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Most nations lack ability to deal with invasive species
The political crusades targeting national parks for drilling and exploitation
Hailed as ‘America’s best idea’, the parks are hugely popular with the public but face political efforts to lift federal protection and allow private development
“It’s easy to feel besieged here,” said Wendy Ross, superintendent of the Theodore Roosevelt national park. Ross’s park, named after the “conservationist president” who helped to keep America’s natural treasures unspoiled, is surrounded by oil and gas drilling that has transformed the landscape.
Related: 100 years of America’s national parks – in pictures
Continue reading...The Pacific is sinking
The Pacific is sinking
Share your encounters with elephants
As part of a new series on elephant conservation we’d like to hear about your experiences with the world’s largest land mammal
Over the next year we’re going to be covering the plight of elephants around the world. The numbers of these beautiful animals – now our largest land mammal – have been in steep decline for a century and now face more serious challenges than ever, due to poaching, habitat destruction, and conflict with man.
Please help with our coverage by getting in touch and telling us your own stories, encounters and campaigns. Are you a wildlife campaigner in Asia? A grassroots activist in Africa? Whoever you are, we want to hear from you about your own encounters with elephants.
Badger cull protesters change tactics in response to expansion
Demonstrators focus on driving up policing costs as anti-bovine TB programme expanded across south-west England
Protesters against the badger cull in England have said they plan to change tactics by undertaking direct action to drive up policing costs, following reports of an expansion of culling to new areas.
The BBC has reported that the cull will be extended to five new areas in south-west England – south Devon, north Devon, north Cornwall, west Dorset and south Herefordshire – where badger shooting will begin in early September as part of government efforts to eradicate bovine TB.
Continue reading...Inuit activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier on climate change and the Arctic
Neither Coalition nor Labor emissions reduction targets are good enough, says climate body
Climate Institute report says negative-emissions technology is imperative because risks of global temperature reaching 2C are ‘unmanageable’
Australia will blow its carbon budget with either the Coalition’s emissions reduction targets, or those suggested by the Labor opposition, highlighting the urgent need for negative-emissions technology, analysis commissioned by the Climate Institute shows.
“Everyone is just now beginning to work out the implications of the 1.5C goal, and how hard it is to get to it,” said John Connor, chief executive of the Climate Institute.
Continue reading...Sea Shepherd will keep harassing Japanese whaling boats despite US court ruling
Conservation group says it is committed to upholding Australian federal court ruling banning the slaughter of whales in the Australian sanctuary
A United States court ruling preventing conservationists from attacking Japanese whaling boats will not stop the annual protection campaign in the Southern Ocean.
The Japanese Times newspaper reported on Tuesday that a settlement declaring the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society was “permanently enjoined from physically attacking the [Japanese] research vessels and crew and from navigating in a manner that is likely to endanger their safe navigation”.
Continue reading...The London rail network's Energy Gardens - in pictures
Energy Gardens is a pan-London community garden project where reclaimed land alongside overground train stations and track is cultivated by local community groups. Up to 50 gardens will be created across the rail network.
Continue reading...Commonwealth environmental water latest facts - August 2016
Deadly desert: working in 60C heat – in pictures
Unforgiving temperatures of up to 60C (140F) beat down on these saltminers on a daily basis. The mines, situated in the Afar Triangle in Ethiopia, stretch across 38,000 sq miles and at their lowest point are more than 300ft below sea level. Joel Santos travelled to capture the area’s dry, brutal beauty
Continue reading...Are you rubbish at recycling?
Fear of the light: why we need darkness | Amanda Petrusich
Every civilisation we know of has devised a system – scientific, religious, what have you – to make sense of the night sky. The mystery of what’s up there, where it came from, and what it means has been inherited and puzzled over for generations. Those questions may be the most human ones we have.
Due to pervasive light pollution – glare from excessive, misaimed and unshielded night lighting – 80% of Europe and North America no longer experiences real darkness. For anyone living near a major metropolis, a satellite image of the Milky Way seems abstract: we understand it to be a document of something true, but our understanding is purely theoretical. In 1994, after a predawn earthquake cut power to most of Los Angeles, the Griffith Observatory received phone calls from spooked residents asking about “the strange sky”. What those callers were seeing were stars.
Continue reading...Climate change will create new ecosystems, so let's help plants move
Australia's treeless alps are vulnerable to the spread of woody shrubs. Alps image from www.shutterstock.comAustralia’s ecosystems are already showing the signs of climate change, from the recent death of mangrove forests in northern Australia, to the decline in birds in eastern Australia, to the inability of mountain ash forests to recover from frequent fires. The frequency and size of these changes will only continue to increase in the next few years.
This poses a major challenge for our national parks and reserves. For the past 200 years the emphasis in reserves has been on protection.
But protection is impossible when the environment is massively changing. Adaptation then becomes more important. If we are to help wildlife and ecosystems survive in the future, we’ll have to rethink our parks and reserves.
A weedier worldClimate change is predicted to have a substantial effect on our plants and animals, changing the distribution and population of species. Some areas will become unfavourable to their current inhabitants, allowing other, often weedy, species to expand. There will likely be widespread losses in some ecosystems as extreme climate events take their toll, either directly by killing plants and animals, or indirectly by changing fire regimes.
While we can model some of these changes, we don’t know exactly how ecosystems will respond to climate change.
Australia has an extensive natural reserve system, and models suggest that much of this system is expected to be altered radically in the next few decades, resulting in the formation of totally new ecosystems and/or shifts in ecosystems.
Yet with rapid climate change, it is likely that ecosystems will fail to keep up. Seeds are the only way for plants to move, and seeds can only travel so far. The distribution of plants might only shift by a few metres a year, whereas the velocity of climate change is expected to be much faster.
As a result, our ecosystems are likely to become dominated by a low diversity of native and exotic invasive species. These weedy species can spread long distances and take advantage of vacant spaces. Yet the exact nature of changes is unknown, particularly where evolutionary changes and physiological adaptation will assist some species but fail others.
Conservation managers are concerned because with increasing weediness will come a loss of biodiversity as well as declines in the overall health of ecosystems. Plant cover will decrease, triggering erosion in catchments that provide our water reservoirs. Rare animal species will be lost because a loss of plant cover makes them more susceptible to predators. A cascade of changes is likely.
From conservation to adaptationWhile climate change threats are acknowledged in reports, we continue to focus on conserving the state of our natural environments, devoting scarce resources to keeping out weedy species, viewing vegetation communities as static, and using offsets to protect these static communities.
One way of preparing for the future is to start the process of deliberately moving species (and their genes) around the landscape in a careful and contained manner, accepting that rapid climate change will prevent this process from occurring quickly enough without some intervention.
Overseas plots covering several hectares have already been established that aim to achieve this at a large scale. For instance, in western North America there is a plot network that covers 48 sites and focuses on 15 tree species planted across a three-year period that covers temperature variation of 3-4°C.
In Australia, a small section of our reserve system, preferably areas that have already been damaged and/or disturbed, could be set aside for such an approach. As long as these plots are set up at a sufficiently large scale, they can act as nursery stock for the future. As fire frequency increases and exceeds some plants' survival capabilities, the surviving genes and species in these plots would then serve as sources for future generations. This approach is particularly important for species that set seed rarely.
Our best guesses about what will flourish in an area in the future will be wrong in some cases, right in others, but ongoing evolution by natural selection in the plots will help to sort out what really can survive at a particular location and contribute to biodiversity. With a network of plots established across a range of natural communities, our protected areas will become more adaptable for a future where many species and communities (along with the benefits they provide) could otherwise be lost entirely.
As in the case of North America, it would be good to see plots set up along environmental gradients. These might include from wet to dry heading inland, and from cold to warm heading north-south or with changing altitude.
One place to start might be the Australian Alps. We could set aside an area at higher altitude and plant low-altitude grasses and herbs. These may help current plants compete against woody shrubs that are expected to move towards our mountain summits.
Lower down, we might plant more fire-tolerant species in mountain ash forests. Near the coast, we might plant species from further inland that are better at handling drier conditions.
The overall plot network should be seen as part of our national research infrastructure for biodiversity management. In this way, we can build a valuable resource for the future that can serve the general community and complement our current ecosystem monitoring efforts.
Ary Hoffmann receives funding from the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network and the Australian Research Council. He is a member of the IUCN Climate Change Specialist Group.
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Stung by a wasp while clearing poppies
Allendale, Northumberland There are a lot of wasps about this year – I know of at least six nests around the garden
The ladybird poppies, fire-engine red with jet black centres, had flopped in the rain, their flimsy petals scattered across the path. Cutting back the plants, it took me a moment to process what was happening. A flurry of insects was circling my head and arms from a disturbed wasps’ nest. I was shocked by the intensity of pain from a sting on the end of my nose. Swabs of vinegar helped neutralise its alkalinity, but my cheek quickly swelled.
There are a lot of wasps about this year. I know of at least six nests around the garden. The entrance to one is in a stone wall, another under the bargeboard of a shed. One was found when thistle-bashing in the field, a fourth when clipping a box hedge.
Continue reading...World-leading solar and battery storage project lures BHP
New Tesla model S jets to 60mph in 2.65 seconds. But, why?
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