Biota in Biological News

October Geology and GSA Today media highlights

... marine plants. The exceptionally preserved biota of the Eramosa Lagersttte lived in marginally ... It is the association of exceptionally preserved biota with the more commonly preserved shelly fauna and ... soft-bodied fossils such as the Mazon Creek biota of Illinois (slightly more than 300 million years ...

New theory gives more precise estimates of large-scale biodiversity

... number of species in a square-meter plot or within an acre, but a major problem in conservation biology and ecology is estimating the diversity of biota at very large spatial scales, such as in the Amazon," said Harte, UC Berkeley professor of energy and resources. "This theory provides a much more ...

K-State using Second Life island to help high school students learn earth science

... past times is to look at the fossil record," Totten said. "So this tool is especially useful. Through their avatars, the students can see that the biota are different and know that they're in a different geologic time period. They may see flying pterodactyls. They can click on different organisms and ...

AAAS Symposium: Emerging threats to tropical, temperate and ocean ecosystems

... escalating in importance, buoyed by rapid globalization and rising demands for commodities. Much is unknown about how climate change will affect biota on land and in the sea, and how this will interact with other environmental changes. Information on environmental synergisms is meager at best. The ...

Nitrous oxide emissions respond differently to no-till depending on the soil type

... the soil surface modifies several soil properties but also influence nitrogen dynamics. Soils under no-till usually host a more abundant and diverse biota and are less prone to erosion, water loss, and structural breakdown than tilled soils. Their organic matter content is also often increased. In ...

October 2008 GEOLOGY and GSA TODAY media highlights

... track environmental perturbations, however, requires the discovery of new taphonomic windows (sets of conditions for preservation) for the Ediacaran biota in relatively continuous successions dominated by chemical sediments. Yet, finding these fossils in alternative modes of preservation has been ...

Shipwrecks on coral reefs harbor unwanted species

... dramatically decreasing the diversity of marine organisms on the reef. This study documents for the first time that a rapid change in the dominant biota on a coral reef is unambiguously associated with man-made structures. The findings of the study, published in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, ...

Tropical forest sustainability: A climate change boon

... Dr Raupach says. They authors also note, however, that efforts to mitigate climate change by increasing both the overall area and volume of biota in those forests, does carry the risk that events such as bushfires and insect outbreaks can release massive amounts of sequestered carbon back into ...

Fungi have a hand in depleted uranium's environmental fate

... said Geoffrey Gadd of the University of Dundee in Scotland. Because fungi are perfectly suited as biogeochemical agents, often dominate the biota in polluted soils, and play a major role in the establishment and survival of plants through their association with roots, fungal-based approaches ...

Regional nuclear conflict would create near-global ozone hole, says CU-Boulder study

... shrimp, fish and phytoplankton, said Mills. Most organisms can do little to avoid UV exposure, so one of the big unanswered questions is how the biota would respond to these big UV increases triggered by a nuclear exchange. The team used a cluster of computer processors at LASP to run three ...

2008 Ocean Sciences Meeting -- media advisory 2

... (CSDMS), University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, USA Session: 192 Ocean Acidification: Causes and Impacts on Biogeochemical Processes, biota and Climate Monday, 3 March 1600 As the worlds oceans become more acidic, many calcifying marine organisms will be negatively impacted, which ...

4 GBIF-endorsed campaigns underway

... also has the support of external organisations including INBIO Costa Rica, Argentinean Natural History Museum, CONABIO Mexico, GBIF.es SPAIN, biota / UTU Finland, ETI Bioinformatics Netherlands, AndinoNet, and the New York Botanical Garden. Once operational, ABBIF will help promote a ...

February Geology and GSA Today media highlights

... a large ice cap appeared on Antarctica for the first time. It was also a time of widespread extinction, in the oceans and on land, as the world's biota adjusted to the new conditions. In their paper, Pearson et al. discuss a new, highly detailed record of these events that has been discovered in ...

Elevated carbon dioxide changes soil microbe mix below plants

... carbon from the atmosphere. The research will be published online this week in the journal Environmental Microbiology. "These changes in soil biota are evidence for altered interactions between trembling aspen trees and the microorganisms in the surrounding soil," says Daniel (Niels) van der ...

CO2 emissions could violate EPA ocean-quality standards within decades

... carbon-dioxide induced changes in ocean chemistry within the ranges predicted for the next decades and centuries present significant risks to marine biota and that adverse impacts on food webs and key biogeochemical process would result. An international team of twenty five leading researchers ...

Tropical crab invades Georgia oyster reefs -- but the long-term impact can't be predicted

... observation of the oyster reefs may ultimately provide answers. We have observed both positive and negative impacts on oysters and oyster-related biota at small scales, but we cannot definitively answer our concerns about oyster reefs at larger scales, Hollebone added. With continued monitoring of ...

Biota makes major antiviral discovery

... biota Holdings Limited announced today that it has ... RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) infection. biota has filed worldwide patents and selected a lead ... patients: premature infants. If successful, the biota RSV drug is expected to have significant ...

Smithsonian scientists discover new marine species in eastern Pacific

... effort to develop an innovative management plan for Coiba National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site. What species live here? How much of this biota remains unknown to science? What are the relationships to other world regions? The results of this collection trip will be published in the ...

Hotspots of mercury contamination identified in eastern North America

... an analysis of levels of mercury contamination over time in the Merrimack River watershed suggests that lowered emissions reduced mercury levels in biota within a few years. The 10-member research team was led by David C. Evers of the BioDiversity Research Institute in Gorham, Maine. The study was ...

Cougar predation key to ecosystem health

... interventions to stream channels, but concluded that those impacts could not have caused the enormous loss of trees and associated impacts to other biota that were found in the canyon. The findings of this study may be relevant to other ecosystems in the U.S. and around the world where ...

Global warming may warrant new approaches to ecosystem restoration

... undergoing the most rapid rate of change in the earth's history. This global climate change is likely to have important regional consequences for biota and ecosystems. Ecological restoration, including reafforestation and rehabilitation of degraded land, may be a common response to the effects ...

Researchers find Amchitka seafood safe for now

... W. Powers, principal investigator for the consortium. He noted that expedition scientists sampled and analyzed for radionuclides many types of biota in the seas at Amchitka and a reference site, nearby Kiska: "Rutgers' Joanna Burger developed a program that has assessed these two marine regions as ...

Essential mangrove forest threatened by cryptic ecological degradation

... O. Batelaan, S. Sooriyarachchi, L.P. Jayatissa, and N. Koedam: "Transitions in Ancient Inland Freshwater Resource Management in Sri Lanka Affect biota and Human Populations in and around Coastal Lagoons" ...