conservationists

As It Happens6:05Spider webs catch more than prey. They're also jam-packed with animal DNAJosh Newton probably isn't very popular with spiders. After all, the Australian scientist has a tendency to go around undoing their hard work. "I liken it to when Princess Fiona in Shrek makes some cotton candy for Shrek from spider webs, where she collects a stick and just wraps around the spider web for him. But I do it with a clean, sterile stick," Newton, a PhD candidate in life sciences at Curtin University, told As It Happens…

A close-up of a sea otter taken in Morro Bay, California, in 2016. Credit: Marshal Hedin from San Diego, CC BY-SA 2.0 There are fields of scientific research that involve neither vast cosmic phenomena nor extremely cute animals, but those are topics of high salience in Saturday Citations, and this week is no exception. And we'll probably play the odds and say next week won't be either. …

A few years ago, a couple of Google employees reached out to a Minnesota scientist with an unusual proposal: What if they could teach computers to spot beaver habitats from space? "They wanted to know if I thought it was possible to find beaver wetlands from aerial imagery myself, and then if that could be scaled up with machine learning," Emily Fairfax, a University of Minnesota beaver researcher and assistant professor of geography, told As It Happens guest host Megan Williams.Fairfax knew that beavers' sprawling dams…

In a converted shipping container perched oceanside in Ketch Harbour, N.S., a group of people gather to peer into tanks filled with fuzzy pieces of gravel. The rocks are covered with tiny blades of sugar kelp. Soon, the squares of steel mesh they're fixed to will be suspended in the water at a kelp farming demonstration site in Mahone Bay, in the hopes of safeguarding the future Nova Scotia's kelp beds.It's an effort by scientists, conservationists and a West Coast company working together on the restoration technique for…

On July 25, 2021, Pedro Huertas, an American doctor trying to cross from Canada into the U.S. at the Highgate Springs border crossing in Vermont, told a border guard he was bringing one $2,000 stone statue with him.  He was lying. A search of his vehicle revealed nine bubble-wrapped packages of various sizes, one of them long and thin, others small, according to a criminal complaint filed in U.S. court. When border guards asked Huertas what was inside, he and his wife would not respond to their questions.Three of the…

A conservation group in Australia is planting trees to create corridors that help koalas safely move across the landscape in New South Wales after the marsupial populations were devastated by bushfires in 2019 and 2020. A conservation group in Australia is planting trees to create corridors that help koalas safely move across the landscape in New South Wales after the marsupial populations were devastated by bushfires in 2019 and 2020. FOLLOW US ON GOOGLE NEWS Read original article here Denial of…

Think Sonoma County, and the picturesque valley and vineyards come to mind. But the locale is also home to rich and incredible biodiversity. And Soundscapes to Landscapes, the name of a biodiversity-monitoring initiative in the county, aims to document just that.Over the past five years, from mid-spring to late summer here in California wine country, the initiative collected a massive amount of sound data by placing acoustic recorders in 1,300 locations around the county. The project, run by Sonoma State University,…