The world's first vaccine against malaria should be rolled out in limited 'pilot' demonstrations in Africa, an advisory group to the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva said on 23 October. The demonstrations — involving up to 1 million children — are needed because the vaccine is ineffective against malaria unless children receive four doses spread out over 18 months, and even then offers only modest protection. (Editorial)
A key challenge in climate change adaptation planning is projecting how changes in climate will affect efforts to conserve biological communities, and in particular species already under threat. While the projected effects of climate change on individual species may vary from beneficial to deleterious, for rare species already at risk of extinction (hereinafter, at-risk species), the projected effects of climate change are generally thought to accelerate declines.
Bees have been managed and utilised for honey production for centuries and, more recently, pollination services. Since the mid 20th Century, the use and production of managed bees has intensified with hundreds of thousands of hives being moved across countries and around the globe on an annual basis. However, the introduction of unnaturally high densities of bees to areas could have adverse effects.
During 2007, counties across the Midwestern US with relatively high levels of landscape simplification (i.e., widespread replacement of seminatural habitats with cultivated crops) had relatively high crop-pest abundances which, in turn, were associated with relatively high insecticide application. These results suggested a positive relationship between landscape simplification and insecticide use, mediated by landscape effects on crop pests or their natural enemies.
Determining the links between the behavioural and population responses of wild species to environmental variations is critical for understanding the impact of climate variability on ecosystems. Using long-term data sets, we show how large-scale climatic anomalies in the Southern Hemisphere affect the foraging behaviour and population dynamics of a key marine predator, the king penguin. When large-scale subtropical dipole events occur simultaneously in both subtropical Southern Indian and Atlantic Oceans, they generate tropical anomalies that shift the foraging zone southward.
The past was a world of giants, with abundant whales in the sea and large animals roaming the land. However, that world came to an end following massive late-Quaternary megafauna extinctions on land and widespread population reductions in great whale populations over the past few centuries. These losses are likely to have had important consequences for broad-scale nutrient cycling, because recent literature suggests that large animals disproportionately drive nutrient movement.
The pens slipped easily across the paper, about every eight minutes. At regular intervals, Heads of State entered the innermost sanctum and solemnly signed their names, committing their nations to the Framework Convention on Climate Change. The year, 1992. The place, the landmark United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, known as the “Earth Summit” at Rio de Janeiro.
Since 2004, Halji village, home of the oldest Buddhist Monastery in north-western Nepal, has suffered from recurrent glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs). A sudden englacial drainage of a supraglacial lake, located at a distance of 6.5 km from the village, was identified as the source of the flood. The topography of the lake basin was mapped by combining differential Global Positioning System (DGPS) measurements with a structure-from-motion (SFM) approach using terrestrial photographs.
