Satyrodes appalachia. Image #1115080 at Forestry Images, licensed under Creative Commons.
A friend told me yesterday of a research project she was part of while working in the US. The project looked at the behaviour of a particular wetlands butterfly, Satyrodes appalachia (Appalachian brown), in habitats unlike their own, and was intended as a study of how animals may disperse through unconnected habitat fragments.
(If you’re interested, you can find the Continue reading
“Great Wave Off Kanagawa” by Katsushika Hokusai. Image in public domain.
John Cook, Climate Communications Research Fellow at the University of Queensland and writer/editor of the blog Skeptical Science, has jointly published a paper in Environmental Research Letters entitled Quantifying The Consensus On Anthropogenic Global Warming In The Scientific Literature. As you might expect, the results show an overwhelming agreement that climate change is happening, and it’s largely caused by Continue reading
Honeybees grooming by Alex Ford, Victoria, age 17
The European Union has recently decided to ban three of the world’s most widely used pesticides for 2 years, as they are linked to colony collapse disorder in bees. It wasn’t a unanimous decision, or even enough countries to achieve the weighted majority needed to ban the pesticides outright, which is why the Continue reading
Palau. Image by LuxTonnerre, licensed under Creative Commons.
Guest post written by Craig Costion
Today we use the term “endangered species” to raise awareness about species that are threatened with extinction. The use of the term ‘endangered species’, however, implies that the species has passed a strict set of criteria that assesses the number of individuals or the area occupied by individuals of that species. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) regularly maintains and updates which species fall into this category (along with other classifications such as vulnerable and extinct in the wild) as part of its Red List.
When most people think of endangered species they Continue reading
The endangered golden bandicoot. Image (cropped) by Amareeta Kelly, licenced under Creative Commons.
I sometimes get asked where the value is in biodiversity: you can’t eat it, drink it, or sell it, so what’s the good of it? Well, in a previous post I talked about some of the reasons why we need it, but that’s not the whole answer by any means. It’s also difficult to convince governments or other large groups of humans that maintenance of biodiversity is extremely important: there are so many current problems all shrieking for attention that Continue reading
European University Institute. Licensed under Creative Commons.
Matt Wright-Simon from Ecocreative, who helped us with our Biodiversity Brief newsletter, has written an interesting article about sustainability in universities.
It seems that students are increasingly considering level of sustainability when choosing a university, in addition to other aspects such as academic performance and on- and off-campus Continue reading
Tiger quoll, a nocturnal apex predator. Image by Arnd Bergmann, licensed under Creative Commons 2.0.
Ever wondered how ecologists gather information about the behaviour of animals in the wild? If you guessed long uncomfortable hours sitting motionless for months on end in all sorts of weather, waiting for an animal to wander by so the ecologist can observe it, you’d be right.
This is a bit of a problem for those studying animals, particularly nocturnal animals: since humans can’t see well at night, simply finding nocturnal animals is hard enough, much less observing their Continue reading
