Conservation zones are in the wrong place to protect vulnerable coral reefs from the effects of global warming, an international team of scientists warned today.

Conservation zones are in the wrong place to protect vulnerable coral reefs from the effects of global warming, an international team of scientists warned today.

New research, reported this week in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds that coal burning, primarily in North America and Europe, contaminated the Arctic and potentially affected human health and ecosystems in and around Earth's polar regions.

This drooping lobster is missing limbs and painted with dark spots, the tell-tale signs of shell disease. The search for what causes a debilitating shell disease affecting lobsters from Long Island Sound to Maine has led one Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) visiting scientist to suspect environmental alkyphenols, formed primarily by the breakdown of hard transparent plastics.

A global study led by Professor Robert Diaz of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, College of William and Mary, shows that the number of "dead zones"—areas of seafloor with too little oxygen for most marine life—has increased by a third between 1995 and 2007.

EVEN when they tiptoe discreetly through the undergrowth, nature lovers and ecotourists may be having an unexpectedly damaging impact on wildlife. A study of protected Californian forest has shown that hiking, wildlife-watching and similar low-impact activities are linked to a sharp drop in numbers of carnivores such as bobcats and coyotes.

Rare trees in the Amazon basin are more likely to
go extinct than common species, according to scenarios based on neutral
theory.
Common tree species in the Amazon will survive even grim scenarios of deforestation and road-building, but rare trees could suffer extinction rates of up to 50 percent, predict Smithsonian scientists and colleagues in the Aug. 12 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

Jeremy Jackson, Scripps Professor of Oceanography. Human activities are cumulatively driving the health of the world's oceans down a rapid spiral, and only prompt and wholesale changes will slow or perhaps ultimately reverse the catastrophic problems they are facing.

With less than a month remaining before the Beijing Olympics, Chinese officials have introduced a series of measures to improve air quality for the Games. A new tool has been installed in the capital city to allow the Chinese to monitor the effectiveness of these efforts.

No-take marine reserves where fishing is banned can have benefits that extend beyond the exploited fishes they are specifically designed to protect, according to new evidence from Australia's Great Barrier Reef reported in the July 22nd issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication. Researchers have found that outbreaks of large, predatory crown-of-thorns starfish (Acanthaster planci), which can devastate coral reefs, occur less often in protected zones, although they don't yet know exactly why.

The Chesapeake Bay, like other East Coast estuaries, suffers from pollution by excess nitrogen. If you are living in the eastern United States, the environment around you is being harmed by air pollution. From Adirondack forests and Shenandoah streams to Appalachian wetlands and the Chesapeake Bay, a new report by the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and The Nature Conservancy has found that air pollution is degrading every major ecosystem type in the northeastern and mid-Atlantic United States.

A diseased coral. A new indicator of coral health has been discovered in a community of microscopic single-celled algae called dinoflagellates. The study, released in the July 8th edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveals that a particular type of these algae renders corals more susceptible to disease.

An international team of conservation scientists from Australia, the United Kingdom and United States, including University of Texas at Austin Professor Camille Parmesan, call for new conservation tactics, such as assisted migration, in the face of the growing threat of climate change.

Borneo (Kalimantan) is the third largest island in the world. It is rich with a variety of indigenous orchid species that grow in the forests. Borneo's rain forests are also home to some extremely rare species of orchids, all highly valued for their exotic aromas and aesthetic beauty. It has been estimated that 2500 to 3000 orchid species grow in the forests of Borneo.

NOAA-supported scientists from the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium and Louisiana State University are forecasting that the "dead zone" off the coast of Louisiana and Texas in the Gulf of Mexico this summer could be the largest on record.

Women exposed to high levels of PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls – a group of banned environmental pollutants) are less likely to give birth to male children. A study published today in BioMed Central's open access journal Environmental Health found that among women from the San Francisco Bay Area, those exposed to higher levels of PCBs during the 50s and 60s, were significantly more likely to give birth to female children.

A third of reef-building corals around the world are threatened with extinction, according to the first-ever comprehensive global assessment to determine their conservation status. The study findings were published today by Science Express.

Scientists announced today the discovery of reef structures they believe doubles the size of the Southern Atlantic Ocean's largest and richest reef system, the Abrolhos Bank, off the southern coast of Brazil's Bahia state. The newly discovered area is also far more abundant in marine life than the previously known Abrolhos reef system, one of the world's most unique and important reefs.

Fort Lauderdale, Fla.— Nearly half of U.S. coral reef ecosystems are considered to be in "poor" or "fair" condition according to a new NOAA analysis of the health of coral reefs under U.S. jurisdiction.

Commercial flower and plant growers know all too well that invasive, ubiquitous weeds cause trouble by lowering the value and deterring healthy growth of potted ornamental plants. To control weeds, many commercial nursery owners resort to the expensive practice of paying workers to hand-weed containers. Some growers use herbicides, but efficacy of herbicides is questionable on the wide range of plant species produced in nurseries, and many herbicides are not registered for use in greenhouses.

Would shrinking your carbon footprint, recycling more, and going green be easier if you could monitor your household's environmental impact? That's the question a team of Canadian industry consultants set out to answer. They report their findings in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Environmental Technology and Management from Inderscience Publishers.

Rain has soaked this Adélie penguin chick in Antarctica before its feathers are capable of repelling water. Though the icy continent is in essence a desert, coastal rainfall is becoming more common with changing climate. Credit: Dee Boersma Like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, penguins are sounding the alarm for potentially catastrophic changes in the world's oceans, and the culprit isn't only climate change, says a University of Washington conservation biologist.

The battle to reduce carbon emissions is at the heart of many eco-friendly efforts, and researchers from the University of Missouri have discovered that nature has been lending a hand. Researchers at the Missouri Tree Ring Laboratory in the Department of Forestry discovered that trees submerged in freshwater aquatic systems store carbon for thousands of years, a significantly longer period of time than trees that fall in a forest, thus keeping carbon out of the atmosphere.

A detailed analysis of data from nearly 50 years of weekly fish-trawl surveys in Narragansett Bay and adjacent Rhode Island Sound has revealed a long-term shift in species composition, which scientists attribute primarily to the effects of global warming.

Prior to the federal Clean Air Act, unhindered industrial emissions were released into the air throughout the Midwestern and Eastern United States for decades. Many of those harmful chemicals came right back down to earth in the form of acid rain, a chemical concoction that includes nitric and sulfuric acid.

The plant, Kalanchoe fedtschenkoi, is unique because, unlike normal plants, it captures most of its carbon dioxide at night when the air is cooler and more humid, making it 10 times more water-efficient than major crops such as wheat. Scientists will use the latest next-generation DNA sequencing to analyse the plant's genetic code and understand how these plants function at night.

Nitrogen is essential to all life on Earth, and the processes by which it cycles through the environment may determine how ecosystems respond to global warming. But certain aspects of the nitrogen cycle in temperate and tropical forests have puzzled scientists, defying, in a sense, the laws of supply and demand. Trees capable of extracting nitrogen directly from the atmosphere often thrive where it is readily available in the soil, but not where it is in short supply. Now scientists from the Carnegie Institution have explained the paradox by recognizing the role of two other factors: temperature and the abundance of another key element, phosphorous.

Single person submersibles have been called in to help scientists retrieve samples from a lake in northern British Columbia that may hold vital clues to the history of life on Earth and on other planets.

Wilkins Ice Shelf has experienced further break-up with an area of about 160 square kilometers breaking off. This animation, comprised of images acquired by Envisat's Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar between May 30 and June 9, 2008, highlights the rapidly dwindling strip of ice that is protecting thousands of kilometers of the ice shelf from further break-up. This is the first ever-documented episode to occur in winter. Credit: ESA Wilkins Ice Shelf has experienced further break-up with an area of about 160 km² breaking off from 30 May to 31 May 2008. ESA's Envisat satellite captured the event – the first ever-documented episode to occur in winter.

Conserving biodiversity must be considered when developing plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation, researchers warn in today's edition of Science.