Fifty years after setting foot in Gombe, Jane Goodall calls for urgent action to save our closest living relatives from extinction in the wild. Conservationists and local people must collaborate, she and Lilian Pintea conclude.
Researchers and regulators need to keep up with the changing risks, and share information, says Arne Jernelöv, as tanker spills decline and pipeline leaks and blowouts become more of a concern.
The value of ecosystems is largely invisible to markets. Ricardo Bayon and Michael Jenkins call on governments to drive regulatory and voluntary economic instruments that put a price on the services that nature provides.
Emissions of African dust increased sharply in the early 1970s, but the human contribution to land degradation and dust mobilization remains poorly understood. Now, a 3,200-year record of dust deposition off northwest Africa has been constructed.
Global climate and the atmospheric partial pressure of carbon dioxide (pCO2atm ) are correlated over recent glacial cycles, with lower pCO2atm during ice ages, but the causes of the pCO2atm changes are unknown. The modern Southern Ocean releases deeply sequestered CO2 to the atmosphere.
A survey of organic and conventional potato fields shows that species evenness is greater under organic management. Replicating these levels of evenness in a field trial shows that the evenness of natural enemies found in organic fields promotes pest control and increases crop biomass. This is independent of the identity of the dominant enemy species, so is a result of evenness itself.
It remains uncertain whether added nitrogen enhances total plant productivity in response to CO2-fertilisation in natural ecosystems. Here the authors show that nitrogen addition initially enhances the CO2-stimulation of plant productivity but also promotes the encroachment of plant species that respond less strongly to elevated CO2 concentrations.
Global climate and the atmospheric partial pressure of carbon dioxide (pCO2atm ) are correlated over recent glacial cycles, with lower pCO2atm during ice ages, but the causes of the pCO2atm changes are unknown. The modern Southern Ocean releases deeply sequestered CO2 to the atmosphere.
