Category: Ecosystems
-
How Expanding Soy Markets Destroy Wetlands
In Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia, soy expansion results in wetland loss and degradation. Various wetlands of high conservation status are being affected for this expansion. This causes the direct loss of biodiversity, but also the loss of key services that these ecosystems provide.
-
It Takes A Forest To Keep Reefs Healthy
Benefits from protected forests such as improved water quality due to decreased runoff and increased distribution of the vegetation are more closely linked to coral reef health than previously thought.
-
Urban Forest Diversity Increases Urban Bird Diversity
Managing urban green spaces to ensure that they have a good mix of tree species, including some older and larger trees, can enhance species diversity of woodland birds, a new study has shown.
-
Can We Re-Design Forests For Climate Change? And If We Can, Should We?
“My general feeling is we just don’t know enough about the consequences of genetic mixing to go full force into widespread assisted migration, so I’ve been working with the Nature Conservancy in the design of experiments that we might do”
-
U.S. Forests Being Stripped For European Wood Pellet Stoves. Birds Suffer
It looks like a rabbit pellet, speckled quail-egg brown, a cylinder perhaps an inch long, thick as a No. 2 pencil, with a shiny coat that brings to mind a sausage casing. There are no fillers, no binders, no added chemicals. Wood pellets are all-natural, made of nothing but wood. A single pellet is light […]
-
Who Needs Thorns When There Are Lions? Plant’s Security Strategy
The presence of carnivores helps plants without thorny defences thrive, a study of life on the savannah reveals.
-
Hunting May Be Greatest Threat To Survival Of Forests
Hunting – driven by increasing human population, greater demand for wild meat and expanding wildlife trade networks – is the greatest threat to mammals and birds in tropical forests. Because it tends to target large species like primates and hoofed animals, particularly those that disperse tree seeds, hunting can prevent seed dispersal and the growth of new saplings. As large trees are lost, they are often replaced by plants like lianas (woody vines) whose seeds are dispersed by wind rather than animals. This changes forest composition over time, reducing the forest’s ability to sequester and store large quantities of carbon.
-
‘Resistance is futile.’ The Inevitability Of Invasive Species
Invasive plants, they found, were more likely to have evolved in habitats with a great diversity of competing species. Darwin was right: Some plants have evolved to be fighters.
-
The More The Merrier: Native plant diversity increases herbivory to non-natives
Diverse plant communities are more likely to contain herbivores that are able to consume a non-native species, which may help to explain why diverse communities are able to resist invaders while others are easily dominated.
-
Every Tree Is Precious: Biodiversity Suffers From Even Minimal Logging
Each tree in a forest matters—so much so that the loss of even just a handful could wipe out entire species of flora and fauna forever.