Tag archives for Ecology
Saving Lives, Livelihoods, and Life
Posted by Guest Blogger on April 22, 2013 
By Harold E. Varmus, Director of the U.S. National Cancer Institute; and Robert D. Hormats, Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment For many people, the term biodiversity might seem highly technical and irrelevant to their day to day concerns. If you think that, think again. It may just save your life.…
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The Great Lakes hold 20 percent of the world’s available surface freshwater–enough to cover the continental United States with 10 feet of water if you turned them upside down. In many places along the lakes, you can stand on one side without seeing the shoreline on the other because they are so huge. It’s difficult…
Geography in the News: The Everglades’ Python Solution
Posted by Neal Lineback of Maps101.com and Maps.com on February 14, 2013 By Neal Lineback and Mandy Lineback Gritzner, Geography in the NewsTM and Maps.com* Florida’s famous Everglades National Park is experiencing one of its greatest ecological threats. Burmese pythons, which are native to Southeast Asia, are devastating the native wildlife of the Everglades. How the pythons reached South Florida and became a reproducing population of thousands that…
Nusa Penida: Black Magic Island, Part II
Posted by IZILWANE on January 9, 2013 
By Altaire Cambata All Photos Courtesy of Justin May/Interwoven Multicolored quarter-sized candy wrappers, amassed by the fist full, were slipping through my gloves on my thirtieth trip to the trash bag in the corner of the lot. I crouched again, my dirty knees hovering above the aged, twisted plastic, the remnants of a bygone…
Restoring More than Animals – Returning Fire to American Prairie Reserve
Posted by American Prairie Reserve on November 21, 2012 
This fall, American Prairie Reserve conducted our first controlled burn of nearly 900 acres in an effort to expand prairie dog habitat and restore an important ecological process to the landscape. The fire was a result of collaboration between the Reserve, US Fish & Wildlife Service, which provided expertise, personnel and equipment to conduct…
Damming the Mekong River
Posted by Michael Fry on November 6, 2012 Laos has announced plans to proceed immediately with the construction of an 820-meter-long hydroelectric dam across the Mekong River. Critics of the project say the Xayaburi dam, to be located in northern Laos, would be an ecological disaster for the Mekong and millions of people in Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, who rely on…
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Deep in the Karoo of South Africa’s Eastern Cape is a land starting over. The air is dry, the ground recovering from drought, and on high plateaus great plains of golden grass are home to large herds of zebra, red hartebeest, blesbuck and wildebeest. The animals never descend to the bushland below which is also…
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They are little known by the general public, but caddisflies are an ancient group of aquatic insects that are important indicators of ecological health. For this week’s Freshwater Species of the Week, we interviewed caddisfly expert Kjell Arne Johanson, a professor and head of the entomology department at the Swedish Museum of Natural History.…
Posted by By Bob Hirshon, American Association for the Advancement of Science Saguaro National Park, Arizona–Tardigrades, or “water bears,” are tiny creatures so bizarre that they have their own phylum. They’re found in a diverse range of environments. A team from Baker University in Kansas came to the 2011 BioBlitz in Saguaro National Park to see if…
By Bob Hirshon, American Association for the Advancement of Science Saguaro National Park, Arizona–One of the coolest things about the BioBlitz, held this year in Saguaro National Park, is that it brings kids and scientists together. In this third BioBlitz “BobCast,” I go on a nighttime insect inventory, out in the desert, with entomologists and…
By Bob Hirshon, American Association for the Advancement of Science Saguaro National Park, Arizona–Not all of the organisms being counted at the BioBlitz are big and visible, like birds and snakes. Scientists are also surveying microscopic species, like the fungi in this video. Fungi make all sorts of useful compounds, and finding new ones could…
Posted by What do a forest ecologist, a photographer and a cinematographer have in common? A deeply rooted passion for education, art and conservation!
