Latest Biogeography Stories
OTTAWA, May 17, 2013 /CNW/ - Media are invited to join a moderated teleconference on Tuesday, May 21 at 12:00 pm Eastern Daylight Time. The Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement (CBFA), signed by seven leading environmental organizations and 19 member companies of the Forest Products Association of Canada (FPAC), applies to 72 million hectares of public forests licensed to FPAC members. The Agreement, when fully implemented, will conserve significant areas of Canada's vast Boreal...
More carbon dioxide is released from residential lawns than corn fields according to a new study. And much of the difference can likely be attributed to soil temperature. The data, from researchers at Elizabethtown College, suggest that urban heat islands may be working at smaller scales than previously thought. These findings provide a better understanding of the changes that occur when agricultural lands undergo development and urbanization to support growing urban populations. David...
A new global-scale modeling study that takes into account nitrogen – a key nutrient for plants – estimates that carbon emissions from human activities on land were 40 percent higher in the 1990s than in studies that did not account for nitrogen. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Bristol Cabot Institute published their findings in the journal Global Change Biology. The findings will be a part of the upcoming Fifth Assessment Report from...
WASHINGTON, March 27, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- The World Cocoa Foundation (WCF) and Swiss chocolate maker Lindt & Sprungli are providing a financial gift to the U.S. Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service's Sustainable Perennial Crops Laboratory (SPCL) to support genetics research on fine-flavor cocoa varieties found in Ecuador. The research may help ensure long term supply of cocoa and chocolate products that contain prized flavor attributes. WCF President Bill...
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Despite widespread use of fertilizers and nitrogen emissions by industrial processes, the amount of atmospheric nitrogen has remained consistent over the past 500 years, according to a new study in Nature. "People have been really interested in nitrogen in current times because it's a major pollutant," said study co-author Kendra McLauchlan, an assistant professor of geography at Kansas State University. "Humans are producing a lot...
Around half of Cambodia's tropical flooded grasslands have been lost in just 10 years according to new research from the University of East Anglia. The seasonally flooded grasslands around the Tonle Sap, Southeast Asia’s largest freshwater lake, are of great importance for biodiversity and a refuge for 11 globally-threatened bird species. They are also a vital fishing, grazing, and traditional rice farming resource for around 1.1 million people. Research published today in the journal...
Pensoft Publishers A revision of the genus Copa offers a peculiar insight into spider biogeography in the Afrotropical Region The species from the genus Copa are very common spiders found in the leaf litter of various habitats. Being predominantly ground-living, they occur widely in savanna woodlands but also occasionally in forests, where they are well camouflaged. They usually share the litter microhabitats with several other species of the family Corinnidae. The spiders from this...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The Isthmus of Panama uplifted 2.6 million years ago to form a land bridge connecting North and South America. This bridge has long been thought to be the crucial step in the interchange of animals between the Americas. Armadillos and giant sloths moved up into North America and ancient relatives of modern horses, rabbits, foxes, pigs, cats, dogs and elephants moved down into South America. A new study from the University of Florida...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Facing relentless human encroachment, some endangered primates and large cats will seek sanctuary in the sultry thickets of mangrove and peat swamp forests. These are not inviting places. Instead they are harsh coastal biomes with thick vegetation such as clusters of salt-loving mangrove trees and highly acidic peat soil composed of the waterlogged remains of partially decomposed leaves and wood. Because of these conditions, swamp...
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online As wireless technology progresses, biologists are finding new ways to harness these advancements and further their research in the process. At the annual meeting of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston this Sunday, Stanford marine sciences professor Barbara Block discussed a new method for “biologging” the activities of various sea creatures using wireless technology. Using an innovative...
Latest Biogeography Reference Libraries
The Great Basin shrub steppe ecoregion, located within the Deserts and xeric shrublands Biome, incorporates a variety of xeric shrub-steppe sub-ecoregions in the area of the Great Basin in the Western United States. It’s within the North American Desert area, and includes a great deal of Nevada, northeastern and eastern California east of the Sierra Nevada and Cascade Range rain shadows, and some parts of Utah and Idaho. The Great Basin Desert and semi-arid non-desert xeric shrubland...
The Mulga Lands are an interim Australian bioregion out of eastern Australia made up of dry and sandy plains that are scattered with mulga trees. Located in inland New South Wales and Queensland these are level plains with some low hills and infertile sandy soil with a cover of shrubs and grasses with mulga and eucalyptus trees. The region incorporates regions of wetland, the majority of which are only seasonally flooded, these include Lake Numalla and Lake Wyara, the Currawinya Lakes,...
Taiga, or otherwise known as boreal forest, is a biome that is characterized by coniferous forests made up mostly of spruces, larches, and pines. The taiga is the world’s largest terrestrial biome. In North America, it covers most of inland Canada and Alaska as well as portions of the extreme northern continental United States and is known as the Northwoods. It covers most of Sweden, Finland, much of Norway, lowland/coastal areas of Iceland, much of Russia, northern Kazakhstan, northern...
The Central tall grasslands are a prairie ecoregion of the Midwestern United States, a portion of the North American Great Plains. It covers a large region of southern Minnesota, most of Iowa, and a small portion of eastern South Dakota and a narrow strip going through eastern Nebraska and northeastern Kansas. The rainfall here is 1,000 millimeters per year, which is higher than most of the Great Plains. The Northern tall grasslands are located to the north and have fewer and different...
The Central and Southern mixed grasslands are a prairie ecoregion of the central United States, a portion of the North American Great Plains. This is a vast grassland area with few trees running north to south from central Nebraska through central Kansas and western Oklahoma to north central Texas, covering about 282,000 square kilometers. This is a transition zone between the Central tall grasslands and Central forest-grasslands transition ecoregions towards the east and the Western short...
