The decline of species and their habitats may not just make nature less interesting. New research, published in Bioscience, suggests it may also put you at greater risk for catching some exotic new disease. For the first time, habitat destruction and biodiversity loss have been linked to an increase in the incidence and distribution of […]
A new study in the journal Ecology shows that the carcasses of moose killed by wolves enrich the soil in “hot spots” of forest fertility around the kills, causing rapid microbial and fungal growth that provide increased nutrients for plants in the area. The unexpected finding illuminates another contribution large predators make to the ecosystem […]
Mismanagement and growing needs for water are causing freshwater ecosystems to collapse, making freshwater species the most threatened on Earth with extinction rates 4 to 6 times higher than their terrestrial and marine cousins, say scientists at the DIVERSITAS 2nd Open Science Conference, in Cape Town, South Africa. Klement Tockner, of the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater […]
Under pressure from a fungal disease that has been labeled an “extinction filter” by researchers, frog communities in South America are undergoing “a vast homogenization” that is leaving behind impoverished communities that increasingly resemble one another. “We’re witnessing the McDonaldization of the frog communities,” says Kevin G. Smith, from Washington University in St. Louis. The […]
A new study in the journal Conservation Biology shows that more than 80 percent of the world’s major armed conflicts from 1950-2000 occurred in regions identified as the most biologically diverse and threatened places on Earth. The study compared major conflict zones with the Earth’s 34 biodiversity hotspots identified by Conservation International (CI). The hotspots […]
Hydrology may be more important for predicting biodiversity than biology, say an international group of scientists whose study in the latest issue of Nature challenges current thinking about biodiversity and opens up new avenues for predicting how climate change or human activity may affect biodiversity patterns. Their new method for predicting biodiversity, described by them […]
A new analysis suggests that as plant species around the world go extinct, natural habitats become less productive and contain fewer total plants – a situation that could ultimately compromise important benefits that humans get from nature. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists from the University of California, Santa Barbara, […]
A new study in this week’s issue of Science reveals how free-floating icebergs are a haven for a startling array of creatures. The researchers behind the study say that these floating islands of ice have a major impact on the ecology of the ocean around them, with thriving communities of seabirds above and a web […]
Somewhat counter-intuitively, experiments conducted by University of Minnesota (UM) researchers have shown that a plentiful supply of water and nutrients actually restrictsecosystem biodiversity. Carried out on grassland plots, the experiments revealed that too much of a good thing (nutrients or water) was shown to decrease the diversity of most species, while increasing the productivity of […]
A new meta-study in Nature has analyzed more than 100 previous species diversity studies and come to the conclusion that accelerating rates of species extinction will pose substantial problems for humanity in the near future. The analysis, by Bradley J. Cardinale, from the University of California, Santa Barbara, shows that biodiversity is intrinsically linked to […]
