Latest Biogeography Stories
Scientists are gaining a deeper understanding of marine mammal travel patterns using a large-scale tracking network. A new PLoS collection, created in conjunction with the Pacific Ocean Shelf Tracking (POST) Program and the Census of Marine Life (CoML), will highlight the variety of ways scientists are using this large POST network to trace marine animal movement in the Northeast Pacific Ocean. The PLoS POST Collection launches on August 31st.POST provides a tool for researchers from...
New research from the University of Sheffield has discovered that the deep open ocean, by far the largest habitat for life on Earth, is currently the most under-explored area of the sea, and the one we know least about.The research, which was published August 1, 2010 in the journal PLoS ONE, has mapped the distribution of marine species records and found that most of our knowledge of marine biodiversity comes from the shallow waters or the ocean floor, rather than the deep pelagic ocean- the...
The waters surrounding Australia and Japan are home to the greatest variety of aquatic lifeforms, and crustaceans such as crabs, lobsters, crayfish and shrimp are the most common species in the world's seas, according to the findings of the Census of Marine Life.The information, which was disclosed in a series of articles published Monday in the open access journal PLoS ONE, comes from a decade-long effort by more than 360 scientists to catalog species in 25 different regions, ranging from...
New study suggests primary role of ocean temperature in the distribution of marine biodiversity, documents significant overlap between areas of high human impact and diversity hotspotsIn an unprecedented effort that will be published online on the 28th of July by the international journal Nature, a team of scientists mapped and analyzed global biodiversity patterns for over 11,000 marine species ranging from tiny zooplankton to sharks and whales. The researchers found striking similarities...
TAU biologist refutes conventional thinking on evolutionLong before TV's campy Fantasy Island, the isolation of island communities has touched an exotic and magical core in us. Darwin's fascination with the Galapagos island chain and the evolution of its plant and animal life is just one example.Think of the extensive lore surrounding island-bred creatures like Komodo dragons, dwarf elephants, and Hobbit-sized humans. Conventional wisdom has it that they "” and a horde of monster-sized...
Will Help Determine Places with Habitat to Support WildlifeThe most detailed national vegetation U.S. land-cover map to date was released yesterday by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). The map will enable conservation professionals to identify places in the country with sufficient habitat to support wildlife.The map, produced by the USGS Gap Analysis Program (GAP), can be viewed online and downloaded for free. "These data are critical for determining the status of biodiversity, as baseline...
North America's nearly 2,000 marine protected areas represent an unprecedented effort to protect the continent's fragile marine environments and are found throughout the marine ecoregions that encircle our continent.The latest map from the North American Environmental Atlas"”coordinated by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC)"”for the first time brings together information about all types of marine protected areas in Canada, Mexico and the United States, offering details...
Vegetation around the world is on the move, and climate change is the culprit, according to a new analysis of global vegetation shifts led by a University of California, Berkeley, ecologist in collaboration with researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service.In a paper published today in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography, researchers present evidence that over the past century, vegetation has been gradually moving toward the poles and up mountain slopes, where...
Michigan State University scientists have developed a pioneering, comprehensive approach that makes conserving and managing freshwater lakes, streams and wetlands more integrated and effective."We call our approach landscape limnology," said Patricia Soranno, MSU associate professor of fisheries and wildlife. "It's a new way to study freshwater that considers all freshwaters together "“ lakes, rivers and wetlands "“ as they interact with one another and with natural and...
"Blindsnakes are not very pretty, are rarely noticed, and are often mistaken for earthworms," admits Blair Hedges, professor of biology at Penn State University. "Nonetheless, they tell a very interesting evolutionary story." Hedges and Nicolas Vidal, of the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, are co-leaders of the team that discovered that blindsnakes are one of the few groups of organisms that inhabited Madagascar when it broke from India about 100 million...
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...
