Showing posts with the label
Ecosystems
Species that live in symbiosis with others, which often occur in the most delicately balanced and threatened marine ecosystems such as coral reefs, are the slowest to recover their diversity if damag…
Deforestation of the Amazon is about to reach a threshold beyond which the region's tropical rainforest may undergo irreversible changes that transform the landscape into degraded savanna with sp…
In the summer of 2010-2011 Western Australia experienced an unprecedented marine heat wave that elevated water temperatures 2-4°C above average for more than 2 months. The heat wave resulted in defol…
After a 100-year flood struck south central Oklahoma in 2015, a study of the insects, arthropods, and other invertebrates in the area revealed striking declines of most invertebrates in the local eco…
Ocean acidification will severely impair coral reef growth before the end of the century if carbon dioxide emissions continue unchecked, according to new research on Australia's Great Barrier Ree…
A team led by scientists from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego and the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) has demonstrated that the excess carbon dioxide ad…
Up to half of plant and animal species in the world's most naturally rich areas, such as the Amazon and the Galapagos, could face local extinction by the turn of the century due to climate change…
Poaching and habitat loss have reduced forest elephant populations in Central Africa by 63 percent since 2001. This widespread killing poses dire consequences not only for the species itself but also…
About 2 to 3 million years ago, a group of spiders let out long silk threads into the wind and set sail, so to speak, across the Pacific Ocean to Hawaii. These spiders were parasites of other spiders…
For nearly two decades, scientists have noted dramatic changes in arctic tundra habitat. Ankle-high grasses and sedges have given way to a sea of woody shrubs growing to waist- or neck-deep heights. …
In a study spanning twelve years, researchers from Kyoto University, and with Ryukoku University have developed a method to calculate the fluctuating stability of a natural ecological community in Ma…
Rainforest loss is fuelling a tsunami of tropical species extinctions. However, not all is doom and gloom. A new study, conducted in the Brazilian Amazon, suggests that ecological cataclysms prompted…
Fields, streets and cities, but also forests planted in rank and file, and dead straight rivers: humans shape nature to better suit their purposes, and not only since the onset of industrialization. …
For the first time, researchers have seen life rebounding in the world's driest desert, demonstrating that it could also be lurking in the soils of Mars. Hyperarid core of the Atacama Desert [Cre…
A new theory of plant evolution suggests that the 400 million-year drive of flora across the globe may not have been propelled by the above-ground traits we can see easily, but by underground adaptat…
