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Tag: "vegetation" at biology news

Deep-rooted plants have much greater impact on climate than experts thought

... global climate change recognize the importance of vegetation in removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and in local cooling through transpiration, they have assumed a simple model of plants sucking water out of the soil and spewing water vapor into the atmosphere. The new study in the Amazonian forest sh...

Amazon rainforest greens up in the dry season

...e finding surprised the researchers. "Most of the vegetation around the world follows a general pattern in which plants get green and lush during the rainy season and then during the dry season, leaves fall because there's not enough water in the soil to support plant growth," said lead researcher Alfredo R. H...

Ancient DNA provides clues to the evolution of social behavior

...rows except for brief forays to collect the grassy vegetation on which they feed. When they do leave their colonies, the rodents often make a tasty meal for prowling owls. For thousands of years, these owls have roosted in two caves near the Chilean border and regurgitated pellets of indigestible fur, bones and...

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

...orest losses within major watersheds, eco-regions, vegetation types, and the geographic ranges of 382 mammal species, two extreme scenarios were developed, encompassing the likely range of future trajectories of deforestation through 2050. The first of the two futures discussed is a business-as-usual scenario i...

Predators keep the world green, ecologists find

...us landscape. Terborgh and his team monitored the vegetation at 14 sites of differing size. Nine of the sites w... quite radically. And there's no question that the vegetation on these islands is just in a state of collapse." A drought that began in 2001 and reached extreme ...

Tropical Atlantic cooling and African deforestation correlate to drought, report scientists

...ate change. Tropical ocean temperatures and land vegetation have an important effect on African monsoon system...rica. Weldeab says that man's reduction of inland vegetation cover through deforestation and overgrazing in equatorial Africa and increases in global temperature...

Sahara's edge studied from ground, air and space to improve water management

...Meanwhile ground teams precisely documented ground vegetation and terrain at sampling sites within these test ar...Munich, which gathers additional environmental and vegetation information by observing across dozens of spectral bands invisible to the human eye. "The hyperspe...

Underlying cause of massive pinyon pine die-off revealed

...earchers confirmed the massive regional dieback of vegetation through both aerial surveys and analysis of satell...odlands. "Scientists are concerned about how fast vegetation will respond to climate change, but we don't have many examples to test our ideas," Breshears said. ...

'Acid rain' and forest mass: Another perspective

... return of nutrients (amount of nutrients that the vegetation gives back to the soil together with the litterfall and foliar excretion) and a drop in their retranslocation (reabsorption of nutritive elements). Thus, the efficiency in the use of cations was affected by the atmospheric deposition of contaminants....

Pulp mill devastates swans' sanctuary in Chile

...ed to a massive die off of luchecillo, the aquatic vegetation that was the swans' main food source. "It was heart-rending. We talked to people in Valdivia who said they saw emaciated swans fall from the sky, landing on rooftops and cars," Curtis said. "They were so weak they were unable to carry their own wei...

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

...g through the trees can pull down large amounts of vegetation when a tree falls. The forest also becomes drier and more flammable, as the shady canopy is thinned. "Logged forests are areas of extraordinary damage," Asner said. "A tree crown can be 25 meters. When you knock down a tree it causes a lot of damage...

Chernobyl: The true scale of the accident

...ontamination? Following the accident, animals and vegetation in forest and mountain areas had high absorption of radiocaesium, with persistent high levels in mushrooms, berries and game. Because exposure from agricultural products has declined, the relative importance of exposure from forest products has incre...

Study shows big game hunters, not climate change, killed off sloths

... didn't happen after serious changes in climate or vegetation ?and that the first appearance of humans must have been the decisive factor." The fossil record shows the people who arrived in North America were making sophisticated tools out of stone, bone and ivory, Steadman said. These "big-game hunters" had a...

Did humans cause ecosystem collapse in ancient Australia?

...Based on the evidence, human-induced change in the vegetation is the best fit to explain what happened at that critical juncture." ...

Toxic flood lifts lid on common urban pollution problem

...ganisms can help filter the contaminants. Planting vegetation and especially trees also creates aesthetically pleasing buffer zones, providing storm water flooding control and other benefits. Finally, cities can use high-tech street sweeping equipment that is very effective at capturing pavement contaminants. ...

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

...h focused on devil's gardens, mysterious tracts of vegetation that randomly appear in the Amazonian rainforest. "Devil's gardens are large stands of trees in the Amazonian rainforest that consist almost entirely of a single species, Duroia hirsuta, and, according to local legend, are cultivated by an evil fore...

Lands surface change on Alaska tundra creating longer, warmer summers in Arctic

... to slowly migrate northward. The increasing woody vegetation is further warming the near-surface atmosphere by ...er than reflecting incoming solar radiation. "The vegetation change is pretty dramatic," Epstein said. "The tundra is getting greener, and there is a noticeable ...

York scientists warn of dramatic impact of climate change on Africa

...g that dramatic changes may soon occur in Africa's vegetation in response to global warming. They believe the effect may be on a similar scale to the climatic disruption in the last Ice Age and the African forest decline 2,500 years ago. Scientists in the University's Environment Department studied the likely...

MERIS monitoring tracks planetary photosynthesis levels

...rocessed results shown here indicate a decrease in vegetation activity against the average for Spain and Portuga... of any long-term continental-scale perspective on vegetation growth. Forget fossil fuels and nuclear plants: on a global scale solar power is the dominant sour...

Woods Hole Research Center plans controlled burn in Amazon rainforest

...use their eventual replacement by fire-prone scrub vegetation through a process call "savannization." This is the second phase of this work, the world's largest tropical fire experiment. One square kilometer was already burned in August 2004. This year, from mid-August to early September, one half square kilom...

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