A visiting biologist at the University of California, San Diego and her colleagues in Africa and Britain have shown that there are close linkages between outbreaks of Ebola hemorrhagic fever in human and wildlife populations, and that climate may influence the spread of the disease.
According to a recent study, predicting the impact of climate change on organisms is more complicated than simply looking at species northern and southern range limits. Studying the California Sea Mussel — Mytilus californianus — Brian Helmuth (University of South Carolina) and colleagues from the University of California-Santa Barbara, the University of British Columbia-Vancouver and Oregon State University measured body temperatures of this mussel along most of its range, from Washington to Southern California.
Global warming has already caused extinctions in the most sensitive habitats and will continue to cause more species to go extinct over the next 50 to 100 years, confirms the most comprehensive study since 2003 on the effects of climate change on wild species worldwide by a University of Texas at Austin biologist.
Global warming strikes again. A University of Illinois researcher reports that a red-winged black bird population in Ontario, Canada has decreased by 50 percent since 1972. The decrease is related to a positive shift in the North Atlantic Oscillation which has resulted in warmer, wetter winters in the southeastern United States.
In a fascinating study appearing in the November issue of the American Naturalist, biologists investigated the response of small animals to climate change on a remote sub-Antarctic Island. From an evolutionary standpoint, acclimatizing to a change in circumstances seems to make evolutionary sense. However, Steven Chown and Jacques Deere (both of Stellenbosch University) found that terrestrial animals don’t adapt. Why not?
In two oceanographic surveys conducted in the south-west Pacific Ocean, in October 1999 and April 2000, scientists from this IRD observed a sharp change in direction of equatorial intermediate current between these two dates. Such temporal variability is not new, but in this case its amplitude is strikingly strong. This effect will have to be taken into account if better understanding of ocean/atmosphere exchanges and climate variations is to be achieved.
ALTRAN, the European leader in innovation and high technology consulting, unveiled at the EcoBuilding Performance Forum on November 8-9 in Paris, three new eco-innovative concepts, to enable the best use of energy in the building and urban environment sectors. The “eco-innovation” is one of the pillars of the environment policy recently adopted by the EU, emphasizing that a “green” product is not enough, but that the product’s life cycle must be energy efficient.
An increasing number of countries and regions are transitioning from deforestation to afforestation, raising hopes for a turning point for the world as a whole, according to researchers advancing a more sophisticated approach to measuring forest cover. The novel approach looks beyond simply how much of a nation’s area is covered by trees and considers the volume of timber, biomass and captured carbon within the area.
Even if climate records from Greenland and Antarctic ice cores look different, climate of Artic and Antarctic are directly linked. Investigations of an Antarctic ice core indicate a principle connection between both hemispheres by a “bipolar seesaw.”
WFP has welcomed a generous contribution of US$2 million from the Russian Federation to WFP?s emergency operation in Kenya, praising the first donation from the Russian Federation to WFP?s work in East Africa.