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Tag: "grazing" at biology news

Six million Africans face famine because of locusts, drought

...ts and drought having destroyed crops and stripped grazing land for six million people across West Africa, small farmers have started selling livestock cheaply and eating the seed corn they should plant during next month's expected rains, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs...

Retinal scans eyed for New Mexico show cattle

...tags alone on several hundred cattle on a communal grazing allotment in the Valles Caldera, an 89,000-acre area in the Jemez Mountains. Communal grazing allotments are typically seasonal, running from May to October. "We wanted to show the small-scale ...

Cattle grazing may help rather than hurt endangered species

...st issue of Conservation Biology finds that cattle grazing plays an important role in maintaining wetland hab...for some endangered species. Removing cattle from grazing lands in the Central Valley of California could, inadvertently, degrade the vernal pool habitat of f...

New evidence questions the simple link between prion proteins and madcow disease

...ned a high level of PrP. "Think about it ?a sheep grazing in a field is not naturally exposed to highly infected brain and could only pick up a tiny amount of PrP from other tissues. This will then be exposed to 48 hours or more digestion before it arrives in the gut, and our experiments show that after t...

How marine reserves are giving coral reefs a helping hand

...ef which allows new corals to settle and grow.This grazing process is essential to the health of the system."...most reserves are unlikely to reduce the amount of grazing even afterthe number of predators rises." Peter added, "Diving in the Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park ...

Report shows deforestation threatens Brazil's Pantanal

Deforestation from increased grazing and agriculture has destroyed 17 percent of the na...rs in Brazil. Overall, opening the region to more grazing and agriculture, including the transformation of native pasture to farmland, has destroyed almost 45...

Value of services performed by insects tops $57 billion in US

...ontrol, pollinate $3 billion in crops and clean up grazing lands, which saves ranchers some $380 million a year. And these are "very conservative" estimates that probably represent only a fraction of the true value, reports Losey, associate professor of entomology at Cornell. This analysis of the economic ...

K-Staters design and build a low-cost remote sensing tool for environmental studies

... we're interested in how management decisions like grazing and burning, coupled with year-to-year weather variations, impact the movement of carbon dioxide between the surface and the atmosphere," Ham said. "Through these networks we're trying to get a good understanding of all the major ecosystems in the w...

More than drought affecting wheat yields

...idespread cases can reduce yields enough that only grazing or making silage from the crop can salvage any income. In many cases, the crop is "zeroed out" by insurance companies and plowed up. This year's virus started early because of last year's crop, he said. A hail storm across much of the region shortl...

Cougar predation key to ecosystem health

...ects in influencing the population sizes of native grazing animals such as deer and elk ?they also have indir...knowledge the potentially enormous impact of these grazing animals on other ecosystem processes, scientists say. This could open the way to new management opt...

A green way to slag off bunnies

...lag-treated plants were compared to normal plants, grazing damage fell by more than half. Slag ?or calcium silicate ?a plentiful byproduct of blast furnaces, is dirt-cheap and environmentally friendly. What’s more, it’s already known to act as an effective fertilizer in rice paddies and sugar cane fields....

A buffet for early human relatives

...le in addition to seeds, roots, tubers and perhaps grazing animals. "By analyzing tooth enamel, we found that they ate lots of different things, and what they ate changed during the year," says University of Utah geology doctoral student Ben Passey, a coauthor of the study in the Friday, Nov. 10 issue of th...

Monitoring poisons in the environment -- a woolly matter

...shoulder area of rare and heritage breeds of sheep grazing on hills in the Lake District and North Wales. The wool was then washed to ensure that only metabolised deposits of heavy metals were detected, rather than anything that had stuck to the outside of the wool. Copper and lead concentrations were then d...

Parasites' impact goes beyond host to affect ecosystem

The good news, if you’re grazing normally on algae in the rocky intertidal zone of the North Atlantic, is that you may not be infected by a parasite. But the better news is, according to new research from the University of New Hampshire, that you might have more to eat if plenty of ...

Amphibians in losing race with environmental change

...ds due to use of modern fertilizers and waste from grazing animals has led to higher rates of parasite infections, and chemical contamination of aquatic systems is also more common. Many animal species lay their eggs communally or congregate socially, often to avoid predation or improve resource use. Bu...

Antarctic icebergs -- Hotspots of ocean life

...es in phytoplankton community composition to favor grazing as a key biological process involved in carbon sequestration around free-floating icebergs,” said oceanographer Maria Vernet from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, one of the members of the research team. “We used a small, remo...

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