biodiversity

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. The U.S. Supreme Court opens its new session on Oct. 3, 2022, with a high-profile case that could fundamentally alter the federal government’s ability to address water pollution. Sackett v. EPA turns on a question that courts and regulators have struggled to answer for several decades: Which wetlands and bodies of water can the federal government regulate under the 1972 Clean Water Act? Under this…

Annie Proulx was not able to travel for her book on wetlands. She had imagined journeys into the disappearing Siberian mires and the English fens, which are already mostly lost. She would visit biologists examining the fires crackling under the Arctic peatlands and explore the southeastern swamps, where her feet would bounce on rafts of sphagnum moss, a sensation she compares to walking on a water bed. But amidst a global pandemic, Proulx, who is 87 years old, was stuck at home. So instead, as she explains in the forward…

Though Bd swept through Central America from the 1980s to the 2000s, the analysis that demonstrated its effect on human health could be accomplished only recently, says Michael Springborn, the paper’s lead author and a professor and environmental and resource economist at UC Davis. “The data existed, but it wasn’t easily obtainable,” he says. Over the years, though, county-level disease records were digitized at the ministries of health in Costa Rica and Panama, providing an opportunity to combine that epidemiology in a…

Located an hour’s drive from the city of Dunedin on New Zealand’s South Island, Foulden Maar has become one of the world’s most significant but troubled fossil sites. This shallow-sided volcanic crater lake (called a maar) was formed in a violent explosion 23 million years ago—the start of the Miocene epoch, when the climate in this part of the world was much warmer and wetter than it is now. For at least 120,000 years, a rain forest grew around the lake. In its waters, tiny single-celled algae called diatoms bloomed…

CLIMATE POLICY California to ban gasoline-only cars California regulators last week issued the first ban by a U.S. state on the sale of new passenger cars that run only on gasoline. Starting in 2035, nearly all new cars sold in California must be all electric or run on hydrogen fuel cells; 20% can be hybrid-electric vehicles with batteries capable of running at least 80 kilometers. The measure is expected to halve greenhouse gas emissions from passenger cars, pickups, and SUVs…

Credit: CC0 Public Domain Honeybees are disappearing. Contributing factors include the pesticides of industrial agriculture and urban developments encroaching on habitats. Wildflowers and areas of plant abundance are in decline. The bees are losing their food source. …

The United Nation’s latest biodiversity report warns that one million species are headed for extinction, including 1,000 wild mammal species and 450 species of sharks and rays. Losing this much wildlife will have massive human consequences because one in five people depend on these species for food and income. To help reverse the crisis, the UN’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services urges governments and NGOs to secure land rights for Indigenous peoples, who have been…

Every middle-school student learns the dogma: a species is defined as a group of organisms that interbreed and produce fertile young. When individual plants and animals can’t, we call them different species. Sometimes it’s a little confusing to imagine exactly how that might work between Great Danes and Chihuahuas, which are both Canis familiaris, but for the most part it’s a comforting way to make sense of the biological diversity around us. Except that it’s wrong. Older genetic sequencing techniques meant that until…

By highlighting future issues, the new report points to where changes must be made today to protect our marine and coastal environments. Credit: Emma JohnstonLithium extraction from the deep sea, overfishing of deeper-water species, and the unexpected ocean impacts of wildfires on land are among 15 issues experts warn we should address immediately.An international team of experts has identified 15 issues they believe are likely to have a significant impact on marine and coastal biodiversity over the next decade.They…

For all the progress that scientists have made in breeding crops that feed more people, these breakthroughs typically elude a core demographic in low-income countries that rely on agriculture: women. Advances in seed genetics are estimated to be responsible for up to 60 percent of yield increases in farmers’ fields in recent years by making crops hardier and faster-maturing. However, only a third of crops grown by sub-Saharan African farmers in 2010 were the latest varieties of genetically improved plants; the uptake is…