Deforestation

During its nesting season, the marbled murrelet, known affectionately among bird watchers as a "strange, mysterious little seabird," lays a single egg in the thick mosses that grow on the branches of British Columbia's old-growth forest canopy.With some of those forests under threat from logging, the small black-and-brown mottled seabird is considered threatened, too.The marbled murrelet is among a growing number of migratory species animals facing a perilous future, a new UN report found.  "The solution for the marbled …

Our planet is changing. So is our journalism. This weekly newsletter is part of a CBC News initiative entitled "Our Changing Planet" to show and explain the effects of climate change. Keep up with the latest news on our Climate and Environment page.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox every Thursday.This week: From fashion to burials: How fungi can help fight climate change 2024 has barely started and is already threatening to set temperature records World's globetrotting animals at risk due to habitat…

Graphical abstract. Credit: Environmental Science & Technology (2024). DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.3c07851 About 10% of human-made mercury emissions into the atmosphere each year are the result of global deforestation, according to a new MIT study. The world's vegetation, from the Amazon rainforest to the savannahs of sub-Saharan Africa, acts as a sink…

The Current16:20Huge ancient city discovered in Amazon"Wow" was all archaeologist Stéphen Rostain could say when LiDAR (light detection and ranging) laser technology revealed several ancient cities hidden deep in the Amazon rainforest."It's a gift for an archaeologist," he told The Current's Matt Galloway. Using the laser-scanning technology, researchers have uncovered a complex network of farmland, roads and neighbourhoods in Ecuador's Upano River Valley.The cities are believed to be between 2,000 and 3,000 years old,…

Canada's forestry sector is responsible for far more greenhouse gas emissions than show up in official tallies, potentially leading to policies that aren't in line with the country's climate goals, a new study suggests.The peer-reviewed study, published in the academic journal Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, found that annual greenhouse gas emissions attributable to forestry between 2005 and 2021 were, on average, nearly 91 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent — which would put the sector on par with…

Canada is home to the largest boreal forest in the world, a vast expanse of wilderness rich in biodiversity that stretches from coast to coast.But a major new study examining nearly a half century of logging in Ontario and Quebec warns that clear-cutting has left forests in the provinces severely depleted — and puts woodland caribou at risk.The peer-reviewed research, published in the academic journal Land, found that logging practices between 1976 and 2020 have resulted in the loss of more than 14 million hectares of…

Comparison of the forecasting schemes of monthly mean number of clusters for Tropical America in January 2019 and their errors. Top left is the observed number of clusters from WWLLN, top center is the result of the mean scheme, top right is the result of the random selector scheme. Bottom left is the error of the mean scheme, bottom right is the error of the random selector scheme (Error = forecast – observations). Credit: Quarterly Journal of the…

In Brazil, the unabated use of dangerous pesticides reminds the world of the harm done by denying reality. Here, as with everywhere else, synthetic pesticides play a crucial role in agriculture by controlling pests and protecting crops. But because of their high biological activity and persistence in the environment, these substances can harm human health and the ecosystem. All too often, they do just that.Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro, who, many times, criticized COVID vaccines by claiming that they were too…

As It Happens6:18Chimps and bonobos remember friends and families' faces, even after decades apartWhen Laura Simone Lewis visited Kendall the chimpanzee for the first time in six months, she wasn't sure how he would react.She had been working with the chimp at the North Carolina Zoo in 2015 as part of her undergraduate research on primate cognition, and they'd developed a special bond.But, after visiting Kendall two to three times a week for about eight months, she left for a summer to study baboons in South Africa."I was…

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Universities will do the environment a good service and trim deforestation levels if they turn their campuses paperless, according to a study published as part of the 2022 Advances in Science and Engineering Technology International Conferences (ASET). The call comes as hundreds of renowned…