February 20, 2012
- Pompeii-like, a 300-million-year-old tropical forest was preserved in ash when a volcano erupted in what is today northern China. Paleobotanists have reconstructed this fossilized forest, lending insight into the ecology and climate of its time.
February 17, 2012
- A NASA-led science team has created an accurate, high-resolution map of the height of Earth's forests. The map will help scientists better understand the role forests play in climate change and how their heights influence wildlife habitats within them, while also helping them quantify the carbon stored in Earth's vegetation.
February 16, 2012
- With its miles and miles of dense swamp forest, Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park in the Republic of Congo has long been a wildlife haven. It's home to an unusual primate population: so-called "naïve" chimpanzees, who have so little exposure to humans that they investigate the conservationists who study them, instead of running away. These curious chimps got a recent boost when Congo formally expanded Nouabalé-Ndoki to protect them. Known as the Goualougo Triangle, the 100-plus square-mile forest...
- The Government of Bangladesh recently declared three new wildlife sanctuaries for endangered freshwater dolphins in the world's largest mangrove ecosystem – the Sundarbans, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society whose conservation work helped pinpoint the locations of the protected areas.
February 14, 2012
- By combining airborne laser technology, satellite mapping, and ground-based plot surveys, a team of researchers has produced the first large-scale, high-resolution estimates of carbon stocks in remote and fragile Madagascar. The group has shown that it is possible to map carbon stocks in rugged geographic regions and that this type of carbon monitoring can be successfully employed to support conservation and climate-change mitigation under the United Nations initiative on Reduced Emissions from...
February 6, 2012
- A new study provides compelling evidence that the arrival of the invasive non-native harlequin ladybird (ladybug) to mainland Europe and subsequent spread has led to a rapid decline in historically-widespread species of ladybird in Britain, Belgium and Switzerland. The analysis is further evidence that harlequin ladybirds are displacing some native ladybirds, most probably through predation and competition.
- Several periods of field work during 2008 have led to the discovery of a new species of bamboo-feeding plant lice in Costa Rica's high-altitude region Cerro de la Muerte. The discovery was made thanks to molecular data analysis of mitochondrial DNA. The collected records have also increased the overall knowledge of plant lice (one of the most dangerous agricultural pests worldwide) from the region with more that 20 percent.
February 5, 2012
- A new study shows that land-cover changes, in particular deforestation, in the vicinity of glaciers do not have an impact on glacier loss. However, the study also shows that deforestation decreases precipitation in mid elevation zones, which affects the quality of life of the population living in the surrounding areas.
February 1, 2012
- Yellow-cedar, a culturally and economically valuable tree in southeastern Alaska and adjacent parts of British Columbia, has been dying off across large expanses of these areas for the past 100 years. But no one could say why -- until now.
January 29, 2012
- Tropical vegetation contains 21 percent more carbon than previously thought. Using a combination of remote sensing and field data, scientists were able to produce the first "wall-to-wall" map (with a spatial resolution of 500 m x 500 m) of carbon storage of forests, shrublands, and savannas in the tropics of Africa, Asia, and South America.