogen effluent entering the river from the wastewater treatment plant for the Washington DC area," said USGS scientist Dr. Nancy Rybicki.
More than a dozen species of SAV, including the exotic hydrilla, co-exist in this reach of the Potomac that was almost barren in a 1978-1981 USGS study.
"People want to know that money spent on ecosystem restoration is having tangible results, but many feel that efforts to clean up Chesapeake Bay have so far had limited success," said researcher Dr Henry Ruhl of the NOC.
"Upgrades to the wastewater treatment plant have benefited SAV habitats 50-miles downstream. These findings underscore the benefits of nutrient reduction efforts on a major tributary to the Chesapeake Bay," said Rybicki, who has been conducting research on the Potomac since 1979.
"Our results suggest that widespread recovery of submerged vegetation abundance and diversity can be achievable if restoration efforts are enhanced across the bay," said Henry Ruhl of the National Oceanography Centre. "There are many other estuaries globally where nutrients have been identified as contributing to SAV habitat decline, so restoration is an issue for many governments." …
Potomac River: 10-fold increase in native submerged vegetation reflects improved water quality
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Slowing urban sprawl, adding forests curb floods and help rivers
By Brian Wallheimer
August 18, 2010WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Controlling urban growth and increasing forested land are the most effective ways to decrease future water runoff and flooding, according to a Purdue University study.
Bryan Pijanowski, an associate professor of forestry and natural resources, used a model to simulate Michigan's Muskegon River watershed runoff rates from 1900 through the present and forecast them 30 years into the future. Several scenarios, including forest regrowth, urbanization, and buffers between development and streams, were analyzed to estimate their impact on rivers and streams.
"Changes in the land's surface feed back to runoff. Urban sprawl and impervious surfaces are the biggest culprits," Pijanowski said. "If you're able to control development, it is the most effective way to save our river ecosystem."
Pijanowski said urban areas in the United States would double in 20 years at the current rate. In the model predictions, doubling the urban area in the Muskegon River watershed would increase runoff by 1 1/2 times.
Excess runoff can have several consequences, including flooding, increases in agricultural nutrients and urban pollutants entering nearby water and affecting aquatic life, increases in water temperature in rivers and streams that can affect aquatic life, and changes in the apportionment of water to wetlands and groundwater.
Pijanowski's findings, published in the early online version of the journal Environmental Management, suggest that slowing the rate of urban sprawl would be the most effective way to reduce or control runoff. Adding forest near rivers and streams and requiring buffer zones between those waterways and development also could help. …
Slowing urban sprawl, adding forests curb floods and help rivers
Sunday, June 27, 2010
An evangelical crusade to go green with God
By NPR Staff
As the oil continues to spill in the Gulf of Mexico, what to do about off-shore drilling and the regulation of the oil industry is cause for debate in Congress and among coastal residents. Now add to this another dimension: religion.
The Southern Baptist Convention has used notably strong language to call on the government — and its own congregation — to work to prevent such a crisis again.
In a resolution, the Convention called on the government "to act determinatively and with undeterred resolve to end this crisis ... to ensure full corporate accountability for damages, clean-up and restoration ... and to ensure that government and private industry are not again caught without planning for such possibilities."
Dr. Russell Moore helped pass that resolution. Moore is the dean of the School of Theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and preaches at Highview Baptist Church near Louisville, Ky. He tells NPR's Audie Cornish that calling on government to hold companies responsible for their actions isn't out of character for evangelicals.
"There's really nothing conservative — and certainly nothing evangelical — about a laissez-faire view of a lack of government regulation," Moore says, "because we, as Christians, believe in sin."
"That means if people are sinful, if all of us are sinful, then all of us have to have accountability — and that includes corporations." Moore says. "Simply trusting corporations to go about their business without polluting the water streams and without destroying ecosystems is really a naive and utopian view of human nature. It's not a Christian view of human nature." …
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Elephants roaming America? A big idea for rebooting nature
A new theory suggests that the thick forests that we think of as wild may actually be an effect of human settlement.
By Andrew Curry
From the March 2010 issue; published online for subscribers only on May 5, 2010On the train headed north from Amsterdam’s Central Station, be sure to sit to the left. Just past the town of Almere, as you round a right-hand bend, you will find a sight unseen in Europe for centuries, if not millennia: hundreds of red deer, plodding groups of long-horned wild cattle, and skittish herds of low-slung brown horses, all moving through the open landscape like something out of a cave painting. This place goes by the name of Oostvaardersplassen. It is a nature reserve, yes, but it is also a far-reaching experiment. Biologists worldwide are increasingly talking about using large herbivores like the ones sharp-eyed passengers can spot from the train to re-create prehistoric, and sometimes even prehuman, ecosystems.
When keystone species—from ancient mammoths, woolly rhinos, and giant bears to more prosaic grazers like bison, horses, and deer—are wiped out, ecosystems that had sustained themselves in perpetuity collapse. The result is a severe loss of biodiversity. By reintroducing approximations of extinct animals to modern habitats, rewilding advocates want to reestablish dynamic systems that have not existed since the rise of human settlement in Europe. This reserve is the first place where they have done more than talk. Just a short train ride from downtown Amsterdam, nearly 3,000 wild horses, deer, and descendants of prehistoric cattle roam a landscape that is being dramatically shaped by their presence.
The brainchild of a pugnacious Dutch ecologist named Frans Vera, Oostvaardersplassen is challenging some of our most basic assumptions about wildness. Today thick, dense forests are considered synonymous with unspoiled nature. “The current idea is that when you have an area and you do nothing with it, it turns into a forest,” Vera says. Ecologists call this one-way process “succession” and say it rules the unfolding of ecosystems much as natural selection rules evolution. The theory has dominated conservation for centuries, virtually unchallenged.
Until now. Vera says his experiment in rewilding has revealed succession as a human artifact: an unnatural, unbalanced outcome created when people killed off the woolly mammoth and corralled wild horses and cattle. Without free-roaming herds of grazing animals to hold them back, closed-canopy forests took over the land wherever humans did not intervene. The result is a crippled collection of ecosystems that need constant human help to limp along. But Oostvaardersplassen, some 25 years in the making, stands as a test case of what the wild animals that once roamed Europe might create when left to their own devices. …
Elephants Roaming America? A Big Idea for Rebooting Nature
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Amazon tribes embrace technology to protect their rainforest home
By Rhett Butler
Deep in the most remote jungles of South America, Amazon Indians are using GPS units, Android handheld devices, Google Earth and other technologies to protect their fast-dwindling home through “cultural mapping.” Tribes in Suriname, Brazil and Colombia are combining their traditional knowledge of the rainforest with western technology to conserve forests and maintain ties to their history and cultural traditions, which include profound knowledge of the forest ecosystem and medicinal plants. …
Amazon Tribes Embrace Technology to Protect their Rainforest Home
Monday, February 22, 2010
World Bank's green bonds clear $1bn mark
By Tom Young, BusinessGreen, Monday 22 February 2010 at 12:03:00
Bond issues raise finance for low-carbon and climate adaptation projects in developing world
The latest issue of green bonds by the World Bank has taken the total amount raised to more than $1bn (£646m), the institution announced today.
The innovative bonds were first issued in late 2008, raising $350m and marking the first time the World Bank had offered bonds to raise funds for a specific purpose.
The bonds were developed in partnership with Swedish bank Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken (SEB), which confirmed that the most recent issue of SEK500,000,000 ($69.2m, £44.7m) helped take the total sold past the $1bn mark.
The bonds are used to raise money to support World Bank-funded projects that tackle the causes and consequences of climate change in the developing world, such as renewable energy installations, reforestry initiatives, watershed management and flood protection schemes.
"Climate action in developing countries – specifically, mitigation and adaptation initiatives – requires important financing by the international community, from both public and private sources," said Warren Evans, director of the environment department at the World Bank.
The latest issue of bonds saw investment from WWF-Sweden and the Swedish National Pension Fund, as well as a number of European private banks and life insurance companies.
The bonds will mature after seven years and promise return at rates of 3.25 per cent per annum – higher than Swedish government bond rates. …
World Bank's green bonds clear $1bn mark
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Survey finds over half of all Americans committing to green New Years resolutions
Photo via optical illusion
A new nationwide survey by Tiller Research LLC has found good green news for the new year. Over half of the American population will likely make an environmentally-focused New Year's resolution. The survey found that 53% of respondents are vowing to put the planet first in at least one way - that's up from 49% just two years ago. The resolutions being taken are great, but we have three that are just as easy, and make a far bigger impact than those listed in the survey. …
Survey Finds Over Half of All Americans Committing to Green New Years Resolutions
Monday, December 7, 2009
Hares, birds and orchids: the casualties of peace in Cyprus
It's called the Green Line, but despite the name, it is a completely accidental wildlife sanctuary. The narrow strip of land that zigzags across the island of Cyprus was imposed in 1974 to separate the parties to armed conflict. As humans moved out, abandoning farms and villages, nature moved in. Thirty five years on, this no man's land has become a safe haven for some of the rarest endemic plants and animals in Europe and a place of special scientific importance. Now however there's a threat hanging over the unique eco-system, not from war, but from peace.
At its narrowest, the Green Line measures only 3.5 metres, and 7.5 km at the widest. But since Cyprus was divided in 1974, the area has seen minimal human activity, barring the occasional patrol by UN peacekeepers. The resulting surge in wildlife became evident early on, but its full scale has become apparent only since Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot scientists began working together to compile the first comprehensive inventories of plant and animal life. An absence of building development has allowed wildlife to flourish. "It means healthy populations of various species have survived without having their habitats fragmented, degraded or destroyed," explains Dr. Iris Charalambidou, a leader of the joint-North South scientific team which has been studying the area.
One of the most exciting finds are populations of two indigenous plants, the Cyprus Tulip (Tulipa cypria) and the Cyprus Bee Orchid (Ophrys kotschyi), both extremely rare. Likewise, a few decades ago, there were only a few hundred Cyprus mouflon, an endangered wild sheep found only on the island. But the Green Line has helped the sub-species to thrive to the point where Cyprus now has a healthy 3,000-strong herd. …
Hares, birds and orchids: the casualties of peace in Cyprus
Friday, November 27, 2009
Forest area bigger than Canada can be restored
By Nina Chestney
LONDON (Reuters) - Only one fifth of the world's forests remain but an area bigger than Canada could be restored without harming food production, a global alliance dedicated to restoring forests said on Thursday.
A study by the Global Partnership on Forest Landscape Restoration (GPFLR), which includes the WWF, Britain's Forestry Commission and International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), said a billion hectares of former forests, equivalent to six percent of the world's total land area, could be restored.
Previous assessments estimated 850 million hectares had restoration potential.
"This is a first go at identifying the total scale of this opportunity. The next stage is to work at a country level to identify what we would restore in the real world," Tim Rollinson, GPFLR chairman and director general of the British Forestry Commission told Reuters in an interview.
Marginal agricultural land, where productivity was low, had the most potential for restoration, the study found.
"There are opportunities in almost every continent. The most potential is in Africa; there are substantial areas in China and India, as well as parts of Brazil," William Jackson, IUCN's deputy director general. …
Forest area bigger than Canada can be restored
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Lost puffins collected and released by Iceland youth
This is lovely, but couldn’t they just turn off the streetlights during breeding season?
In a new series, BBC News focuses on aspects of life in countries and cities around the world. What may seem ordinary and familiar to the people who live there, can be surprising to those who don't.
At the same time every year in the Westman Isles, off the coast of Iceland, baby puffins start appearing on the streets - hiding in corners and behind rubbish bins.
It's all because of the street lights which disorientate and confuse the puffins as they begin their annual migration during the night.
And as Simon Hancock discovers, every night during the season hundreds of children gather during the evening to round up the lost puffins - then later, to release them back into the sea.
Close-Up: Iceland's lost puffins
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Discovering the North American Afterculture: An Anthropology of the Future
Via reader cduhamel:
Discovering the North American Afterculture is a glimpse of a future being shaped, and even lived, right now.
It imagines the culture that might emerge if we fully embraced a completely sustainable, sacred world-outlook. A diorama, crafted artifacts, paintings and photomurals show a New Native American people whose life-patterns are healing to a damaged land. They look like us: a mixture
of races and backgrounds, and there are hints that much of the knowledge gathered in our time remains alive in oral tradition. But they are also profoundly unlike us. They know themselves as part of the web of life. Seeing the natural world as an expression of the sacred, they have simplified their lives the better to move in balance with it. …
This is not your usual end-of-the-century jitters. Future Shock has unnerved the planet. The great tectonic plates of civilization are adrift now, and the widening fault lines can be seen on the evening news every night. The Old Order still rumbles down the track, but it’s a train out of fuel. Staying the course now only guarantees disaster, because up ahead the bridge is out: Capitalism has mutated into vast, uncontrollable multinationals, while Big Science diverts our attention from its disasters with illusions of cool breakthrough-fixes just-around-the-corner. And a young, aggressive techno-elite is fastforwarding us into an information/genetic revolution which will have absolutely apocalyptic consequences if played out. …
Discovering the North American Afterculture
Friday, November 13, 2009
Big profit from nature protection
By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News websiteMoney invested in protecting nature can bring huge financial returns, according to a major investigation into the costs and benefits of the natural world.
It says money ploughed into protecting wetlands, coral reefs and forests can bring a hundredfold return on capital.
The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity study (Teeb) is backed by the UN and countries including the UK.
The project's leader says governments should act on its findings at next month's UN climate summit.
Teeb is the first attempt to evaluate the economic value of "ecosystem services" - things that parts of the natural world do for free, such as purifying drinking water or protecting coasts from storms - on a systematic and global basis.
"We have now evaluated 1,100 studies ranging across different countries and different ecosystem services," said study leader Pavan Sukhdev, a Deutsche Bank economist.
"And we find that with protected areas, for example, no matter how you slice the figures up you come up with a ratio of benefits to costs that's between 25-to-one and 100-to-one.
"Now we can say quite confidently that there is a solid benefit from investing in protected areas," he told BBC News. …
Big profit from nature protection
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Dam's demise lets the Rogue River run
On Friday, a platoon of bulldozers and earthmovers tore away at the last of the temporary earthen berms holding water behind the dam. The Rogue River rushed free, flowing through its historic channel for the first time since 1921.
By Kim Murphy, Los Angeles Times
GRANTS PASS, Ore. — For years, the water stored by the Savage Rapids Dam has nurtured the green bean fields and grazing pastures of southern Oregon, turning them into a lush region of bounty.
But there has been a price — the death of thousands of fish, which slammed themselves into the concrete wall of the dam in a futile effort to head upstream.
That picture now resembles a faded sepia-tone photograph. Many of the big farms have turned into 10-acre hobby ranches; the salmon are in danger of disappearing, and even the federal Bureau of Reclamation, the agency that harnessed rivers and irrigated the West, began saying a few years ago it would be better to just tear down the aging dam once and for all.
So they did.
On Friday, a platoon of bulldozers and earthmovers tore away at the last of the temporary earthen berms holding water behind the dam. The Rogue River rushed free, flowing through its historic channel for the first time since 1921.
"Startin' through," muttered Robert Hamilton, project manager for the Bureau of Reclamation, who worked on fixing, and finally dismantling, the dam for more than 20 years. "Don't see something like this every day." …
Dam's demise lets the Rogue River run
Friday, September 4, 2009
Google web page ranking algorithm detects critical species in ecosystems
Google's algorithm for ranking web-pages can be used to determine which species are critical for sustaining ecosystems. Now researchers find that "PageRank" can be applied to the study of food webs, the complex networks describing who eats whom in an ecosystem.
The researchers, based at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at the University of California, Santa Barbara and at the University of Michigan, therefore adapt Google's PageRank algorithm, which efficiently ranks web-pages according to search criteria, for ecological purposes. Details are published September 4 in the open-access journal PLoS Computational Biology. …
Web Page Ranking Algorithm Detects Critical Species In Ecosystems
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Launch for amphibian 'life raft'
By Richard Black, Environment correspondent, BBC News website
Conservationists have launched a new initiative aimed at safeguarding the world's amphibians from extinction.
The Amphibian Survival Alliance will bring together existing projects and organisations, improving co-ordination, scientific research and fund-raising.
About a third of amphibian species are threatened with extinctions.
A two-day summit held last week in London identified the two main threats as destruction of habitat and the fungal disease chytridiomycosis.
"The world's amphibians are facing an uphill battle for survival," said James Collins, co-chair of the Amphibian Specialist Group (ASG) co-ordinated by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
"By far the worst threats are infectious disease and habitat destruction, so the Alliance will focus on these issues first." ...
"If we want to stop the amphibian extinction crisis, we have to protect the areas where amphibians are threatened by habitat destruction," said Claude Gascon, the Amphibian Specialist Group's other co-chair.
"One of the reasons amphibians are in such dire straits is because many species are only found in single sites and are therefore much more susceptible to habitat loss." …
Launch for amphibian 'life raft'
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Wild salmon return to the River Seine for the first time in almost a century
Wild salmon are returning to the River Seine for the first time in almost a century, French scientists say.
Historically, Salmo salar - or Atlantic salmon - used to migrate up the Seine river for part of the year to spawn.
But increased pollution of the water and the building of dams after World War I saw their number dwindle.
By 1995, the salmon were gone, and only four species of fish braved the Seine's dirty waters, which washed up hundreds of tonnes of dead fish a year.
But a major clean-up project in the past 15 years - including the building of a water purification plant - has turned the tide for the river's marine life.
Now the Atlantic salmon - listed as an endangered species throughout Europe - is back, as attested by anglers who have netted sizeable specimens from the river in recent months. …
Sunday, August 2, 2009
River project offers new hope for oysters, researchers say
By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 31, 2009Scientists say they've created something in a Virginia river that hasn't been seen since the late 1800s: a vast, thriving reef of American oysters, the shellfish that helped create the Chesapeake Bay's ecosystem and then nearly vanished from it.
The reef sits on the bottom of the Great Wicomico River, a bay tributary about 80 miles southeast of Washington. The scientists say they found a better way to plant oysters, creating an 87-acre colony of bivalves that teems with other marine life.
That's a long way from bringing oysters back in all of the Chesapeake. Virginia and Maryland officials said this week that they doubted this success could be replicated widely.
But the oyster researchers said their work, published online Thursday in the journal Science, provides new hope for one of the bay's most beleaguered species. The oyster, depleted by overfishing, pollution and disease, has fallen to less than 1 percent of its historical population.
When an underwater camera hovered over the new reef, "we knew we were looking at something that no one had ever seen before" -- or at least, no one living -- said David Schulte, a researcher with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who worked on the project.
They saw small fish, blue crabs and oysters blowing out underwater "smoke rings," showing that they were filtering out algae and dirt. "That just had been something that hadn't been in the bay for more than a century," Schulte said. …
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Ecological restoration substantially boosts biodiversity and ecosystem services
A new analysis reports that ecological restoration generally deliver benefits for both conserving biodiversity and supporting human livelihoods, but does not completely reverse degradation caused by humans.
The research, published in Science, examined 89 studies and found that ecological restoration increased provision of biodiversity and ecosystem services by 44 percent and 25 percent respectively. Values of both, however, remained lower in restored than in intact reference ecosystems.
Still, Jose Rey Benayas and colleagues are encouraged that restoration projects could become increasingly viable under emerging payments for environmental services schemes like the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) mechanism proposed for a post-Kyoto climate agreement. Such initiatives, which could compensate developing countries for protecting and restoring ecosystems, could simultaneously deliver benefits to the environment and local communities. …
Ecological restoration substantially boosts biodiversity and ecosystem services
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