Latest Biogeography Stories
TORONTO, ONTARIO--(Marketwire - June 30, 2008) - Caledonia Mining Corporation ("Caledonia") (TSX:CAL)(OTCBB:CALVF)(AIM:CMCL) is pleased to announce the signing of an agreement with Mitsubishi Corporation ("MC") on the Rooipoort & Mapochsgronde ("Mapochs") platinum exploration projects in South Africa. The agreement is subject to certain conditions being satisfied within three months from the signature date. Caledonia is confident that these conditions will be satisfied. Under the terms of...
World Register of Marine Species inaugurated with first 122,500 validated names; over 56,000 aliases for ocean species identifiedCensus of Marine Life-affiliated scientists consolidating world databases of ocean organisms have demoted to alias status almost one-third of all names culled from 34 regional and highly specialized inventories.The new World Register of Marine Species contains about 122,500 validated marine species names (experts having recognized and tidied up some 56,400 aliases...
By McKenney, Daniel W Pedlar, John H; Lawrence, Kevin; Campbell, Kathy; Hutchinson, Michael F Currently predicted change in climate could strongly affect plant distributions during the next century. Here we determine the present- day climatic niches for 130 North American tree species. We then locate the climatic conditions of these niches on maps of predicted future climate, indicating where each species could potentially occur by the end of the century. A major unknown in this work is the...
Like pieces in a giant jigsaw puzzle, continents have split, drifted and merged again many times throughout Earth's history, but geologists haven't understood the mechanism behind the moves. A new study now offers evidence that continents sometimes break along preexisting lines of weakness created when small chunks of land attach to a larger continent. The paper - the cover story in the latest issue of Geology, the journal of the Geological Society of America - is the first to provide an...
By Ed Stoddard JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Alan Paton is dead but a new side of the writer famed as a rare white South African voice against apartheid has come to life in his previously unpublished account of a madcap search for a fabled desert city. "Lost City of the Kalahari" tells the tale of a 1956 expedition to a remote corner of the Kalahari desert in present-day Botswana to find the ruins of a mythical lost city. Acclaimed for the stirring anti-racist novel "Cry, the Beloved...
By Jude Webber NAZCA, Peru (Reuters) - A tiny, hand-painted sign mounted on a flimsy barbed wire fence warns visitors to Peru's Nazca lines: "No entry. Area off-limits." It's not much of a deterrent. The latest threat to the vast U.N. World Heritage site where the enigmatic shapes and lines, stylized figures of birds and animals were etched in the desert some 2,000 years ago, is a camp of around 30 shacks that appeared in August. The rudimentary straw-matting huts are pitched in the dry...
Invasive species, wildlife disease, and the effect of fire on ecosystems are among the topics that scientists of the U.S. Geological Survey will discuss as they meet with other leading ecological scientists, educators, and policy-makers from around the globe at the 90th Ecological Society of America meeting in Montreal, Aug. 7-12. The meeting theme is "Ecology at Multiple Scales." All talks unless otherwise indicated, are at the Palais des congrès de Montréal. Tuesday, Aug....
How fast a lineage divides may explain why some areas contain more species than others. The Cape of South Africa is one of the most floristically diverse regions on Earth and many species are found nowhere else. There are two broad explanations for high species richness in the Cape: either the Cape represents an old, relatively undisturbed area that has accumulated species richness gradually over time or the recent onset of its Mediterranean-type climate triggered rapid diversification. In a...
A historic expedition of Census of Marine Life explorers to the planet's most northern reaches has revealed a surprising density and diversity of Arctic Ocean creatures, some believed new to science.The 30-day Ocean Explorer expedition (www.oceanexplorer.noaa.gov), mounted by the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration aboard the US Coast Guard Ship Healy, includes 24 scientists, 11 of them engaged in the Census of Marine Life, an unprecedented 10-year global collaboration to...
In their article in the July 2005 issue of The American Naturalist, Yssa D. DeWoody, Zhilan Feng, and Robert K. Swihart (Purdue University) model species' occupancy within a patchy dynamic landscape. They derive deterministic persistence thresholds which depend jointly upon the spatial and temporal structure of the landscape, reinforcing the importance of spatio-temporal connectivity. This model has the potential to predict various consequences of different land-use strategies and thus serve...
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...
