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How Many Species on Earth? It’s Tricky – NYTimes.com

24 Aug

How many undiscovered species are we wiping out every day?

Scientists have named and cataloged 1.3 million species. How many more species there are left to discover is a question that has hovered like a cloud over the heads of taxonomists for two centuries.

“It’s astounding that we don’t know the most basic thing about life,” said Boris Worm, a marine biologist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia.

On Tuesday, Dr. Worm, Dr. Mora and their colleagues presented the latest estimate of how many species there are, based on a new method they have developed. They estimate there are 8.7 million species on the planet, plus or minus 1.3 million.

via How Many Species on Earth? It’s Tricky – NYTimes.com.

Lone Bird on a Hot Morning

22 Aug

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Green Elders, in Dialog

16 Aug

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Money-Pile Conservation

5 Aug

Scientists map religious forests and sacred sites

1 Aug

The Oxford researchers estimate that religious groups own about eight per cent of land across round the globe, much of it being covered in forest, and about 15 per cent of the world’s surface is ‘sacred land’ – land that has ‘sacred’ connotations rather than being necessarily owned by faith communities….

The Oxford research team is engaged, firstly, in investigating what legal or official data exists on boundary lines and the rights to the land. Once the status of the land and its boundaries are known, the geographical co-ordinates can be entered onto their database at the Biodiversity Institute.

The researchers will work with groups of many different faiths: those who manage the sacred groves in India, the Shinto shrines in Japan, and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, which owns 300 fragments of forest including the last remnants of Afro-montane tropical forest containing rare and endangered insects. The religious sites appear to contain a high proportion of species that feature on the IUCN’s Red List (of threatened species).

via Scientists map religious forests and sacred sites.

The Root of the Problem | The Scientist

1 Aug

Love the microbes, they connect us all to the soil, water, and air.

In all the work being done to illuminate and quantify the importance of belowground dynamics in driving the carbon cycle, the central message is similar: to better understand ecosystem functioning and its response to global change, we must consider feedbacks among plants, microbes, and soil processes. It’s clear that root carbon transfer and resulting carbon cascades through the plant-microbial-soil system play a primary role in driving carbon-cycle feedbacks and in regulating ecosystem responses to climate change.

via The Root of the Problem | The Scientist.

Discovering my microbiome: “You, my friend, are a wonderland” | The Loom | Discover Magazine

27 Jun

Personal biodiversity. Each of us is an ecosystem unique to itself.

Some fragments of navel DNA precisely match the DNA of a known species of bacteria. In other cases, they’re close enough to a species for Hulcr and Lucky to assign them to a genus, a family, a class, or some higher unit of classification. In a few cases, the bacterial DNA is so exotic that all they can say for sure at this point is that it is bacteria.

Hulcr, Lucky, and Dunn had lots of questions about the things that dwell in the human omphalos. Are they different from the species that live in other parts of the skin? Do they differ from one person to the next? Is there a core set of species found in all navels? To address these kinds of questions, they tallied up the number of volunteers who carried each species, and investigated how each species makes a living.

via Discovering my microbiome: “You, my friend, are a wonderland” | The Loom | Discover Magazine.

State Of The Ocean: ‘Shocking’ Report Warns Of Mass Extinction From Current Rate Of Marine Distress

22 Jun

If the current actions contributing to a multifaceted degradation of the world’s oceans aren’t curbed, a mass extinction unlike anything human history has ever seen is coming, an expert panel of scientists warns in an alarming new report.

via State Of The Ocean: ‘Shocking’ Report Warns Of Mass Extinction From Current Rate Of Marine Distress.

What Trees are Appropriate for Your Area?

16 Jun

The Arbor Day Foundation has recently completed an extensive updating of U.S. Hardiness Zones based upon data from 5,000 National Climatic Data Center cooperative stations across the continental United States.

* See a map highlighting changes between 1990 and 2006.

* Find your hardiness zone.

* See a map of Alaska and Hawaii.

* See suggested trees for your region.

via The Arbor Day Foundation.

Climate change to deal blow to fruits, nuts

11 Jun

Climate change is expected to alter the global industry in fruits and nuts dramatically as tree crops such as pistachios and cherries struggle in the rising temperatures, researchers said.

via Climate change to deal blow to fruits, nuts: study.

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