New, groundbreaking research shows how, at a local scale, agricultural research and development led to improved crop varieties that resulted in global benefits to the environment and food system sustainability. The Purdue University study appears in the latest issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “At the global level, we see a reduction…
As grasslands get abandoned, controlled burning is discussed as a labor-saving method of keeping forests at bay. A Kobe University research team found that this method results in higher biodiversity and a higher prevalence of endangered plant species in some grasslands compared to others, depending on what soils they grow on. Humans have been keeping…
In the most comprehensive global analysis of genetic diversity ever undertaken, an international team of scientists has found that the genetic diversity is being lost across the globe but that conservation efforts are helping to safeguard species. The landmark study, published in the pre-eminent scientific journal Nature, was led by Associate Professor Catherine Grueber from…
Back in 2016, one of us (Silviu Petrovan) was asked to identify a live frog found in a shipment of roses in Sheffield, England. It certainly wasn’t any species found in Europe: Silviu thought he had been pranked. But with help from Ecuadorian and Colombian scientists, he was soon able to identify it as a…
For generations, Lars Miguel Utsi’s family has lived in the small town of Jokkmokk in northern Sweden, where reindeer husbandry is a way of life. In a part of the world where most of us would see just an endless expanse of white snow, Utsi perceives the landscape in intricate detail, recognizing subtle features of…
Insights from the First Global Appraisal of Life Below the Earth’s Surface Which microbes thrive below us in darkness – in gold mines, in aquifers, in deep boreholes in the seafloor – and how do they compare to the microbiomes that envelop the Earth’s surfaces, on land and sea? The first global study to embrace…
Oxford University ecologists have co-devised a new framework to classify how biodiversity credit operators define what a unit of nature is. The new analysis demonstrates the challenges involved with devising a biodiversity credit market to fund nature recovery, and the risks of relying too heavily on ‘offsetting.’ We can’t avoid all impacts of human activity…
“If I had the support of the government, I would never have stopped fishing,” says Yiorgos Charalambous, a Cypriot from a fishing family who left the sea in 2015 when he needed more money to support his family. Although he also knitted nets for the fishermen, he has had to look for a second job…
New research has revealed less than a quarter of the remaining tropical rainforests around the globe can safeguard thousands of threatened species from extinction. The research, co-authored by The University of Queensland’s Professor James Watson, evaluated the global availability of structurally intact, minimally disturbed tropical rainforests for more than 16,000 species of mammals, birds, reptiles,…
Connectivity and maintenance measures support wild bees in limestone quarries A research team at the University of Göttingen, Germany’s Nature And Biodiversity Conservation Union (NABU) in Rhede, and the Thünen Institute in Braunschweig has investigated the importance of limestone quarries for wild bee conservation. Diverse landscapes with good connectivity between quarries and calcareous grasslands proved…