Environmental News Agency

Nature Ecology & Evolution, Published online: 14 July 2022; doi:10.1038/s41559-022-01801-3The authors construct a time-calibrated phylogeny spanning >90% of spiny-rayed fishes to explore patterns of body shape disparity within acanthomorphs. They find a trend of steady accumulation of lineages from the Cenozoic, with an increase in morphological disparity following the Cretaceous–Palaeogene event, facilitating the radiation of diverse morphotypes that characterize acanthomorphs’ widespread ecological success today.

Nature Ecology & Evolution, Published online: 14 July 2022; doi:10.1038/s41559-022-01814-yUsing a 30-year dataset of North American bird species, the authors show that species’ abundances and distributions have become more decoupled from climate over time and that this is associated with ecological traits; the effect is particularly strong in threatened species.

Nature Ecology & Evolution, Published online: 14 July 2022; doi:10.1038/s41559-022-01824-wRecent breakthroughs have led to the development of biodegradable sensors which, after collecting data, break down into byproducts that are harmless to their surroundings. Using these sensors to collect ecological data on vast scales and in fine resolution could transform our management and understanding of natural ecosystems.

Jill Biden is helping National Geographic promote its upcoming documentary series on U.S. national parks.

A research team led by Prof. Yang Jun from the Institute of Urban Environment of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has explored the spatial distribution of phytoplankton and zooplankton communities in 24 reservoirs in Southeast China.

By comparing geographic patterns of nonhuman primate biodiversity and human land-use, researchers discovered that areas managed or controlled by Indigenous peoples tend to have significantly more primate biodiversity than nearby regions. They also found that lorises, tarsiers, monkeys and apes whose territories overlap with Indigenous areas are less likely to be classified as vulnerable, threatened or endangered than those living fully outside Indigenous lands.

Invasive plant species do more than harm agriculture and native species as they reshape landscapes. They also cause economic losses of more than $20 billion annually in the U.S. alone. Identifying where and how quickly invasive plants are spreading is critical to fighting an invasion. Scientists and land managers currently use on-site field surveys of population size, density or growth rates to obtain this information, which can be prohibitively expensive and labor intensive. Furthermore, invasive species are spreading so rapidly around the world that traditional methods have become untenable. New techniques are […]

Plant protection products raise concerns because their application may affect certain soil organisms regarded as non-target species and which could be highly sensitive to certain pesticides. The European Food and Safety Authority (EFSA, which regulates agricultural practices, uses of plant protection products, etc. on a European level) has developed a guide and a software tool called the Persistence in Soil Analytical Model (PERSAM) to carry out exposure assessments in soil.

Migratory animals include a wide range of species—from tiny insects to the world's largest marine mammals. To achieve their journeys, migrants must walk, swim, or fly, often traversing complex landscapes that requires many choices about where, when, and why to move. Despite the diversity of migratory journeys made by animals, most scientists who study migration have a taxonomic focus—meaning that they study a particular species or group of species that migrate.

Global processes manifesting as activities in local places have led to an increase in documented conservation conflicts. Conservation conflicts are sometimes labelled human-wildlife conflict, focusing only on the direct negative impact of species (usually wildlife) on humans or vice versa. However, many authors now recognize that conservation conflicts arise between people with diverse views, when one party acts against the interests of another. They are thus human-human conflicts and not merely an impact on or from conservation. Conflict is not always directly correlated with impact because perceptions of risk, levels of tolerance […]

In Europe, and many places throughout the world, the return, and preservation of large carnivores is escalating tensions between stakeholder groups, as well as between local actors and authorities. In Sweden, despite policies aimed at reducing conflict surrounding wildlife management, tensions seem to have intensified. This research investigates the collaborative governance model within Swedish wildlife management and what dampens the capacity to reduce ongoing tensions. In-depth interviews were conducted with stakeholders at different levels of wildlife management. Through an abductive approach combining empirical data from interviews and theories from the human-wildlife conflict […]

Attempts to deter elephants from entering crop fields and human settlements in Africa have used various barriers (e.g. electric fences, chilli fences, beehive fences or plant barriers), situated on or very near the boundaries of fields or villages, with rather variable success. We explored a very simple new barrier concept based upon re-arranging the layout of foreign stimuli already known to arouse suspicion and fear among elephants. Deterrence involved deploying unnaturally scented objects on and across their pathways of habitual movement leading to crop field clusters. Elephants are suspicious of unpleasant olfactory […]

Alternative farming methods must be deployed to mitigate the detrimental impacts of intensive agriculture on climate, biodiversity, and ecosystem services. Organic and biodynamic farming are environmental-friendly practices that progressively replace conventional agriculture. While potential biodiversity benefits of organic vs. conventional farming have been studied repeatedly, the effects of biodynamic farming on biodiversity remain ill-understood. We investigated the effects of these three main management regimes, and their interaction with ground vegetation cover, on vineyard invertebrate communities in SW Switzerland. Invertebrates were sampled three times during the vegetation season in 2016, focusing on ground-dwelling […]

Multiple demographic factors can affect ranger experiences and perceptions of their work, including factors like gender, age, and income. Similarly, whether a ranger is local to their conservation area might influence their experiences and perceptions of the work. This premise, however, has received limited attention. In this study we use survey data from across 11 countries to explore how being local to a conservation area might affect ranger experiences and perceptions. We define local rangers as originally being from within 20km of their conservation area. Our findings suggest that being local corresponds […]

Iron is an important element and its biogeochemical processes are vital to the matter and energy cycles of wetland ecosystems. Hydrology greatly controls characteristics of soil property and plant community in wetlands, which can regulate the behavior of iron and its oxides. However, it remains unclear how the spatial distribution of iron and its forms in estuarine wetlands responses to hydrological conditions. Five typical plant communities along a naturally hydrological gradient in the Yellow River Estuary wetland, including Phragmites australis in freshwater marsh (FPA), Phragmites australis in salt marsh (SPA), Tamarix chinensis […]

This article reviews the nature of functional responses that have commonly been used to represent feeding relationships in the ecological literature. It compares these with the range of functional response forms that are likely to characterize species in natural communities. The latter set of responses involves many more variables. The article reviews the history of functional response models, and examines previous work that has allowed the functional response of a predator to a single type of prey to depend on additional variables beyond the abundance of that prey type. While a number […]

With the intensification of eutrophication, many artificial water supply lakes that act as a biological filter for water diverted from rivers have been built to alleviate water scarcity in Eastern China. In this study, we selected Lake Yanlong, a representative artificial water supply lake in Yancheng City, as our experimental lake to explore how the community composition of fishes changed among different habitat types and assess potential consequences for effective water treatment. From October 2015 to October 2020, we conducted quarterly surveys of fish communities and environmental factors in the Mangshe River […]

The effective conservation of highly migratory marine species is only possible if core areas of activity and critical habitat can be identified within the vast and dynamic oceanic environment and later on used to delineate marine protected areas (MPAs). However, gathering population-level data and identifying universal patterns within a species or population can be difficult when only a small sample size exists and individuals are not ecologically interchangeable. In addition, the open ocean beyond the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of a country is considered the high-seas and is not part of any […]

Herbivores face a broad range of defences when feeding on plants. By mixing diets, polyphagous herbivores are assumed to benefit during their development by gaining a better nutritional balance and reducing the intake of toxic compounds from individual plant species. Nevertheless, they also show strategies to metabolically cope with plant defences. In this study, we investigated the development of the polyphagous tansy leaf beetle, Galeruca tanaceti (Coleoptera: Chrysomelidae), on mono diets consisting of one plant species [cabbage (Brassica rapa), Brassicaceae; lettuce (Lactuca sativa), or tansy (Tanacetum vulgare), Asteraceae] vs. two mixed diets, […]

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) backscatter based above-ground biomass (AGB) estimates are limited by the saturation of the backscatter-AGB curve. This work explores the potential of combining backscatter with polarimetric SAR interferometry (PolInSAR) estimated forest stand height for improved AGB estimation. The models combining L-band backscatter and TanDEM-X height are compared with established backscatter based models. The models are also temporally cross-validated, i.e., trained on one acquisition date and validated for other dates. It is observed that with the input of height, the combined models perform significantly better than backscatter based models, with […]

Since the publication of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the research of ecosystem services valuation has seen an exponential growth with a consequent development, improvement, and spread of different qualitative and quantitative methods. The interest is due to the benefits that ecosystem services provide for human wellbeing. A large part of ecosystem services is provided by the so-called forest ecosystem services (FES) in both protected and non-protected areas. The aim of the present study is to investigate key variables driving the FES value at the global level. These include, other than socio-economic information, […]

The capacity of forests to resist structural change and retain material legacies–the biotic and abiotic resources that persist through disturbance–is crucial to sustaining ecosystem function after disturbance. However, the role of forest structure as both a material legacy and feature supporting carbon (C) cycling stability following disturbance has not been widely investigated. We used a large-scale disturbance manipulation to ask whether legacies of lidar-derived canopy structures drive 3-year primary production responses to disturbance. As part of the Forest Resilience Threshold Experiment (FoRTE) in northern Michigan, USA we simulated phloem-disrupting disturbances producing a […]

Techno-economic analysis (TEA) has been considered an important tool to evaluate the economic performance of industrial processes. Recently, the application of TEA has been observed to have exponential growth due to the increasing competition among businesses across various industries. Thus, this review presents a deliberate overview of TEA to inculcate the importance and relevance of TEA. To further support the aforementioned points, this review article starts with a bibliometric analysis to evaluate the applicability of TEA within the research community. Conventional TEA is widely known to be conducted via software modeling (i.e., […]

Social propaganda and guidance policies have important practical significance for promoting public green travel. In recent years, the rapid development of digital technology, network, and mobile communication technology has promoted a revolutionary change in the dissemination of information and services. However, in the era of new media communication driven by emerging technologies, there is still a lack of research on the impact of social propaganda and guidance policies on public willingness to travel green. Based on the theory of planned behavior and the survey research of China's urban residents, this study investigates […]

This study examines the role of business organizations in co-governing biodiversity and ecosystem services (BES) using a phenomenon-based approach and bridging business management literature, ecosystem services literature and environmental governance literature. The empirical analysis includes twelve Nordic forest corporations considered market leaders in Finland, Sweden and Norway. Using content analysis of corporate sustainability reports and managerial interviews, we recorded 127 company-led measures addressing BES and we categorized them into seventeen types (e.g., land use planning and restoration, mobilization of financial resources for conservation, partner auditing, capacity building and consultation with stakeholders). For […]

The horticultural industry claims the substitution of plastic plantlet containers, which derive from oil-based raw materials and cannot be recycled, with bio-based ones, aiming to decrease waste management costs and increase the overall production sustainability. Bio-based fully biodegradable nursery pots can be directly placed in soil, thus decreasing the plantlet transplant stress and labor, and avoiding waste generation. The development of biomaterials specifically obtained from food-derived wastes like fruit and vegetables will add further advantages by an improved use of resources, the production of added-value materials and the replenishment of food losses, […]

Ambitious fossil-free targets imposed on the aviation industry worldwide demand a large volumetric supply of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) to meet. Sweden's commitment to a 30% volume SAF blending target by 2030 attracts interest in local production. However, the sustainability of local production is largely unknown. Addressing this gap, we aim to explore potential SAF technology pathways and assess their environmental performances in Sweden. To do so, we utilize a socio-technical system (STS) approach for pathways selection and prospective life cycle assessment (LCA) for environmental impact assessment. As a result, we identify […]

Southeast Asia has a high prevalence of mental health problems and a low desire to seek professional help. Low treatment rates in LMICs are also reflected in the lack of readily available treatments geared toward students. In developing countries such as Thailand, academic advisors in higher education play another extra role in providing appropriate mental health counseling beyond teaching, researching, and delivering academic advising to their students. This quasi-experimental research aimed to study counseling’s competency of academic advisors in higher education and develop counseling’s competency of academic advisors in higher education. The […]

Water Resources Research announced that, as a result of global warming, the amount of extreme torrential rain globally has increased steadily since the middle of the last century. To cope effectively with climate change, it is important to use consistent and scientific water information of water resources. In this study, we use a hydrological analysis of the Saint Blaise Vallon area to indicate how the damage from natural disasters that may come in the future may be minimized. In addition, a hydrological analysis and a numerical simulation model were implemented to estimate […]

The current food system is directly associated with food insecurity, malnutrition, food waste, and environmental impacts. The international community has been working on sustainability, and the enhancement of sustainable food consumption is a fundamental step for identifying possible strategies to limit the negative consequences derived from the health emergency of the COVID-19 pandemic. This work aims to understand the food consumption patterns of the Sapienza University community. The methodology adopted for the research activity has been developed while taking into account the theoretical reflections and the tested methodologies acquired in relation to […]

The ordinary Portland cement (PC) manufacturing process emits toxic carbon dioxide into the environment. Minimizing cement consumption in the construction industry is a major scholarly priority. This paper studies the comparison of reinforced Portland cement concrete and geopolymer concrete beams, in which rice husk ash (RHA) is used as a partial replacement for cement. The study aims to determine the optimum mix proportion of Portland cement concrete with RHA (PC-RHA) and geopolymer concrete with RHA (GC-RHA) for compressive strength that meets the requirements for normal strength concrete of 18, 25, and 32 […]

The COVID-19 global pandemic has caused an unprecedented disturbance in higher education and the business services sector. In the 2014–2020 financial perspective, the Operational Programme Knowledge Education Development has constituted a response to challenges and an instrument to execute the Europe 2020 Strategy. However, the Programme was not designed to prevent crises, and neither did it foresee the pandemic which surprised the whole world. Despite this, higher education institutions that implemented projects co-financed with the EU funds had to face the “black swan” and ensure the continuity of their activities while improving […]

Eight years after allowing a shale gas company to drill beneath Deer Lakes County Park for methane gas, the Pennsylvania county home to Pittsburgh has banned all industrial activity in the area’s eight other parks — despite a veto from the county executive.

There is a need to outline current knowledge about the likelihood of extreme climate change, discuss why understanding bad-to-worst cases is vital, articulate reasons for concern about catastrophic outcomes, define key terms, and put forward a research agenda.

There is no long-term strategy or ultimate goal beyond militarise by any and all possible means.

This film is a documentary on the conservation of indigenous seeds by Sahyadri School, KFI, Khed, Pune, in the western state of Maharashtra in India.

As it melts records across the Northern Hemisphere, the scorching summer of 2022 has squeezed out the warmest month of nights in U.S. history.

Climate change has led to warming temperatures in the Pacific Northwest, leading some insect species to expand their range into more northerly oak savannas, according to new research.

Scientists are proposing management changes on western federal lands that they say would result in more wolves and beavers and would re-establish ecological processes.

Experts at the forefront of efforts to restore the UK's coastal seagrass meadows say the remarkable plant's contribution to the UN Sustainable Development goals deserves to be reassessed. Conserving and restoring seagrass meadows actually contributes to achieving 16 out of the 17 goals.

The restoration of grassland ecosystems may need more of a guided, hands-on approach over time, according to a new review of global conservation efforts.

Tropical coastal ecosystems are among the most biodiverse areas on Earth. And they're also on the front lines of effects caused by human activity. That's why it's becoming increasingly important, especially as human populations increase, to manage the impacts of runoff and wastewater that flow into the sea.

Growth of the Amazon rainforest in our increasingly carbon-rich atmosphere could be limited by a lack of phosphorus in the soil, new research shows.

Even relatively modest climate warming and associated precipitation shifts may dramatically alter Earth's northernmost forests, which constitute one of the planet's largest nearly intact forested ecosystems and are home to a big chunk of the planet's terrestrial carbon.

Climate change has led to warming temperatures in the Pacific Northwest, leading some insect species to expand their range into more northerly oak savannas, according to new research.

Without bumble bees, a flowering plant that can self-pollinate lost substantial genetic variation within only nine generations, an experimental study found. A group of 'selfing' monkeyflower plants lost 13% to 24% of their genetic variation compared to another group that were propagated by bumble bees. This loss could rob the plants of their ability to adapt to environmental challenges, according to the study. With bee populations on the decline in nature, the findings point to serious issues for wild plants and crops that rely on these pollinators.

Dust from all over the world is landing in the Sierra Nevada mountains carrying microbes that are toxic to both plants and humans. New research shows higher concentrations of the dust are landing at lower elevations, where people are more likely to be hiking.