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Tag: "amazon" at biology news

Amazon symposium to address large-scale conservation

On July 19, 2005, at the Society of Conservation Biology annual meetings, in Brasília, Brazil, the Woods Hole Research Center and the Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazonia (IPAM) will hold an international symposium on the prospects for large-scale conservation of natural resources in the Amazon Basin. . This region has entered a new era of natural resource destruction as the principle indu...

Amazon source of 5-year-old river breath

The rivers of South America's Amazon basin are "breathing" far harder ?cycling the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide more quickly ?than anyone realized. .. . It had been hoped that regions such as the nearly 2.4 million-square-mile Amazon River basin ?where tropical forests rapidly gulp carbon dioxide during photosyn...

Assessing the Amazon River's sensitivity to deforestation

Understanding how the Amazon River varies in time, what causes those variations, and how sensitive it will be to ongoing, and accelerating, deforestation is a focus of study for scientists at the Woods Hole Research Center. Population and development pressures in the last several decades have led to significant areas of deforestation in the Amazon, most in the eastern and southern portion of the...

Woods Hole Research Center plans controlled burn in Amazon rainforest

Fire is an important agent of transformation in the Amazon landscape. Every year, low intensity fires burn thousands of square miles of Amazon forest. To study the effects of these fires on the forest, and the forests' ability to recover from repeated burning, Woods Hole Research Center scientists will burn two and a half square kilometers of forest in the transition forest of northern Mato Gross...

Ants, not evil spirits, create devil's gardens in the Amazon rainforest, study finds

For the first time, scientists have identified an ant species that produces its own natural herbicide to poison unwanted plants. . .. "Devil's gardens are large stands of trees in the...

NASA satellite data provides rapid analysis of Amazon deforestation

.. The Amazon, a vast tropical forest stretching across South America, is so large that if you were to take pictures of the region with optical photographs, it would take about ten years to get a composite image of the area. To make matters worse, its landscape is constantly evolving. So, scientists have learned to seek answers about this fragile ecosystem with the help of powerful eyes...

Logging doubles threat to the Amazon, rivaling clear-cutting, study suggests

Human activities are degrading the Amazonian forest at twice the rate previously estimated, suggests a new study that adds the effects of logging to those of clear-cutting. The research appears in the 21 October issue of the journal . .. A new satellite imaging method, developed by Gregory Asner of the Car...

Amazon trees much older than assumed, raising questions on global climate impact of region

Trees in the Amazon tropical forests are old. Really old, in fact, which comes as a surprise to a team of American and Brazilian researchers studying tree growth in the world's largest tropical region. . .. "Little was k...

Why the Amazon rainforest is so rich in species

Tropical areas of south and central America such as the Amazon rainforest are home to some 7500 species of butterfly compared with only around 65 species in Britain. UCL scientists have ruled out the common theory that attributed this richness of wildlife to climate change, in a paper published on 7th December by the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B (Biological Sciences). . Instead, sc...

Satellites show Amazon parks, indigenous reserves stop forest clearing

Conservation scientists generally agree that many types of protected areas will be needed to protect tropical forests. However, little is known about the comparative performance of inhabited and uninhabited reserves in slowing the most extreme form of forest disturbance: conversion to agriculture. . In a paper recently published in Conservation Biology (2006, Vol 20, pages 65-73), an internation...

Amazonian terra preta can transform poor soil into fertile

The search for El Dorado in the Amazonian rainforest might not have yielded pots of gold, but it has led to unearthing a different type of gold mine: some of the globe's richest soil that can transform poor soil into highly fertile ground. . That's not all. Scientists have a method to reproduce this soil -- known as terra preta, or Amazonian dark earths -- and say it can pull substantial amounts...

The Amazon in 2050: Implementing the law could save a million square kilometers of rainforest

Economic and political forces are rapidly transforming the forests of the Amazon basin, precipitating one of the world's greatest environmental crises. . Through an inter-discplinary modeling project known as Amazon Scenarios, scientists at the Woods Hole Research Center, the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (Brazil), and the Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazônia (Brazil), with colleagu...

Amazon rainforest greens up in the dry season

The Amazon rainforest puts on its biggest growth spurt during the dry season, according to new research. The finding surprised the researchers. . .. "What we found for a large section of the Amazon is the opposite. As soon as the rains stop and you start to enter a dry...

Fragmentation rapidly erodes Amazonian biodiversity

An international research team has discovered that forest fragmentation poses an even greater threat to Amazonian biodiversity than previously thought. . .. The Amazon contains the planet’s most biologically diverse tree communities, with up to three hundred species occurring in an area the size of just two football fields. These...

Mother knows best: Plant knowledge key to childhood health in remote Amazon

In a remote area of the Amazon, globalization is threatening the time-honored transmission of plant knowledge from generation to generation, with adverse effects on childhood health and nutrition. In a novel study published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers report that parents, and especially mothers, who know more about plants and how to use the...

Large size crucial for Amazon forest reserves

An international research team has discovered that the size of Amazon forest reserves is yet more important than previously thought. Their findings, to be published this week (January 12th) in the journal Science, underscore the importance of protecting the Amazon in large stretches of primary forest. . The article summarizes bird survey results from the world's largest and longest running exper...

Human's ecological footprint in 2015 and Amazonia revealed

A recent study shows human population size and affluence are the main drivers of human-caused environmental stressors, while urbanization, economic structure and age of population have little effect. . Modeling global average productivity to compare environmental tradeoffs and human-induced stressors in the environment Thomas Dietz (Michigan State University), Eugene Rosa (Washington State Univer...

Paper challenges 1491 Amazonian population theories

There's a scholarly debate brewing about whether pre-Columbian Amazonian populations settled in large numbers across Amazonia and created the modern forest setting that many conservationists take to be ‘natural.' . .. "We don't contradict that there were major settlements in key are...