Ecological

To the dismay of many scientists in Chile, voters resoundingly rejected a draft constitution that would have had major impacts on research, environmental policies, and Indigenous rights. Sixty-two percent of voters said “no” during a referendum yesterday on the new charter, which would have steered the country sharply leftward. “I’m still a bit shocked,” says Olga Barbosa, an ecologist at Austral University of Chile who supported the new constitution. “There’s still so much…

Skellig Michael, a jagged outcrop off the coast of County Kerry, was used as the location of Luke Skywalker’s hideaway in two Star Wars films, but tradition holds that human habitation on the island dates from AD600, when ascetic Irish monks began retreating to ever-more remote spots. Emma Donoghue’s brooding, dreamlike new novel, Haven, imagines who those first souls might have been and how they might have survived. Suffice to say, the refuge they imagine – somewhere far from temptation and worldly chatter – soon becomes…

In the 1570s, when King Philip II of Spain sent emissaries to survey the flora and fauna of villages in central and southern Spain, he wasn’t thinking about ecological networks or extinction. He just wanted to know exactly what he owned. So, he asked at least two people in each village to describe the land, flora, and fauna of their territory to his surveyors. Now, 450 years later, a team of ecologists says the resulting answers to that survey have value as ecological surveys,…

Mandarinfish (Synchiropus splendidus) is a small, brightly colored member of the dragonet family.Machine learning enables largest study to date on aesthetic preferences and fish ecology.What makes a fish beautiful to humans? Is it colorful, symmetrical, and distinctive? Perhaps you don’t know the features, but you just “know it when you see it.” That works in this study, where people rated the attractiveness of fish in images, and a machine learning (a type of artificial intelligence) neural network was able to learn what…

A group of Ediacaran specimens of Fractofusus and Plumeropriscum from the “E” surface, Mistaken Point Ecological Reserve, Newfoundland, Canada. Credit: Charlotte G. Kenchington (CC BY 4.0)Metacommunity analysis suggests succession, not mass extinction, explains the Ediacaran diversity drop.Early animals developed complex ecological communities more than 550 million years ago, setting the evolutionary stage for the Cambrian explosion, according to a research study by Rebecca Eden, Emily Mitchell, and colleagues at the…

Many residents living along the U.S. Eastern Seaboard whom researchers surveyed about their understanding of coastal ecosystems displayed one of two lines of thought. People exhibiting linear thinking saw the relationships between different aspects of their environment as going in one direction, while systems thinkers captured the concept of two-way relationships more often. Credit: B. Hayes/NISTA new study that highlights a sharp contrast between urban and suburban ways of thinking about coastal ecosystems has been…