Cricket's finicky mating behavior boosts biodiversity
Biologists at Lehigh University and the University of Maryland have identified a cricket living in Hawaii's forests as the world's fastest-evolving invertebrate. Females in the Laupala genus detect tiny differenc...Biodiversity hotspots identify conservation priorities
The new book Hotspots Revisited identifies 34 regions worldwide where 75 percent of the planet's most threatened mammals, birds, and amphibians survive within habitat covering just 2.3 percent of the Earth's surface (roughly equivalent to the combined areas of the five largest U.S. states). This habitat originally covered 15.7 percent of the Earth's surface, an area equivalent in size to Russia a...Acid water in East Java threatens biodiversity and local welfare
She went to investigate the local ecology. Yet during her field work on East Java, Dutch biologist Ansje Lohr became increasingly involved with the local residents, whose harvests failed and whose health was deteriorating due to extremely acidified and polluted river water. Lohr has recently received a second grant to help the Javanese population. Lohr's Ph.D. study was part of a larger pr...Overfishing in inland waters reduces biodiversity and threatens health
Systematic overfishing of fresh waters occurs worldwide but is largely unrecognized because of weak reporting and because other pressures can obscure fishery declines, according to an article in the December 2005 issue of BioScience. Although the status of inland waters and their fish species should be of broad concern, threats to freshwater fisheries and associated biodiversity have recei...Biodiversity key to sustainable biofuel according to University of Minn. researcher's findings
Ecosystems containing many different plant species are not only more productive, they are also better able to withstand and recover from climate extremes, pests and disease over long periods of time. These findings, published in the June 1 issue of Nature, are the culmination of 12 years of experiments conducted by David Tilman, Regents Professor of Ecology at the University of Minnesota,...Biodiversity threatened as forests become 'islands' of green, UW professor says
America's national forests are beginning to resemble "islands" of green wilderness, increasingly trapped by an expanding sea of new houses, a UW-Madison forestry researcher reports at the 90th annual Ecological Society of America (ESA) meeting in Montreal, Canada. The widening circle of development around forests such as the Cleveland National Forest in Southern California is serving to...Southern states join hands to protect biodiversity
Forests ministers of the four southern states have decided to form a cell for better cooperation to protect and preserve the biodiversity //of their rich forests. "We have decided to form protocols for joint action raids and protection camps among the southern states," Karnataka Forest Minister C. Chennigapa told reporters here Saturday after the conclusion of a two-day conference of...