A survey of bumblebees in North America provides unequivocal evidence that four previously common and abundant species have undergone recent and widespread population collapse. Various explanations remain possible.
A hallmark of the latter half of the 20th century is the widespread, rapid intensification of a variety of anthropogenically-driven environmental changes
Non-timber forest products (NTFPs) generate sizeable magnitudes of income and employment in different parts of the world for the tribal and poor people. The evidence is based on the review of past studies across different continents. The study presents a collective evidence for the role of NTFPs in development in low and underdeveloped sectors of the world.
Studies diverge substantially on the actual magnitude of the North American carbon budget. This is due to the lack of appropriate data and also stems from the difficulty to properly model all the details of the flux distribution and transport inside the region of interest.
To persist, species are expected to shift their geographical ranges polewards or to higher elevations as the Earth’s climate warms. However, although many species’ ranges have shifted in historical times, many others have not, or have shifted only at the high-latitude or high-elevation limits, leading to range expansions rather than contractions.
In 2010 Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), again devastated honey bee colonies in the USA, indicating that the problem is neither diminishing nor has it been resolved. Many CCD investigations, using sensitive genome-based methods, have found small RNA bee viruses and the microsporidia, Nosema apis and N.
The main consumer-targeted certification scheme for sustainable fisheries is failing to protect the environment and needs radical reform, say Jennifer Jacquet, Daniel Pauly and colleagues.
As part of the Global Atmospheric Passive Sampling (GAPS) study, XAD-resin based passive samplers are being deployed for consecutive one-year periods at numerous sites on all seven continents to determine annually averaged concentrations of persistent organic pollutants.
Species distribution models (SDMs) are increasingly used for extrapolation, or predicting suitable regions for species under new geographic or temporal scenarios. However, SDM predictions may be prone to errors if species are not at equilibrium with climatic conditions in the current range and if training samples are not representative.
