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Migrating birds are arriving at their breeding grounds earlier as global temperatures rise, an Edinburgh University study finds.

A rare giraffe has been born at Chester Zoo.

Designation of Bears Ears in Utah and Gold Butte in Nevada mark last moves to protect environmentally sensitive areas in administration’s final weeks

President Barack Obama designated two national monuments at sites in Utah and Nevada that have become key flashpoints over use of public land in the west, marking the administration’s latest move to protect environmentally sensitive areas in its final weeks.

The Bears Ears national monument in Utah will cover 1.35m acres in the Four Corners region, the White House said. In a victory for Native American tribes and conservationists, the designation protects land that is considered sacred and is home to an estimated 100,000 archaeological sites, including ancient cliff dwellings.

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Cougar killed after husky and owner injured in central Alberta forest during unusual attack on pet dog

A Canadian man punched a cougar in the face to stop it attacking his dog, police have said.

The incident occurred in a wooded area near a fast food chain in Whitecourt, central Alberta, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) said on Wednesday.

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Environmentalist and writer Tim Flannery has some thoughts about how we should treat our bodies of water and what we can learn from traditional Indigenous practices.

Australia is world-famous as a swimming nation. We have a celebrated beach culture, not to mention more privately owned pools per person than any other country. Yet few urban Australians would consider swimming in their city’s river.

Almost every major Australian city sits on the banks of a large river. But judging by online reactions to the suggestion of a dip in the Brisbane River, most people are worried about everything from ear infections to a painful death from brain-eating amoebae.

Melbourne’s Yarra River has been the butt of many jokes, most famously when Norman Gunston extolled its virtues as the river where you could go fishing and land a catch pre-wrapped in newspaper. In Sydney and Perth people just prefer the beach.

MELBOURNE, VIC. 1943-11-17. Lieutenant A. M. Dennis and sergeant D. Lawson, members of the Australian Women’s Army Service (AWAS), do high dives during the AWAS swimming parade in the Yarra River. Australian War Memorial

It wasn’t always like this. Our modern distaste for river swimming is a stark constrast with a history where urban rivers provided a venue for sport, recreation and entertainment – all within easy distance of shops, offices and public transport.

There were clubs such as the North Adelaide District Swimming Club, formed in 1905, and open water swimming competitions such as those held on Perth’s Swan River from 1912. The Yarra River’s three-mile swim was held from 1917 to 1964, and at its peak was the largest open water swimming competition in the World.

There was spectacle as well as sport, with feats of aquatic derring-do that made swimming look like vaudeville theatre. In the Yarra, Annette Kellerman – one of the first women to reject pantaloons in favour of a one-piece bathing costume – swam her way to a world record between Church Street bridge and Princes Bridge in 1904. After leaving Australia she developed her own swimwear line and went on to become an author and renowned Hollywood actress. The Yarra was her unlikely springboard to global celebrity.

Sidney Nolan takes a dive into the Yarra, 1942.

Endurance was similarly tested by “Professor” Alec Lamb in 1907 who swam 7 miles (11km) and dove from eight bridges, stopping for sustaining glasses of milk and whisky from his trainer’s boat. As the Argus newspaper faithfully noted, the first of his bridge dives was so high that the force of the impact tore off his swimming costume. Harry Houdini also famously attracted a crowd of 20,000 to watch him emerge triumphant from chains, handcuffs and the Yarra mud in 1910.

Melbourne’s river even hosted innovative fund-raising events. In 1910 the Royal Life Saving Society used it to stage a fake near-drowning, with a society member throwing himself off Princes Bridge before being “rescued” by a “policeman”. A third member then produced a megaphone to request donations from the concerned crowd of onlookers.

An arguably less brazen charity appeal centred on Solomon Islands swimmer Alick Wickham’s record-breaking dive of 250 feet (76m) into the river in 1917, attracting 50,000 spectators with the proceeds going to the Soldiers Amelioration Fund.

Several lengths behind

Some projects are now aiming to recast Australia’s urban rivers as fun places to swim, including Our Living River in Sydney’s Parramatta River, and the Swim Thru Perth open water swimming event to be held in the Swan River. Meanwhile, the Yarra Swim Co. is planning to revive the three-mile race and build a river-fed swimming pool on the Yarra’s banks.

Fears about pollution are understandable, but can be managed by websites such as Yarra Bay Watch and the New South Wales Office of Environment Health . While important, the official advice inadvertently adds to the view that Australian urban rivers are little more than an extension of the stormwater system.

Compare that with the renaissance of river swimming internationally. British writer Caitlin Davies swam of the length of London’s Thames to uncover a multitude of present and historical swimming cultures. And municipal governments in Copenhagen, Portland, Berlin, New York and Boston have all embraced river swimming.

The Swiss must surely be the world leaders, even advocating for river swimming in international diplomacy. Every year, large Swiss cities host mass swimming events like the Rhineschwimmen in Basel.

As the Swiss have already realised, to swim in an urban river is to reclaim, one stroke at a time, a public space and a wilder romantic past. It is no coincidence that the same country that zealously promotes urban river and lake swimming can also lay claim to a distinguished environmental record. Our regular, primary contact with this most primal of elements can act in a way to force change in the way our rivers are managed, helping both people and the environment to be a bit healthier.

This article was coauthored by Sally McPhee, based on her honours thesis for RMIT’s Bachelor of Urban and Regional Planning.

Marco Amati does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

A University of Edinburgh study finds birds are arriving at breeding grounds too soon, causing some to miss out on food

Migrating birds are responding to the effects of climate change by arriving at their breeding grounds earlier as global temperatures rise, research has found.

The University of Edinburgh study, which looked at hundreds of species across five continents, found that birds are reaching their summer breeding grounds on average about one day earlier per degree of increasing global temperature.

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Brambles and birds did well, but bees dipped and butterflies were hindered, according to a review of the year’s wildlife and weather by the National Trust

Farmers made hay but rampant grass growth in 2016 made life hard for butterflies and even puffin chicks, according to a review of the year’s wildlife and weather by the National Trust.

The nation’s ever more variable weather brought both booms and busts, with brambles and birds doing well, and slugs flourishing. But bumblebees dipped and owls found field voles hard to find.

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Wenlock Edge, Shropshire On a closer look, the trees are not still holding leaves at all but are full of bracts and seeds

From a distance, the common lime trees are a rich orangey colour. This looks wrong. The autumn leaves of these trees are buttery and the last of them blew down a month ago. The limes have a curious russet foliage, just like the coating of rust on the fallen leaves in a spring issuing from ironstone under the Short Woods a few miles north of here. The rusty limes look oddly out of time, as if frozen in an arrested autumn when all about them winter trees stand darkly naked.

On a closer look, the limes are not still holding leaves at all but are full of bracts and seeds. The bracts are small, oblong, modified leaves, pale and almost transparent when they open in spring, like solar panels on a satellite above the dangling cyme of two to seven flowers.

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Warm winters and bad summers have hit the insect population, but seen other wildlife flourish, says the National Trust

Cropland losses will have consequences especially for Asia and Africa, which will experience growing food insecurity as cities expand

Our future crops will face threats not only from climate change, but also from the massive expansion of cities, a new study warns. By 2030, it’s estimated that urban areas will triple in size, expanding into cropland and undermining the productivity of agricultural systems that are already stressed by rising populations and climate change.

Roughly 60% of the world’s cropland lies on the outskirts of cities—and that’s particularly worrying, the report authors say, because this peripheral habitat is, on average, also twice as productive as land elsewhere on the globe.

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A juvenile dingo on Fraser Island. Eloïse Déaux, CC BY-NC

As I visited a wildlife park in New South Wales in 2011, the keeper at the daily “dingo talk” confidently told us that “pure dingoes don’t bark”. After five years studying dingoes’ vocal behaviours, I can tell you that this is a myth. Dingoes do bark!

While travelling around Australia to study dingoes, I have had the opportunity to meet and talk with all sorts of people. One thing I realised is that the “dingoes don’t bark” belief is widespread – and it isn’t the only unproven dingo myth out there.

Lots of people in Australia take these three myths as hard facts:

1. “pure” dingoes don’t bark

2. “pure” dingoes are all ginger

3. dingoes are “just dogs”.

But none of these are actually true and here’s why.

Myth 1: dingoes don’t bark

Anyone who has been around dingoes for long enough will tell you that they do bark, but not like domestic dogs. Dingoes’ barks are generally harsher, and given in short bursts.

Domestic dogs will bark anytime, anywhere, for anything (often to their owners’ or neighbours’ chagrin). This is not the case with dingoes. They will generally bark only when alarmed – such as when researchers trap them to fit a radio tracking collar, or if you stumble across one in the bush.

Dingo barking sequence. Eloïse Déaux, CC BY-NC-ND133 KB (download)

Dingoes can also bark if they get very excited (about food, for example) but this is quite uncommon. The rarity of these events probably explains the prevalence of the “no barking” myth – wild dingo barking just doesn’t happen often enough for most people to witness it.

Another associated misconception is that captive dingoes will learn to bark from listening to domestic dogs. Although humans are very good at learning new sounds – indeed, that’s how we acquire our language – most other species (including canines) can make only a limited range of vocal sounds, and can’t learn new ones.

So the fact that captive dingoes bark actually confirms that they have barking abilities right from the start. It is, however, possible that by listening to nearby domestic dogs, captive dingoes learn to bark more often and in more situations than they otherwise might.

It is easy to see how this myth might harm efforts to protect dingoes. Imagine a well-meaning pastoralist shooting or baiting anything that barks, in the mistaken belief that it’s not a dingo.

Myth 2: all pure dingoes are ginger

The “typical” dingo that people picture in their minds – think Fraser Island – will be ginger (or tan) with white feet and a white-tipped tail. But dingoes, like people, come in a variety of shapes and colours.

Importantly, although ginger dingoes make up about three-quarters of the population, there is genetic evidence that their coats can also be black, black and tan, black and white, or plain white.

A black and tan dingo… Tim Pearson …and a white one. Tim Pearson

There is also a lot of variation in the size and shape of white patches and these may even be absent altogether. It’s often thought that dingoes that lack ginger fur or white patches are dingo-dog hybrids, but this is not necessarily true.

Like the no-barking myth, misconceptions about coat colour can potentially harm dingo conservation. If we were to protect only ginger dingoes, we would unwittingly reduce the natural genetic variation of the population, making it more vulnerable to extinction.

Myth 3: dingoes are just dogs

This is perhaps the hardest belief to address, because it can vary depending on whether we look at their behaviours, ecology or origins. But this concept is arguably even more relevant to their conservation and management.

So is a dingo a dog? Although dogs’ evolutionary origins are still unclear, we know that dingoes are descendants of animals domesticated long ago somewhere in Asia and then brought to Australia. Dingoes are thus an ancient dog breed and so, yes, dingoes are dogs.

However, we also know that dingoes arrived in mainland Australia roughly 5,000 years ago and have since been isolated from all other canines right up until European settlement. Some experts argue that this makes them distinct enough to warrant protection from hybridisation with domestic dogs.

As dingo researcher Ben Allen puts it, “pure ones need to be distinguished from hybrid ones somehow, and it is the pure ones that have conservation value as a species”.

But as fellow dingo expert Guy Ballard points out, dingoes are undeniably a type of dog, so arguably all that really matters is that their function as top predators in the ecosystem is preserved.

But there’s a catch (as Ballard has acknowledged): we do not know whether dingoes, feral dogs and hybrids behave similarly – or in other words, whether all three can perform the same ecological role.

We do know that India’s free-ranging dogs behave very differently from Australian dingoes: they are inefficient predators, do not form packs and do not breed cooperatively. This suggests that, in terms of their behaviours, dingoes may be very different from other types of dogs after all.

Until we know more, the best approach to safeguarding dingoes and their role in the ecosystems might be to view and treat them as completely separate and distinct from other free-ranging dogs in Australia.

Far from being “just dogs”, dingoes really are unique dogs.

Eloïse Déaux received funding from the Hermon Slade Foundation.

The President-elect’s nominees to key positions deny the existence, threats, and solutions to human-caused global warming

When speaking about climate change, President-elect Trump has flip-flopped between acceptance and denial, which suggests that he hasn’t put much thought into one of humanity’s greatest threats. However, what his administration does is far more important than what he thinks. Unfortunately, Trump has nominated individuals to several critical climate leadership positions who reject inconvenient scientific and economic evidence.

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Urgent action is needed to stop the world’s fastest land animal becoming extinct, experts have warned

Urgent action is needed to stop the cheetah – the world’s fastest land animal – becoming extinct, experts have warned.

Scientists estimate that only 7,100 of the fleet-footed cats remain in the wild, occupying 9% of the territory they once lived in. Asiatic populations have been hit the hardest, with fewer than 50 surviving in Iran, according to an investigation led by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).

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Urgent action is needed to stop the cheetah - the world's fastest land animal - becoming extinct, scientists say.

A selection of images captured by photographers over the past 12 months, including a Donald Trump lookalike pheasant, kissing parakeets, and a lost sloth

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Allendale, Northumberland The lights dance and shift, fading or intensifying, undulating in curtains of colour

As I open the back door, the path shows up in a rectangle of light, the gravel sparkling like golden sugar. My breath shows in pale mists that billow and dissipate in the air. The owls that called repeatedly at dusk are now silent, hunting for voles across the frozen haugh. There’s the sharp smell of cold, and the river seems much louder than it does by day.

Here, in the frost hollow of the valley, it is a couple of degrees lower than the surrounding hills. Cooler air, being denser, flows down into the bowl of the land. The grasses and seedheads of the garden become outlined in hoar frost, coated in spiky crystals, the shrunken browns and greys of dying foliage enlarged into something magical.

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A selection of the best science and environment reads this year.

David Pitt, 77, went into cardiac arrest after highly venomous reptile bit him on the foot in his home in far north Queensland

An elderly man bitten by a taipan at his home in Queensland has died after spending nearly a week in hospital.

David Pitt, 77, went into cardiac arrest after the highly venomous snake bit him on the foot at his home in Yorkeys Knob, Cairns, on 20 December.

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If 2015 ended on a note of hope, with the successful conclusion of the Paris climate talks, the overriding impression of 2016 is that last year’s optimism has been answered with a large reality check.

The Paris Agreement was meant to herald a year in which politicians would finally cut through the stalemate and start saving the planet. Instead we watched aghast as swathes of the Great Barrier Reef were killed by climate change, while the political uncertainty only grew. Donald Trump completed his improbable climb to the US political summit, and Australian climate politics stayed mired in the trenches.

Nowhere was that more evident than in the unseemly blame game over the statewide blackout that plunged South Australia into darkness on a stormy night in September.

With fingers being pointed at the state’s reliance on wind power, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull used the incident to call for an end to Labor states setting their own agendas on renewable energy. That was despite analysis showing that the blackout was due to 22 transmission towers being knocked over.

The planned closure of Victoria’s Hazelwood power station prompted more argument over cheap brown coal versus expensive electricity. The debate culminated in the Turnbull government’s 24-hour dalliance with the idea of an emissions intensity scheme for power stations (a policy that Labor took to July’s federal election).

The episode was seen as a slapdown for minister Josh Frydenberg, who in July had been handed the “superportfolio” of energy and environment in an overdue acknowledgement that these issues are now one and the same.

One of Frydenberg’s biggest tasks for 2017 will be handling the planned review of climate policy. Figures released quietly before Christmas underline the fact that Australia is on course to miss the government’s 2030 emissions target of 26-28% below 2005 levels. This year’s events proved that the electricity sector, the biggest source of emissions, is in serious need of reform.

In the states, Queensland continued to navigate a legal course for the controversial Carmichael coal mine, while SA Premier Jay Weatherill suggested a plebiscite to decide whether the state should build an international nuclear waste dump.

In fact, one of the year’s quietest periods for environmental policy was during the federal election campaign itself – neither climate nor conservation rated more than the briefest of mentions.

Death comes to the reef

The year’s biggest single environmental story was the unprecedented coral bleaching that hit the Great Barrier Reef in March and April. The bleaching affected more than 1,000km of the reef and prompted a storm of media reports – some more accurate than others.

Months later, the damage is clear: two-thirds of corals on the reef’s northern stretches are dead. Researchers are watching anxiously to see how much will bounce back.

Elsewhere on the high seas, there was better news for environmentalists. Oil giant BP cancelled plans to drill in the Great Australian Bight, and Australia’s Macquarie Island research station earned a reprieve after being slated for closure by the government.

In October, nations signed off on creating the world’s biggest marine park in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica. Meanwhile, Australia had a win (of sorts) in its battle with Japan’s whaling program, successfully sponsoring a resolution to provide greater oversight of “scientific” whaling.

In reality, however, the voluntary measure will have little effect on Japan’s activities. Perhaps it’s time to admit that whaling cannot be stopped altogether, and maybe even try some “whale poo diplomacy” instead.

Talking Trump

Speaking of diplomacy, when delegates arrived at November’s UN climate summit in Marrakech, they were expecting to begin putting flesh on the bones of the previous year’s Paris Agreement. This came into force with record speed just 11 months after it was signed.

But on its third day the summit was hit by a “Trump tsunami” as the surprise US election result dawned. Perhaps understandably, the conference morphed into a show of defiance towards the new president-elect.

It is still unclear whether Trump will follow through on his threat to withdraw from the Paris deal. For those keen to see global climate action continue, perhaps the most optimistic view is that Trump will be unable to revive the coal economy singlehanded, and that if the United States does relinquish the climate leadership it has belatedly shown under President Barack Obama, China will be more than willing to step up.

Heat and ice

While the political hot air flowed, the climate records kept tumbling. 2016 is set to be confirmed as the hottest year ever recorded, although September did bring an end to the streak of 16 consecutive record-setting months.

In May, the southern hemisphere joined the north in passing the symbolic milestone of 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But the good news is that global emissions seem, at long last, to have plateaued – although the picture is less rosy when it comes to methane emissions.

The El Niño came to an end, after helping to push Australia’s summer sea temperatures to record levels. We learned that rising seas have claimed five entire Pacific islands, while the Arctic ice is at record low levels, driven by a freak bout of human-induced warm weather.

Meanwhile, Earth’s last remaining wild places are being crisscrossed by roads, although there was some rare good news in the only place on Earth where tigers, rhinos, orangutans and elephants all live together – a treasured Indonesian forest now saved from logging.

If all that wasn’t enough, we were told that we are officially living in the Anthropocene Epoch, courtesy of nuclear weapons testing – which came to Australia 60 years ago this year.

A more nature-loving 2017?

Having polished off your ethically raised Christmas ham, perhaps now is the time to resolve to engage a bit more with the natural world in 2017.

While you might not be able to sail a scientific voyage around Antarctica, climb trees to save orange-bellied parrots, or discover previously unknown wild gatherings of animals, there are things you can do at home.

You might decide to join in a citizen science program, tend your garden, or get to know some of the fascinating critters who share your home.

You could even get closer to nature while doing the most 2016 thing possible: playing Pokémon GO.

So if the past year in environmental news has left you feeling despondent, look on the bright side – at least you don’t have a ball of 150 huntsman spiders living in your house … or do you?