biodiversity

The Wilder Blean project, like many of its ilk, is inspired largely by the work of Dutch ecologist Frans Vera. In his influential book Grazing Ecology and Forest History, published in 2000, Vera questions the prevailing wisdom that vegetation in the lowlands of central and western Europe used to be dominated by closed forest. As a result of this assumption, he writes, farming has been given a lot of credit for increasing biodiversity, as grazing livestock creates different types of vegetation. But Vera argues that this…

Historically, Shelta Cave was one of the most diverse cave systems in the eastern United States. Long before Niemiller and other scientists came along, beetles, salamanders, shrimp, crayfish, and other animals lived out their days in the dark. Often blind and lacking pigmentation, many cave-dwelling species live longer than their surface-dwelling relatives, thanks to slower metabolisms—a common evolutionary adaptation to subterranean life. For example, the red swamp crayfish, the unfortunate star of many a Louisiana…

For millennia, many animals and plants have coped with occasional climate changes by moving into new areas. But humans’ relatively recent burning of fossil fuels is pushing global temperatures upward at an exceptionally rapid rate, placing many species on what a new book by science journalist Benjamin von Brackel notes has been called an “escalator to extinction”—and raising the question of whether migration can save them this time. It is estimated that land-dwelling animals are now moving toward the poles at a rate of an…

For Native Americans, kéya (the turtle) symbolizes wisdom. For Europeans, bears are an important element of their history. What animals mean the most to you, and why do they hold such significance? Cultures worldwide have empowering relationships with wild animals and knowing those animals promotes a deeper connection to spirituality, geography and pride. For Black people, our connection to nature and the cultural significance of mammals comes from traditions practiced during the slavery era and continues into modern-day…

From the window of a passenger plane flying over the Amazon, the view is breathtaking. “It’s just miles across of river and river islands,” said Lukas Musher, a postdoctoral researcher at Drexel University’s Academy of Natural Sciences.The massive rivers below branch into a dense, treelike network that has continuously rearranged itself over hundreds of thousands of years, drawing new paths and erasing old ones. The rivers divide and subdivide the forest into spaces that are each an entire world for the innumerable…

There are estimated to be around three million shipwrecks sitting on sea beds around the world, many of them made from wood – and these submerged wooden islands are proving a vibrant breeding ground for deep sea microbes, a new study reveals.  Scientists say these human-made structures are having an important impact on the delicate ecosystems down at the bottom of the oceans, to an extent that hasn't really been appreciated before.Deep sea microbes living on submerged shipwrecks are positioned at the bottom of the…

The grand old man of ornithology Salim Ali gave talks on birding and nature conservation on All India Radio (AIR) between 1941 and 1985. Tara Gandhi, who was guided by Salim Ali for her MSc in Field Ornithology, discovered these lectures archived as catalogued scripts and has compiled them in Words for Birds: The Collected Radio Broadcasts. Providing an insight into one of the greatest minds in Indian conservation, the 35 talks in the book are rich essays on topics such as bird breeding, migration, birding in Sikkim and…

Trilobites are perhaps the most successful group of animals ever to live. Named for their distinctive three-lobed body, these armored, pill-bug-like arthropods were some of the first hard-bodied animals on Earth. They appeared some 520 million years ago and dominated the fossil record of ancient seas for nearly 300 million years afterward. To date, paleontologists have uncovered a staggering 20,000 species, sporting every outlandish configuration of plates, spines and horns imaginable. “It’s just like, ‘Evolution, go…

In the dense jungles of Cameroon and nearby countries, the population of the iconic and critically endangered western lowland gorilla declined by nearly 20 percent between 2005 and 2013 to about 360,000 individuals—and their number is expected to plunge by another 80 percent over about the next 65 years. Raw materials extracted from their habitat and used for goods manufactured in China and then sold in the U.S. and elsewhere have contributed to that decline. This is just one of thousands of species the world stands to…

Deforestation in South America is devastating to local communities. Credit: © Xico Putini, Shutterstock Deforestation in the Gran Chaco forest in South America can be the end of the world for indigenous people who call it home. Researchers have been investigating different aspects of its human impact. …