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Asia’s Fragile Caves Face New Risks from Development by Mike Ives: Yale Environment 360
Asia’s Fragile Caves Face New Risks from Development by Mike Ives: Yale Environment 360.
Botanist Li-Bing Zhang has spent years collecting ferns in the caves and limestone formations of southwestern China and neighboring Southeast Asia. When I met him recently in a Vietnamese national park, his research vehicle, a silver van, was bursting with fern specimens. Zhang and two colleagues had found them in tropical forests and at the entrances of 10 caves.
About 10 of the specimens, including a cave fern that his team had found inPhong Nha-Ke Bang National Park in central Vietnam, were probably unknown to science, Zhang said. He planned to test his hunches when he returned to his laboratory at the Missouri Botanical Garden, where he works as an associate curator. “The problem is that a lot of species go extinct unnoticed,” Zhang told me while trekking through a forest in jeans and rubber boots. “That’s why we do our collecting.”
Limestone formations in Southeast Asia, or karsts, which spread across a belt of non-contiguous land nearly the size of California, contain fragile and biodiverse environments. The caves’ dark, humid passages play host to dozens of species of ferns, bats, insects, spiders, mites, blind fish, and many other plants and invertebrates.
Earth could face another mass extinction – study — RT News
Earth could face another mass extinction – study — RT News.
Animals on Earth continue to disappear at an alarming rate, which could result in another mass extinction over the next few centuries, a study by the journal Nature claims, although researchers are struggling to understand the scale of the problem.
Thousands of animals become extinct every year; pressures on species continue to grow, despite renewed conservation policies across the globe to try and slow the process, and the increasing amount of land and ocean areas being set aside for protection.
“In general the state of biodiversity is worsening, in many cases significantly,” said Derek Tittensor, a marine ecologist with the United Nations Environment Program’s World Conservation Monitoring Center in Cambridge, UK, as quoted by Nature.
The so-called Red List of Threatened Species, compiled by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, discovered that there are 46,000 critically endangered species.
Industrial Farming Plows Up Brazil’s ‘Underground Forest’ | Climate Central
Industrial Farming Plows Up Brazil’s ‘Underground Forest’ | Climate Central.
PALMAS, Brazil – South and east of Brazil’s famous Amazon, the air becomes dryer and the humid rainforest gives way to emerald green patches of irrigated pasture carved from scrubby woods and native grasslands.
As global meat demand increases, farmers are plowing up more of Brazil’s enormous Cerrado, a unique “underground forest” where plants and shrubs store tremendous quantities of carbon in a sprawling root network.
Credit: Autumn Spanne
This is a different kind of forest, hidden in plain sight and far more threatened than the Amazon. Known as the Cerrado, it is the largest, most biologically diverse savannah region of South America, home to 5 percent of all life on the planet.
But industrial farming is fast swallowing this unique landscape. And its rapid transformation is creating a ticking carbon bomb that scientists warn could significantly affect the global carbon cycle if the current rate of destruction continues.
This enormous expanse in central Brazil was once as impenetrable as the deepest rainforest, so isolated that Portuguese settlers dubbed it Cerrado, or “closed.” Today roads connect the Cerrado’s southern boundary in the São Paulo and Mato Grosso do Sul states with its northern limits some 1,500 miles away near the Atlantic coast. Yet the Cerrado is still largely unknown, even in Brazil.
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Protecting Seeds and Their Stories: The Sacred in Everyday Life – PermacultureNews.org
Protecting Seeds and Their Stories: The Sacred in Everyday Life – PermacultureNews.org.
The recent UN Climate Change Summit, the marches in New York and around the world, once again brought into our collective consciousness the need for real change. As did the shocking news of the global loss of species. The vital need to protect our ecosystems is part of a cry that embraces the whole earth, from the smallest creature to the vast oceans. And in the midst of this call to cease our globally self-destructive behavior is a story that touches each of us, every day.
It is in every bite of an apple, every bowl of rice, every piece of bread we butter. It is the essential and elemental story of seeds, how we are losing our heritage, and how this effects our soul as well as our body.
As I take my walk these early fall mornings, I pass by an old apple tree with gnarled and empty branches. Only a few weeks ago these same branches pushed over the hedgerow, laden with red and golden fruit. Nature’s generosity is one of life’s wonders; and yet, seeing these empty branches, I am also reminded of the hidden sadness of loss, knowing how once in this country we had around 5,000 apple varieties but now mostly grow only 15 varieties. Accordian, Camack Sweet, Haywood June, Sally Crocket, are just a few names of what has been lost. Like apples, all seeds, our most essential source of sustenance, are losing their biodiversity. They are suffering the same fate as much of the natural world, with many varieties being made extinct—75% lost from the world’s fields1: yet another example of what our mechanized world is destroying, the ecocide we are witnessing.
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A Conservationist Sees Signs of Hope for the World’s Rainforests by Rhett Butler: Yale Environment 360
After decades of sobering news, a prominent conservationist says he is finally finding reason to be optimistic about the future of tropical forests. Consumer pressure on international corporations and new monitoring technology, he says, are helping turn the tide in efforts to save forests from Brazil to Indonesia.
In the mid-1990s I visited a magnificent tract of lowland rainforest in Malaysian Borneo. Some of my fondest memories are from that forest: hiking under the towering trees, wading in the crystal-clear streams, and delighting in its spectacular wildlife, including hornbills and endangered orangutans. But a few months after my visit, those trees were torn down, and the forest was obliterated. Today that area is an oil palm plantation.
The destruction of that forest set me on an odyssey that led to the creation of Mongabay.com, which has become a popular and influential website that closely tracks trends in the world’s tropical forests. For a decade-and-a-half, I have devoted tens of thousands of hours to the cause of protecting forests, engaging with the world’s leading forest experts and visiting scores of forests around the world. During that time, I’ve continued to witness incredible destruction, and there has been reason for despair. But lately — for the first time, really — I’ve started seeing cause for optimism about future of forests.
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Can we have our cities and biodiversity, too? | Ensia
Can we have our cities and biodiversity, too? | Ensia.
October 23, 2014 — We are entering the most extensive and rapid phase of urban growth ever experienced. Not only are urban populations expected to double in just a few decades, physical urban space is expected to increase at an even faster pace. Estimates suggest that by 2050 a land area the size of South Africa, more than 1.2 million square kilometers, will be engulfed by cities, straining natural resources and ecosystems. And much of this development will occur adjacent to biodiversity-rich areas.
While continuing urbanization will pose challenges, it can also provide opportunities. Reconciling biodiversity and urban areas through conscious choices and innovative development has proven to be beneficial for human and environmental health. When done right, harm to the environment is minimized, cities become more resilient to severe weather, and the effects of climate change may even be mitigated. The potential of cities is vast.
The Cities and Biodiversity Outlook project seeks to draw attention to that potential and to successful examples of cities capitalizing on it. Based on scientific work from the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity, the Stockholm Resilience Centre and Local Governments for Sustainability, the CBO developed a list of 10 key messages about biodiversity and urbanization and produced the short film above, An Urbanizing Planet.
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