‘Stockbroker’s Bible’ Just Told Oil Industry To Accept Its Demise
Restoring the Everglades will benefit both humans and nature
Restoring the Everglades will benefit both humans and nature
The park and the wider Everglades ecosystem have suffered immense ecological damage from years of overdrainage to prevent flooding and promote development.
via Restoring the Everglades will benefit both humans and nature.
More Than A Third Of The Coral Is Dead In Parts Of The Great Barrier Reef
Beavers add water to dry landscape
Alastair Bland writes for Water Deeply:
On California’s central coast, a region that usually receives drenching rainfall or fog for most of the year, some forests are now as arid as a desert. Streams that once ran at least at a trickle through summer have vanished in the ongoing drought, and environmentalists and fishermen fear that local salmon will disappear if climate conditions don’t improve.
The landscape desperately needs rain.
It could also use beavers, according to ecologists who say the near eradication of Castor canadensis from parts of the West in the 19th century has magnified the effects of California’s worst dry spell in history.
“Beavers create shock absorption against drought,” says Brock Dolman, a scientist in Sonoma County who wants to repopulate coastal California with the big lumberjacking rodents.
Beavers are a hated pest and a nuisance in the eyes of many landowners and developers, and the animals are regularly killed with depredation permits and by fur trappers. However, they are also a keystone species whose participation in the ecosystem creates benefits for almost all other flora and fauna, Dolman says. This is because of the way beavers’ hydro-engineering work affects the movement of water.
“Beavers aren’t actually creating more water, but they are altering how it flows, which creates benefits through the ecosystem,” says Michael Pollock, an ecosystems analyst and beaver specialist at the National Marine Fisheries Service Northwest Science Center.
Read the rest of the story here.
Why It’s So Hard To Save An Endangered Species
Green groups hailed it as “big news for a little porpoise.” With just 60 animals left in the wild and the threat of extinction looming, governments had finally banded together in an effort to save the vaquita, the most endangered marine mammal on Earth… Urgent conservation measures to protect the creature were approved at the International Whaling Commission in Slovenia late last month. The emergency resolution that the U.S. tabled included measures to permanently ban gill net fishing from the vaquita’s range, remove existing gill nets and clamp down on the illegal trade of totoaba. The critically endangered fish can become captured by the nets that snare and strangle vaquita
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/vaquita-conservation_us_58200a2ee4b0e80b02cae21d
Scott Administration Helped Keep Scathing EPA Pipeline Report Out Of Legal Challenge
TALLAHASSEE — Gov. Rick Scott’s top environmental agency helped block a scathing federal report outlining environmental concerns from being submitted as part of a challenge to a controversial natural gas pipeline that would run across some of Florida’s most “environmentally sensitive areas”… The Sabal Trail pipeline, a joint venture of Spectra Energy, Duke Energy and Florida Power & Light Co.’s parent company, would extend 515 miles from central Alabama to Osceola County. The project, which covers more than 260 miles in Florida, faces a legal challenge to a state permit in Florida from an environmental group named the WWALS Watershed Coalition.
Scientists May Be ‘Vastly’ Underestimating The Extinction Risk Facing Some Species
A new Columbia University study is challenging the accuracy of methods used by the IUCN to determine conservation status.
The IUCN Red List paints a grim picture of the biodiversity loss we are facing as a planet. In 2016, tens of thousands of mammals, birds, insects, plants and other organisms were found to be under threat from extinction, according to the list.
source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/species-extinction-risk_us_59141a85e4b00b643ebb3934?zja
France Declares All New Rooftops Must Be Topped With Plants Or Solar Panels | CSGlobe
A new law recently passed in France mandates that all new buildings that are built in commercial zones in France must be partially covered in either plants
Source: France Declares All New Rooftops Must Be Topped With Plants Or Solar Panels | CSGlobe
House of horrors: inside the US wildlife repository – photo essay
Resources to catch smugglers are also stretched at American ports and airports. And the situation could deteriorate further – the Trump administration has requested that the FWS budget be cut next year, resulting in more than 300 staff losing their jobs.
Source: House of horrors: inside the US wildlife repository – photo essay
Gainesville Greenway Challenge
Join Greenway Challenge and help pull invasive Caesar’s Weed and Coral Ardisia at this week’s Give Back Thursday!
Starts at 9:00 am.
For more information, go to: https://www.facebook.com/events/128497857798347/