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Each year approximately 10 million waterfowl fly north to their breeding grounds in the Prairie Pothole Region of North America, but the landscape that greets them has changed. Weather patterns and agricultural practices have significantly transformed the pothole-dotted native grasslands that waterfowl have used for thousands of years.View the full article
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A major collaboration involving 80 scientists from Europe and South America has identified the regions of the Amazon rainforest where trees are most likely to face the greatest risk from drier conditions brought about by climate change. Based on the analysis, the scientists predict trees in the western and southern Amazon face the greatest risk of dying. They also warn that previous scientific investigations may have underestimated the impact of drought on the rainforest because those studies focused on the central-eastern part of the forest, which is the least vulnerable to drought.View the full article
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What's good for the Black-backed Woodpecker is good for restoration of burned California forests. The birds' unique relationship with fire underpins the latest research into improved post-fire management. A study describes a new tool that factors in how fires burn into forest management decisions and turns science into action for wildlife conservation.View the full article
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A new global survey of 1000 forest areas shows how climate change since the peak of the last ice age has had a major impact on the diversity and distribution of tree species we see today. The results can help us predict how ecosystems will react to future changes, thus having an impact on conservation management around the globe.View the full article
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Over the past 40 years, the financial losses caused by biological invasions have been equivalent to those caused by various types of natural disasters, such as earthquakes, floods or storms; however, according to scientists, they are now increasing at a faster pace.View the full article
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Coastal species persist on high seas on floating plastic debris
NewsBot posted a topic in NISIC News
The high seas have been colonized by a surprising number of coastal marine invertebrate species, which can now survive and reproduce in the open ocean, contributing strongly to the floating community composition. Researchers found coastal species, representing diverse taxonomic groups and life history traits, in the eastern North Pacific Subtropical Gyre on over 70 percent of the plastic debris they examined. Further, the debris carried more coastal species than open ocean species.View the full article -
Killer whales (also known as orcas) are intelligent predators. While it's known that killer whales in the Pacific Northwest exploit widely different food types, even within the same region, we know much less about the feeding habits of those found throughout the North Atlantic. Thanks to a new technique, it is now possible to quantify the proportion of different prey that killer whales in the North Atlantic are eating by studying the fatty acid patterns in their blubber. As climate change leads to a northward redistribution of killer whales, the results have implications not only for the health and survival of these killer whales, but also in terms of potential impacts on sensitive species within Arctic ecosystems.View the full article
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Wildfires. Many see them as purely destructive forces, disasters that blaze through a landscape, charring everything in their paths. But a new study reminds us that wildfires are also generative forces, spurring biodiversity in their wakes.View the full article
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A study of Britain's native flowering plants has led to new insights into the mysterious process that allows wild plants to breed across species -- one of plants' most powerful evolutionary forces. When wild flowering plants are sizing up others they may often end up in a marriage between close relatives rather than neighbors, a new study has revealed.View the full article
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The island of Dominica took a direct hit from Category 5 Hurricane Maria. Nine months afterward, researchers found that while 89% percent of trees located in nine previously documented forest stands were damaged, but only 10 percent had immediately died. The most common damage was stem snapping and major branch damage. The damage with the highest rates of mortality were uprooting and being crushed by a neighboring tree. Large individual trees and species with lower wood density were susceptible to snapping, uprooting and mortality. Those on steeper slopes were more prone to being crushed by neighboring trees.View the full article
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Nitrogen is such a crucial nutrient for plants that vast quantities of nitrogen-containing fertilizers are spread on farmlands worldwide. However, excess nitrogen in the soil and in drainage run-off into lakes and rivers causes serious ecological imbalances. A recent study has uncovered the regulatory mechanisms at work when plants utilize nitrogenous fertilizers in their roots, a positive step in the quest to generate crops that require less fertilizer while still producing the yields needed to feed the world.View the full article
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Climate change might compromise how permanently forests are able to store carbon and keep it out of the air. In a new study, researchers found that the regions most at risk to lose forest carbon through fire, climate stress or insect damage are those regions where many forest carbon offset projects have been set up. The authors assert that there's an urgent need to update these carbon offsets protocols and policies.View the full article
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A framework has been developed to test disgust and its associated disease avoidance behaviors across various animal species, social systems, and habitats. Over 30 species have been predicted to exhibit disease avoidance strategies in the wild. With these predictions, the team accounts for models of specific ecological niches, sensory environments and social systems for a number of species including the native common octopus and the invasive red-eared slider, which are both relevant to Japan.View the full article
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The number of insects has been declining for years. This has already been well documented for agricultural areas. In forests, however, temporal trends are mostly studied for insect species that are considered pests. Now, a research team has studied the trends of very many insect species in German forests. Contrary to what the researchers had suspected, the results showed that the majority of the studied species are declining.View the full article
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Marine predators have expanded their ranges into the Arctic waters over the last twenty years, driven by climate change and associated increases in productivity.View the full article
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Researchers provide open-access tool to capture new data on a global plant destroyer, Phytophthora.View the full article
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A group of researchers discovered that the rhodopsin -- a protein in the eye that detects light -- of whale sharks has changed to efficiently detect blue light, which penetrates deep-sea water easily. The amino acid substitutions -- one of which is counterintuitively associated with congenital stationary night blindness in humans -- aid in detecting the low levels of light in the deep-sea. Although these changes make the whale shark rhodopsin less thermally stable the deep-sea temperature, allows their rhodopsin to keep working. This suggests that the unique adaptation evolved to function in the low-light low-temperature environment where whale sharks live.View the full article