Volcanoes Responsible For Coral Reef Diversity
Michael Harper for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online A new study claims earthquakes and volcanoes are responsible for the diverse nature of the ocean’s coral reefs. With this information, scientists are now becoming even more worried...
Latest Ecosystems Stories
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online In the South Pacific, three types of coral reef island formations have fascinated geologists for ages. The coral of Tahiti forms a “fringing” reef, with a shelf growing close to the island’s shore. In Bora Bora, the “barrier” reefs are separated from the main island by a calm lagoon. Manuae represents the last type, an “atoll,” which appears as a ring of coral enclosing a lagoon with no island at the center. The...
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Whether it’s Manhattan’s Central Park or the Emerald Necklace in Boston, Frederick Law Olmstead understood the value that forested areas bring to a city. However, the father of American landscape architecture was probably unaware of the billions of dollars these forests contribute in the form of carbon storage and sequestration. According to a new study in the journal Environmental Pollution, urban trees store a total of over...
Coral ecosystems support around 500,000,000 people, but are severely threatened; the Coralbots team aim to revolutionize how such threats are tackled. Their Kickstarter campaign (closing May 26th) seeks individuals and corporations who wish to make a lasting positive impact on the marine environment, offering ways for individuals, schools and corporations to be directly involved. EDINBURGH, Scotland, May 7, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- The ocean covers over 70% of the planet, but is...
Coral reefs support around half a billion people, but are severely threatened; the Coralbots team plan to revolutionize how such threats are tackled, by using teams of autonomous underwater robots. The Coralbots Kickstarter campaign (closing May 26th) is reaching out to individuals and corporations who wish to make a lasting positive impact on the marine environment, and now offering ways for backers to be directly involved in the project. Edinburgh, UK (PRWEB) May 04, 2013 The ocean is...
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online When corals become stressed, they expel their symbiotic algae companions in a process known as “bleaching.” Corals can survive the bleaching, but it leaves them highly vulnerable and often results in die-off. As a changing climate threatens to bleach the corals of the world’s oceans on a massive scale, a team of researchers from Northwestern University has found that some corals facilitate bleaching through the light-scattering...
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem [ Watch the Video Pulsating Coral In The Gulf Of Eilat ] Scientists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have discovered why Heteroxenia corals pulsate. Their work, which resolves an old scientific mystery, appears in the current issue of PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the US). One of the most fascinating and spectacular sights in the coral reef of Eilat is the perpetual...
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online Fine particles in the air resulting from burning coal or volcanic eruptions can negatively affect coral growth, a team of climate scientists and coral ecologists from the UK, Australia and Panama has discovered. The study, which appears in this week’s edition of the journal Nature Geoscience, found that coral reefs respond to changes in the concentration of atmospheric pollution. Those particulates can shade the corals from...
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online The planting and expansion of forests not only allows for the trapping of carbon in the trees themselves, it also fosters carbon absorption in the soil where the trees are rooted. Previous studies have shown that more carbon is sequestered in forest soils that in the trees, but according to new research in the Soil Science Society of America Journal, newly forested lands show a marked increase in carbon sequestration as the...
Cell Press Communities that act locally to limit their fish catches will reap the rewards of their action, as will their neighbors. That's the conclusion of a study reported on March 28 in the Cell Press journal Current Biology of the highly sought-after fish known as squaretail coral grouper living in five community-owned reef systems in Papua New Guinea. "We found that many larvae that were produced by the managed adults return to that same fish population, which means that the same...
A new forum paper suggests bridging two important fields of ecological research It is increasingly recognized that protected areas alone are not sufficient for successful biodiversity conservation, and that management of production areas (e.g. forestry and agricultural land) plays a crucial role in that respect. Retention forestry and agroforestry are two land management systems aiming to reconcile the production of human goods with biodiversity conservation. The retention forestry...
Latest Ecosystems Reference Libraries
Desert greening is made up of any number of methods used to revitalize deserts. So far, only arid and semi-arid desert are meant when using this expression. The icy deserts and other types are considered to be unsuitable. The different methods include landscaping methods to reduce evaporation, erosion, consolidation of topsoil, temperature, sandstorms and more, permaculture in general, planting trees, regeneration of salty, polluted, or degenerated soils, floodwater retention and...
Rainforests are forests that are characterized by high levels of rainfall, with definitions based on a minimum usual annual rainfall of about 68 to 78 inches. The monsoon trough, or otherwise known as the intertropical convergence zone, holds an important role in producing the climatic conditions that are essential for the Earth’s tropical rainforests. About 40 to 75 percent of all biotic species are native to the rainforests. It’s been estimated that there might be many millions of...
The Amazon Rainforest (known as Floresta Amazônica or Amazônia in Portuguese, and Selva Amazónica or Amazonia in Spanish), also known as Amazonia, or the Amazon Jungle, is a moist broadleaf forest that covers almost all of the Amazon Basin in South America. The basin consists of 1.7 billion acres, of which 1.4 billion acres is rainforest. This rainforest covers nine nations (Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana). Brazil contains...
Deforestation is the act or process of removing trees from forested lands by cutting or burning. There are many reasons for deforestation. Logs are sold as a commodity and cleared lands can be used for pastures and human settlements. The damage caused by deforestation, however, can be great. If land is not somewhat reforested it can cause damage to habitats for wildlife and other plant life, affect the aridity of the region, and possibly encourage degradation into wasteland. Due to negligent...
