EAST LANSING, Mich. — Two new species of owls have been discovered in the Philippines, and a Michigan State University researcher played a key role in confirming their existence.
The discovery, which is featured in the current issue of Forktail, the Journal of Asian Ornithology, took years to confirm, but it was well worth the effort, said the paper’s lead author Pam Rasmussen, MSU assistant professor of zoology and assistant curator of mammalogy and ornithology at the MSU Museum.
“More than 15 years ago, we realized that new subspecies of Ninox hawk-owls existed in the Philippines,” she said. “But it wasn’t until last year that we obtained enough recordings that we could confirm that they were not just subspecies, but two new species of owls.” (more…)
Many of the protected areas in tropical nations are struggling to sustain their biodiversity, according to a study by more than 200 scientists from around the world. The study, which will appear Thursday in the journal Nature, found that deforestation is advancing rapidly in these nations and most reserves are losing some or all of their surrounding forest.
Among the scientists participating in the study were lead author Professor William Laurance of James Cook University in Cairns, Australia, and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, who is also a senior research fellow at UCLA’s Center for Tropical Research; and Thomas Smith, a professor at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and director of UCLA’s Center for Tropical Research. (more…)
Renowned expert Charles J. Vörösmarty addresses global water crisis
The world’s streams, rivers and lakes are under increasing stress because of human water management – and mismanagement – that threaten aquatic biodiversity and the water supply, Charles J. Vörösmarty said recently during the second annual John R. Mather Visiting Scholars Lecture.
Vörösmarty, professor of civil engineering with the City College of New York, presented “Global Water Crisis: The Slippery Slope” on May 3 at the University of Delaware’s Roselle Center for the Arts.
“The contemporary water system is really defined increasingly by the actions of humans,” he said. (more…)
In the face of mass deforestation of the Amazon, we could learn from its earliest inhabitants who managed their farmland sustainably.
Research from an international team of archaeologists and paleoecologists, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows for the first time that indigenous people, living in the savannas around the Amazonian forest, farmed without using fire.
Led by the University of Exeter, the research could provide insights into the sustainable use and conservation of these globally-important ecosystems, which are being rapidly destroyed. Pressure on the Amazonian savannas today is intense, with the land being rapidly transformed for industrial agriculture and cattle ranching.
By analysing records of pollen, charcoal and other plant remains like phytoliths spanning more than 2,000 years, the team has created the first detailed picture of land use in the Amazonian savannas in French Guiana. This gives a unique perspective on the land before and after the first Europeans arrived in 1492. (more…)
In the wake of a mass extinction like the one that occurred 445 million years ago, a common assumption is that surviving species tend to proliferate quickly into new forms, having outlived many of their competitors.
But new research shows that tiny marine organisms called graptoloids did not begin to rapidly develop new physical traits until about 2 million years after competing species became extinct.(more…)
Deforestation, considered by scientists to contribute significantly to global warming, has been shown by a Yale-led team to actually cool the local climate in northern latitudes, according to a paper published Nov. 17 in Nature.
“If you cut trees in the boreal region, north of 45 degrees latitude, you have a net cooling effect,” says Xuhui Lee, the study’s principal investigator and professor of meteorology at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. “You release carbon into the atmosphere by cutting down trees, but you increase the albedo effect — the reflection of sunlight.” (more…)
Stanford, CA — Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes had an impact on the global carbon cycle as big as today’s annual demand for gasoline. The Black Death, on the other hand, came and went too quickly for it to cause much of a blip in the global carbon budget. Dwarfing both of these events, however, has been the historical trend towards increasing deforestation, which over centuries has released vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, as crop and pasture lands expanded to feed growing human populations. Even Genghis Kahn couldn’t stop it for long. (more…)
Some 55% of tropical forests are negatively affected by land use practices and deforestation worldwide. But the ability to penetrate the canopy to see what’s going on has been lacking until now.
Global Ecology’s Greg Asner’s group has developed new airborne methods to peer through the canopy to measure and map, in beautiful 3-D, the underlying vegetation, degradation and deforestation, and the amount of carbon stored and emitted in these forests. (more…)
