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Showing posts with label Beauty of Nature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Beauty of Nature. Show all posts
Wolves return to Poland more than 50 years after being wiped out
National park outside Warsaw says several of the animals seem to have settled there again after government cull in the 1960s
Agence France-Presse in Warsaw
Wednesday 25 November 2015 13.51 EST
Wolves
have returned to a large national park on the outskirts of Warsaw,
decades after they were wiped out there under a hunt launched by the
communist authorities.
“We’re really happy,” said Magdalena
Kamińska, spokeswoman for the 150sq mile (385sq km) Kampinos national
park, Poland’s second largest. “The fact that wolves have returned to
our park, from which they completely disappeared in the 1960s, means
that nature is in good health and is renewing itself.”
Park
employees spotted a first wolf in 2013, but the animal was just passing
through. Now there are several and they appear to have settled in for
the long haul, Kamińska said.
About
one-third of the world’s crops depend on the honeybees for pollination.
The past decades honeybees have been dying at an alarming rate. Fewer
bees will eventually lead to less availability of our favorite whole
foods and it will also drive up the prices of many of the fruits and
veggies we eat on a daily basis.
While some actions have been
taken in the past, our bees are still dying and something needs to be
done to make sure our most favorite foods don’t go into extinction.
What’s Causing Massive Bee Deaths?
About
fifty years ago our world looked a whole lot different. Bees had an
abundance of flowers to feast on and there were fewer pests and diseases
threatening their food chain. These days however, nature has to make
place for industrialization and our bees are having a hard time finding
good pollen and nectar.
And if clearing their dinner tables from
good quality food wasn’t bad enough already, farmers are extensively
using herbicides and insecticides, which cause a phenome called Colony
Collapse Disorder (CCD) where bees get disorientated and poisoned and
can’t find their way back to the hive. Or when they manage to get back,
they die from intoxication.
“We need good, clean food, and so do
our pollinators. If bees do not have enough to eat, we won’t have enough
to eat. Dying bees scream a message to us that they cannot survive in
our current agricultural and urban environments,” states Marla Spivak,
an American entomologist, and Distinguished McKnight University
Professor at the University of Minnesota.
List of Foods We Will Have To Go without If The Bees Go
While
we don’t need bees to pollinate all our food because they either
self-pollinate or rely on the wind (like rice, wheat, and corn), many of
our favorite foods will disappear from our kitchen tables.
Foods in the danger zone include:
Apples
Mangos
Kiwi Fruit
Peaches
Berries
Onions
Pears
Alfalfa
Cashews
Avocados
Passion Fruit
Beans
Cruciferous vegetables
Cacao/Coffee
Cotton
Lemons and limes
Carrots
Cucumber
Cantaloupe
Watermelon
Coconut
Beets
Turnips
Chili peppers, red peppers, bell peppers, green peppers
Papaya
Eggplant
Vanilla
Tomatoes
Grapes
Many seeds and nuts
A
substantial drop in population, or complete extinction, of honeybees
will make these food scares or even non-existent. So to keep our body
healthy and our kitchen table interesting we have to take action before
it is too late.
What You can Do
Plant bee friendly plants in your garden or green community space.
Limit the use of pesticides or use organic alternatives.
Buy local, organically grown produce and honey to support the beekeepers and farmers in your area.
Donate to non-profit organizations, like Pollinator Partnership, to help protect, grow, and strengthen bee populations.
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Image 2 of 9 | The silence of the birds: Be afraid
Researchers
say "the [destructive] changes in bird habitats and behavior between
now and 2070 will equal the evolutionary and adaptive shifts that
normally occur over tens of thousands of years." Yay humans!
Brutal wildfire images too much to bear? Fatigued by non-stop news of extreme weather, record-low snowpack, emaciated polar bears, unprecedented this and fast-receding that, a natural world that appears to be going more or less insane?
Maybe you need some quiet. Get outside, sit yourself down and let nature’s innate healing powers soothe your aching heart.
Sounds good, right? Sounds refreshing. Sounds… well, not quite right at all. Not anymore.
Have you heard? Or more accurately, not
heard? Vicious fires and vanishing ice floes aside, there’s yet another
ominous sign that all is not well with the natural world: it’s getting
quiet out there. Too quiet.
Behold, this bit over in Outside magazine, profiling the sweet, touching life and times of 77-year-old bioacoustician and soundscape artist Bernie Kraus, author of “The Great Animal Orchestra” (2012), TED talker, ballet scorer, and a “pioneer in the field of soundscape ecology.”
Krause, last written about on SFGate back in 2007, is a man whose passion and
profession has been making field recordings of the world’s “biophony”
for going on 45 years, setting up his sensitive equipment in roughly the
same places around the world to record nature’s (normally) stunningly
diverse aural symphony – all the birds, bees, beavers, wolves, babbling
streams, fluttering wings, the brush of trees and the rush of rivers –
truly, the very pulse and thrum of life itself.
The argument, put forward by a team from Oxford and Sheffield Universities in the journal Geophysical Research Letters,
begins with temperature. Warmer climates mean more vigorous tree growth
and more leaf litter, and more organic content in the soil. So the
tree’s roots grow more vigorously, said Dr. Christopher Doughty of
Oxford and colleagues.
They get into the bedrock, and break up the
rock into its constituent minerals. Once that happens, the rock starts
to weather, combining with carbon dioxide. This weathering draws carbon
dioxide out of the atmosphere, and in the process cools the planet down a
little. So mountain ecosystems—mountain forests are usually wet and on
conspicuous layers of rock—are in effect part of the global thermostat,
preventing catastrophic overheating.
The tree is more than just a
sink for carbon, it is an agency for chemical weathering that removes
carbon from the air and locks it up in carbonate rock.
That
mountain weathering and forest growth are part of the climate system has
never been in much doubt: the questions have always been about how big a
forest’s role might be, and how to calculate its contribution. Keeping climate stable
U.S. scientists recently studied the rainy slopes of New Zealand’s Southern Alps to
begin to put a value on mountain ecosystem processes. Dr. Doughty and
his colleagues measured tree roots at varying altitudes in the tropical
rain forests of Peru, from the Amazon lowlands to 3,000 meters of
altitude in the higher Andes.
They measured the growth to 30 cm
below the surface every three months and did so for a period of years.
They recorded the thickness of the soil’s organic layer, and they
matched their observations with local temperatures, and began to
calculate the rate at which tree roots might turn Andean granite into
soil.
Then they scaled up the process, and extended it through
long periods of time. Their conclusion: that forests served to moderate
temperatures in a much hotter world 65 million years ago. Read More Here
Mineral weathering by fungi (Credit: Joe Quirk)
UK researchers have identified a biological mechanism that
could explain how the Earth’s atmospheric carbon dioxide and climate
were stabilised over the past 24 million years. When CO2
levels became too low for plants to grow properly, forests appear to
have kept the climate in check by slowing down the removal of carbon
dioxide from the atmosphere. The results are now published in Biogeosciences, an open access journal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU).“As CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere fall, the Earth
loses its greenhouse effect, which can lead to glacial conditions,”
explains lead-author Joe Quirk from the University of Sheffield. “Over
the last 24 million years, the geologic conditions were such that
atmospheric CO2 could have fallen to very low levels – but it
did not drop below a minimum concentration of about 180 to 200 parts
per million. Why?”
Before fossil fuels, natural processes kept atmospheric carbon dioxide in check. Volcanic eruptions, for example, release CO2,
while weathering on the continents removes it from the atmosphere over
millions of years. Weathering is the breakdown of minerals within rocks
and soils, many of which include silicates. Silicate minerals weather in
contact with carbonic acid (rain and atmospheric CO2) in a
process that removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Further, the
products of these reactions are transported to the oceans in rivers
where they ultimately form carbonate rocks like limestone that lock away
carbon on the seafloor for millions of years, preventing it from
forming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Forests increase weathering rates because trees, and the fungi
associated with their roots, break down rocks and minerals in the soil
to get nutrients for growth. The Sheffield team found that when the CO2
concentration was low – at about 200 parts per million (ppm) – trees
and fungi were far less effective at breaking down silicate minerals,
which could have reduced the rate of CO2 removal from the atmosphere.
“We recreated past environmental conditions by growing trees at low, present-day and high levels of CO2
in controlled-environment growth chambers,” says Quirk. “We used
high-resolution digital imaging techniques to map the surfaces of
mineral grains and assess how they were broken down and weathered by the
fungi associated with the roots of the trees.” As reported in Biogeosciences, the researchers found that low atmospheric CO2
acts as a ‘carbon starvation’ brake. When the concentration of carbon
dioxide falls from 1500 ppm to 200 ppm, weathering rates drop by a
third, diminishing the capacity of forests to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
The weathering rates by trees and fungi drop because low CO2
reduces plants’ ability to perform photosynthesis, meaning less
carbon-energy is supplied to the roots and their fungi. This, in turn,
means there is less nutrient uptake from minerals in the soil, which
slows down weathering rates over millions of years.
“The last 24 million years saw significant mountain building in the
Andes and Himalayas, which increased the amount of silicate rocks and
minerals on the land that could be weathered over time. This increased
weathering of silicate rocks in certain parts of the world is likely to
have caused global CO2 levels to fall,” Quirk explains. But the concentration of CO2
never fell below 180-200 ppm because trees and fungi broke down
minerals at low rates at those concentrations of atmospheric carbon
dioxide.
“It is important that we understand the processes that affect and
regulate climates of the past and our study makes an important step
forward in understanding how Earth’s complex plant life has regulated
and modified the climate we know on Earth today,” concludes Quirk.
This research is presented in the paper ‘Weathering by tree
root-associating fungi diminishes under simulated Cenozoic atmospheric
CO2 decline’ published in the EGU open access journal Biogeosciences on 23 January 2014.
The team is composed of J. Quirk, J. R. Leake, S. A. Banwart, L. L.
Taylor and D. J. Beerling, from the University of Sheffield, UK.
Dr. Joe Quirk
Post Doctoral Research Associate
Department of Animal and Plant Sciences
University of Sheffield, UK
Tel: +44 (0)114 22 20093
Email: j.quirk@sheffield.ac.uk
Prof. David Beerling (Principal Investigator)
Department of Animal and Plant Sciences
University of Sheffield, UK
Tel: +44 (0)114 22 24359
Email: d.j.beerling@sheffield.ac.uk
Bárbara Ferreira EGU Media and Communications Manager
Munich, Germany
Tel: +49-89-2180-6703
Email: media@egu.eu
UC
Davis Center for Watershed Sciences and California Trout researchers
study salmon growth in seasonally flooded rice fields in the Yolo Bypass
near Woodland, Calif., on Feb. 19, 2013. Scientists are investigating
whether the Central Valley's historical floodplains could be managed to
help recover California's populations of Chinook salmon. Credit: Carson
Jeffres/UC Davis. From a
fish-eye view, rice fields in California's Yolo Bypass provide an
all-you-can-eat bug buffet for juvenile salmon seeking nourishment on
their journey to the sea. That's according to a new report detailing the
scientific findings of an experiment that planted fish in harvested
rice fields earlier this year, resulting in the fattest, fastest-growing
salmon on record in the state's rivers.
The report, provided to
the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, describes three concurrent studies from
researchers at the University of California, Davis, nonprofit California
Trout and the California Department of Water Resources. The scientists
investigated whether rice fields on the floodplain of Yolo Bypass could
be managed to help recover California's populations of Chinook salmon,
and if so, the ideal habitats and management approaches that could allow
both fish and farms to thrive.
"We're finding that land managers
and regulatory agencies can use these agricultural fields to mimic
natural processes," said co-author Carson Jeffres, field and laboratory
director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at UC Davis. "We still
have some things to learn, but this report is a big step in
understanding that."
Researchers found that the fish did not have a
preference among the three rice field types tested: stubble, plowed and
fallow. The food supply was so plentiful that salmon had high growth
rates across habitats and management methods.
"It's like a
dehydrated food web," said Jeffres of the harvested rice fields. "Just
add water. All of those habitats are very productive for fish."
The
salmon did demonstrate a preference for habitats with better water
flow. Jeffres compared it to choosing among three good restaurants: Each
offers good food with hearty portions, but one has better ambiance and
so is chosen above the others. In this case, the better water flow was
the ambiance the fish preferred. Read More Here
Oct. 31, 2013 — America's
once-abundant tallgrass prairies -- which have all but disappeared --
were home to dozens of species of grasses that could grow to the height
of a man, hundreds of species of flowers, and herds of roaming bison.
For the first time, a research team led by the University of Colorado
Boulder has gotten a peek at another vitally important but rarely
considered community that also once called the tallgrass prairie home:
the diverse assortment of microbes that thrived in the dark, rich soils
beneath the grass.
"These soils played a huge role in American history because they were
so fertile and so incredibly productive," said Noah Fierer, a fellow at
CU-Boulder's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental
Sciences (CIRES) and lead author of the study published today in the
journal Science. "They don't exist anymore except in really
small parcels. This is our first glimpse into what might have existed
across the whole range."
CIRES is a joint institute of CU-Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The remarkable fertility of soils beneath the tallgrass prairie --
which once covered more than 150 million U.S. acres, from Minnesota
south to Texas and from Illinois west to Nebraska -- were also the
prairie's undoing. Attracted by the richness of the dirt, settlers began
to plow up the prairie more than a century and a half ago, replacing
the native plants with corn, wheat, soybeans and other crops. Today,
only remnants of the tallgrass prairie remain, covering just a few
percent of the ecosystem's original range.
For the study, Fierer, an associate professor of microbial ecology,
and his colleagues used samples of soil collected from 31 different
sites spread out across the prairie's historical range. The samples --
which were collected by study co-author Rebecca McCulley, a grassland
ecologist at the University of Kentucky -- came largely from nature
preserves and old cemeteries.
"It was very hard to find sites that we knew had never been tilled,"
Fierer said. "As soon as you till a soil, it's totally different. Most
gardeners are familiar with that."
The researchers used DNA sequencing to characterize the microbial
community living in each soil sample. The results showed that a poorly
understood phylum of bacteria, Verrucomicrobia, dominated the microbial
communities in the soil.
"We have these soils that are dominated by this one group that we
really don't know anything about," Fierer said. "Why is it so abundant
in these soils? We don't know."
While Verrucomicrobia were dominant across the soil samples, the
microbial makeup of each particular soil sample was unique. To get an
idea of how soil microbial diversity might have varied across the
tallgrass prairie when it was still an intact ecosystem, the researchers
built a model based on climate information and the data from the
samples.
"I am thrilled that we were able to accurately reconstruct the
microbial component of prairie soils using statistical modeling and data
from the few remaining snippets of this vanishing ecosystem," said
Katherine Pollard, an investigator at the Gladstone Institutes in San
Francisco and a co-author of the paper.
Fierer and his colleagues are already hard at work trying to grow
Verrucomicrobia in the lab to better understand what it does and the
conditions it favors. But even without a full understanding of the
microbes, the research could bolster tallgrass prairie restoration
efforts in the future.
"Here's a group that's really critical in the functioning of these
soils. So if you're trying to have effective prairie restoration, it may
be useful to try and restore the below-ground diversity as well,"
Fierer said.
Story Source:
The above story is based on materials provided by University of Colorado at Boulder. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
N. Fierer, J. Ladau, J. C. Clemente, J. W. Leff, S. M. Owens, K. S. Pollard, R. Knight, J. A. Gilbert, R. L. McCulley. Reconstructing the Microbial Diversity and Function of Pre-Agricultural Tallgrass Prairie Soils in the United States. Science, 2013; 342 (6158): 621 DOI: 10.1126/science.1243768
IT was the silence that made this voyage different from all of those before it.
Not the absence of sound, exactly.
The wind still whipped the sails and whistled in the rigging. The waves still sloshed against the fibreglass hull.
And there were plenty of other noises: muffled thuds and bumps and scrapes as the boat knocked against pieces of debris.
What was missing was the cries of the seabirds which, on all previous similar voyages, had surrounded the boat.
The birds were missing because the fish were missing.
Exactly
10 years before, when Newcastle yachtsman Ivan Macfadyen had sailed
exactly the same course from Melbourne to Osaka, all he'd had to do to
catch a fish from the ocean between Brisbane and Japan was throw out a
baited line.
"There was not one of the 28 days on that portion of
the trip when we didn't catch a good-sized fish to cook up and eat with
some rice," Macfadyen recalled.
But this time, on that whole long leg of sea journey, the total catch was two.
No fish. No birds. Hardly a sign of life at all.
"In years gone by I'd gotten used to all the birds and their noises," he said.
"They'd
be following the boat, sometimes resting on the mast before taking off
again. You'd see flocks of them wheeling over the surface of the sea in
the distance, feeding on pilchards."
But in March and April this
year, only silence and desolation surrounded his boat, Funnel Web, as it
sped across the surface of a haunted ocean.
North of the equator, up above New Guinea, the ocean-racers saw a big fishing boat working a reef in the distance.
"All day it was there, trawling back and forth. It was a big ship, like a mother-ship," he said.
And
all night it worked too, under bright floodlights. And in the morning
Macfadyen was awoken by his crewman calling out, urgently, that the ship
had launched a speedboat.
"Obviously I was worried. We were
unarmed and pirates are a real worry in those waters. I thought, if
these guys had weapons then we were in deep trouble."
But they
weren't pirates, not in the conventional sense, at least. The speedboat
came alongside and the Melanesian men aboard offered gifts of fruit and
jars of jam and preserves.
"And they gave us five big sugar-bags full of fish," he said.
"They were good, big fish, of all kinds. Some were fresh, but others had obviously been in the sun for a while.
"We
told them there was no way we could possibly use all those fish. There
were just two of us, with no real place to store or keep them. They just
shrugged and told us to tip them overboard. That's what they would have
done with them anyway, they said.
"They told us that his was just
a small fraction of one day's by-catch. That they were only interested
in tuna and to them, everything else was rubbish. It was all killed, all
dumped. They just trawled that reef day and night and stripped it of
every living thing."
Macfadyen felt sick to his heart. That was
one fishing boat among countless more working unseen beyond the horizon,
many of them doing exactly the same thing.
No wonder the sea was dead. No wonder his baited lines caught nothing. There was nothing to catch.
Using Goethe's Theory of Colours
(Zur Farbenlehre) as point of departure, Light Darkness and Colours
takes us on a fascinating journey through the universe of colours. In
1704, Sir Isaac Newton published *Light and Refraction*, his study of
the interactions between sunlight and prisms. Newton was, as a good
scientist, intent on achieving objectivity, which meant studying
sunlight in isolation. He thought colours were contained solely in
light, and found the spectrum he was looking for. When he reproduced
this experiment, Goethe found another, hidden set of colours missed by
Newton. Goethe found the hidden colours in the boundaries between light
and darkness. He felt, as an artist, that one could not talk about light
without including darkness. Calling it 'the light-darkness polarity',
Goethe made this new scientific discovery using artistic methods in
conjunction with science.
