Author: Organikos

Tracking Tree-Poachers

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Global Land Analysis and Discovery alerts, analysing satellite images will be initially be available for Peru, the Republic of Congo and Indonesia. Photograph: Natalie Behring-Chisholm/AP

When there is news on the improved ability to reduce illegal logging, we are always interested. Thanks to the Guardian’s Environment section for their assistance on this front:

New satellite mapping a ‘game changer’ against illegal logging

System that provides hard evidence of logging crimes in almost real time gives new hope of combating tropical deforestation

Taken from outer space, the satellite images show illegal loggers cutting a road into a protected area in Peru, part of a criminal enterprise attempting to steal millions of dollars worth of ecological resources Continue reading →

My Big Fat Floating Solar Panel

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This recent Thames Water press release has just come to our attention and it sounds like progress, or what we count as good news:

Europe’s biggest ever floating solar panel array is being installed on London’s Queen Elizabeth II reservoir as part of Thames Water’s ambitious bid to self-generate a third of its own energy by 2020.

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Climate Denier Roundup

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You will never have seen Leo’s name in these pages before; our reason for linking to this story is just because the subtitle/byline is so delicious (thanks to EcoWatch):

What Climate Deniers Had to Say About Leo’s Oscars Speech

Climate Denier Roundup | March 1

Millions heard the call for climate action on Sunday night, when Leonardo DiCaprio (finally) accepted the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in The Revenant.

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Firefall At Yosemite, An Enduring Fantastic Natural Beauty

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Day after day, it seems, we find something that shocks us–something we did not know that, had we known it, we might have dropped everything to go and see. This February is coming to a close, so we will have to wait until 2017 to check this out in person, but for now thanks to the Science section of the New York Times for bringing it to our attention:

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Instagram was filled with thousands of versions of the firefall. These are a few that photographers shared with us. Clockwise, from top left: Vincent James, @vjamesphoto; Andrew McDonald/High Sierra Workshops; Carlos Loya, @t3nthirty1; Jeff Lui, @jeffreyplui; Bethany Gediman, National Park Service; @xbirdo; Nicki Frates, @nickif24, @theoutdooradventurer; Wayne Nguyen, @potatounit; Vincent James, @vjamesphoto; Gregory Woodman, @gregorywoodman

At Yosemite, a Waterfall Turns Into a Firefall

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By TATIANA SCHLOSSBERG

For a few weeks in February if the conditions are just right, for about 10 minutes around sunset, one waterfall in Yosemite National Park looks more like its opposite — a firefall. Continue reading →

Pollinator Challenges & Our Self-Interested Responsibility

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A wasp lands on a flower in a garden in Srinagar, India, Sept. 8, 2009. Bees and other pollinators face increasing risks to their survival, threatening foods such as apples, blueberries and coffee worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year, the first global assessment of pollinators showed on Friday.

It is worth seeing how various media outlets cover the same news we first linked to here. The CS Monitor, as always, has a thoughtful consideration of the news, asking the key question:

Earth’s bees and other pollinators need some human help: What can we do?

Pollinator populations around the world are declining, threatening hundreds of billions of dollars worth of agriculture. Humans are part of the problem, say scientists, but they can also be part of the solution.

By Christina Beck

The impending extinction of bees, butterflies, and other pollinators could cost the world hundreds of billions in food crops if nothing is done to stop it, according to a new scientific report from the United Nations. Continue reading →

Another Year, Another Invasive Python Hunt

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In this photo taken Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2016, a pair of trousers made of python skin is displayed at All American Gator Products in Hollywood, Fla. About a third of the pythons have come to Brian Wood, owner of All American Gator Products, to be made into wallets, shoes, belts or handbags. Wood pays up to $150 apiece for the snakes, about the same price he pays for python skins imported from Asia. © AP Photo/Alan Diaz

The pattern is striking. Takes a moment to realize it is a natural one. We have Burmese Pythons to thanks for that natural beauty. The pattern by which it is sewn together? Hmmm. We are not sure the fashion would suit us, so to speak. Python pants, in the work we do, would just be odd.

But to be consistent with our enthusiasm for eradication of invasive species, through what we call entrepreneurial conservation methods, we must tip our hats:

Florida hunters capture 106 Burmese pythons; 1 was 15-feet

By JENNIFER KAY, Associated Press

DAVIE, Fla. — Florida wildlife officials say 106 Burmese pythons were caught during a state-sanctioned hunt for the invasive snakes.

The longest was 15 feet. Continue reading →

Oregon, Trendsetter

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Briana Murphy, a shepherdess herds goats at the Portland International Airport in Portland

Shepherdess Briana Murphy herds goats at the Portland International Airport in Portland, Oregon, as Mount Hood is seen in the background, April 17, 2015. In a city that loves its goats, the Portland International Airport now has a temporary herd. Forty goats and a llama started munching this week on invasive plants such as blackberries, thistle and Scotch broom near the PDX airfield. The llama’s job is to keep away predators like coyotes. Picture taken April 17, 2015. REUTERS/Steve Dipaola – RTX19KH0

 

The aroma seems like a small price to pay, under the circumstances, but we appreciate Oregon for trying this novel approach nonetheless:

Oregon city fires its grounds-keeping goats with ‘barnyard aroma’

BY ERIC M. JOHNSON

A crew of goats brought in to devour invasive plants at a popular park in Oregon’s state capital, Salem, have been fired because they ate indiscriminately, cost nearly five times as much as human landscapers and smelled far worse, a city official said on Friday. Continue reading →

Yay, Iceland

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Thanks to Ecowatch for sharing this news, and megathanks to Iceland for making the news:

…Word today from colleagues in Iceland and now reports in both Icelandic and English-language media confirm that the planned hunt for fin whales will not happen this summer. The man behind that whaling is claiming that he’s stopping because of “hindrances” in exporting the meat. That’s great news for whales and everyone who has been opposing this needless, senseless hunt. Continue reading →

We Must Do More

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Beekeepers using a smoker to calm colonies before transferring them to another crop near Columbia Falls, Me. Plants that depend on pollination make up 35 percent of global crop production volume with a value of as much as $577 billion a year.Adrees Latif/Reuters

For every story we love, there seems to be another which, as they say, not so much:

Decline of Species That Pollinate Poses a Threat to Global Food Supply, Report Warns

By JOHN SCHWARTZ FEB. 26, 2016

The birds and the bees need help. Also, the butterflies, moths, wasps, beetles and bats. Without an international effort, a new report warns, increasing numbers of species that promote the growth of hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of food each year face extinction.

The first global assessment of the threats to creatures that pollinate the world’s plants was released by a group affiliated with the United Nations on Friday in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The summary will be posted online Monday. Continue reading →

Sea Butterfly Motion Recorded at GA Tech

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Recording by David Murphy at the Georgia Institute of Technology, via NPR.

We know from previous posts how important plankton is to the health of the world’s oceans, and now we’re learning about a species of zooplankton that is an example of convergent evolution in the form of “flight” motion. The gif to the left displays the watery “wingbeats” of the near-microscopic sea snail Limacina helicina, which is the same type of movement that a fruit fly’s wings make to move through the air. Merrit Kennedy reports for NPR:

It’s “a remarkable example of convergent evolution,” the researchers write. They say the ancestors of zooplankton (such as L. helicina) and those of flying insects diverged some 550 million years ago.

This sea snail’s movements are more like a fruit fly’s than other zooplankton, the study found.

L. helicina, which lives in cold Pacific waters, has two smooth swimming appendages “that flap in a complex three-dimensional stroke pattern resembling the wingbeat kinematics of flying insects.”

Other types of zooplankton typically “paddle through the water with drag-based propulsion” rather than fly, the researchers say.

Study co-author David Murphy tells the Journal of Experimental Biology that the sea snail and fruit fly both “clap their wings together at the top of a wing beat before peeling them apart, sucking fluid into the V-shaped gap between the wings to create low-pressure vortices at the wing tips that generate lift.”

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California Condors, Better Births, Incredible Intervention

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California Condor chick being fed by a puppet as part of the captive breeding program. Photo by Ron Garrison at the San Diego Zoo for the US Fish and Wildlife Service, via WikiMedia Commons.

Back in 1973 when the Endangered Species Act put the California Condor under protection, the species’ numbers were still dwindling at an alarming rate. In the following decade the remaining population was captured and bred in captivity, so as to protect chicks and release them into the wild. And last year, more condors were born and raised in the wild (14) than the number of adult wild condors that died (12), which represents success in the breeding program. There are now over 250 California Condors in the wild, a vast improvement over the 22 surviving birds that were captured for the start of the breeding program.

Officials also counted 27 wild condor nests last year. Nineteen were in California, three in the Arizona-Utah border area and five in Mexico’s Baja Peninsula. Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona has a condor nest, officials said, as do Zion National Park in Utah and Pinnacles National Park in central California.

The captive breeding program continues with the Peregrine Fund‘s World Center for Birds of Prey near Boise being the top egg producer, with six eggs laid this spring and nine more expected.

“So far it’s going fantastic,” said Marti Jenkins, condor propagation manager at the facility.

She said two eggs laid at the facility last year were placed in wild nests in California where eggs were either infertile or damaged. The replacement eggs produced fledglings that officials count in the wild population.

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If You Happen To Be In London

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Serpentine pavilion ‘unzipped’: first look at Bjarke Ingels’ design

The Danish architect offers a sculptural space ‘like a mountain of ice cubes’ stretching across the London gallery’s lawn, to be complemented by four radical summer houses

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‘Cartoonish gyrations’ … Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) architectural impressions of the 2016 Serpentine pavilion.

The humble brick wall, that most London of architectural elements, is the inspiration for this year’s Serpentine Gallery pavilion, according to designs unveiled today. But in the hands of the Danish architectural conjuror Bjarke Ingels and his firm BIG, it won’t be any old brick wall. It’s a wall that will be stretched open and hollowed out, its oversized fibreglass bricks stacked up to form a paraboloid enclosure that will taper high above the park, transforming from a bulging cave to a slender screen as it undulates across the lawn.

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Desert Gold in Death Valley

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The primary threads in the floral carpet are yellow — the most common flower is called Desert Gold, which looks like a yellow daisy. Credit National Park Service

The primary threads in the floral carpet are yellow — the most common flower is called Desert Gold, which looks like a yellow daisy. Credit National Park Service

One of the most evocatively named US National Parks, Death Valley is currently awash in color due to record-breaking autumn rains. The impact of water on one of the driest places on earth is stunning, with carpets of flowers blooming from the latent seeds that remain dormant for years in the dry, crusty soil.

 

 

Find more images in the NYTimes Science feature, and via the National Park Service.

What Is It With Tangier?

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We have not heard any of these recordings, but the last two paragraphs of this post have our attention fully focused and we look forward to the sound:

…I think Bowles would be deeply pleased by what Schuyler and Dust-to-Digital have done with his recordings, the way they’ve now been lovingly, responsibly repackaged. The music itself is frequently staggering: an eleven-minute recording Bowles made in Goulimine, a city in the southern lowlands, is one of the more beautiful examples I’ve heard of guedra, in which one male vocalist and a women’s chorus bang together on a twenty-eight-inch drum. Continue reading →

The Whole Picture

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“Habitat Degradation: Ocean Acidification” contains ocean pH data from 1998 to 2012. The decreasing pH is due to atmospheric carbon dissolving into the ocean, and creating carbonic acid, which means a more acidic ocean. PHOTO: Jill Pelto
“Habitat Degradation: Arctic Melt” shows Arctic sea ice data from 1980 to present. Rapid warming in the Arctic has caused the sea ice area to decline so quickly that species cannot adjust. PHOTO: Jill Pelto

Did you take these for just some stunning water colors? Well, these are hard data on climate change. An artistic expression of an ugly, oft overlooked truth. Jill Pelto, the artist, who graduated in December from the University of Maine with a degree in earth science and studio art, created these paintings based on graphs of data on the environmental effects of climate change.

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Traveling by Water

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Many are the memories created on the banks of rivers, in the middle of the sea, and along ocean tides. PHOTO: Abrachan Pudussery

Many are the memories created on the banks of rivers, in the middle of the sea, and along ocean tides. PHOTO: Abrachan Pudussery

At Xandari Riverscapes, water is everything. Sharing the Kerala backwaters with all those who choose to travel with us has always been about sharing stories of the waters. Of the paddy fields that hug the river banks, canoes that transport groceries and construction material to the hinterlands, women and children fishing and splashing around near their waterfront homes, fishing boats, and more. And so this soulful piece on water’s incredible power to flow by memories resonates with us all through:

Water is great. We tune ourselves to it, to its murmured song of ebb and flow, of wave and ripple, in seas, rivers, streams, lakes, wetlands, ponds, snows. We drink it, we bathe in it, we stare at dark clouds praying for their sudden moment of release of it. “Take me somewhere magical,” my favorite cousin once said. So I did, to sail the sea. By the third day our ship was completely out of sight of land, nothing but water curving with the horizon.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh. That’s exactly what I needed.”

Below us, the swells rolled, allowing us to dance with them until our very steps were full of the lift of waves. In our own small way, our steps lifting with the waves, we were tuning the ocean as we sailed—and it, in turn, was tuning us.

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Capturing The Sense Of A Place

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“The Fishing Hole,” 2015. PHOTOGRAPH © AARON BLUM

The Photo Booth feature on the New Yorker‘s ever expanding online offering is a reminder to us of Milo’s camera, in hibernation while he settles into the homestead in the rolling hills of Central New York. We hope that hibernation ends soon, but meanwhile:

Another Side of Appalachia

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Appalachia is not a corner of the United States that cameras come to fresh. Artist-visitors have been making visual shorthand of the rural region for decades, and they have tended to seek the place’s more derisive scenes: the folded flesh of the obese, the writhing snakes of the Pentecostals, the scabbed injections of addicts. These subjects are there for the finding, but the photographer who focusses only on the sordid or the sensational has an outsider’s narrowness of vision. Harder to capture, and far more revealing, are the mysteries of Appalachia as they appear to Appalachians. Continue reading →

If You Happen To Be In Boston

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Emily Kam Kngwarray’s Anwerlarr angerr (Big yam) (1996), on display in the “Seasonality” portion of the exhibition Everywhen © Emily Kam Kngwarray / © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISCOPY, Australia.

Cambridge, more precisely, is the location where this exhibition can be experienced:

At the Harvard Art Museums, Indigenous Australian Art and Thought on Display

by SOPHIA NGUYEN

THOUGH SNOW MAY FALL OUTSIDE, inside their special exhibition galleries the Harvard Art Museums host some heat from desert Australia. Composed of 70 artworks—many of which had never left their native land before now—the exhibition Everywhen: The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia opened on February 5.

The project was some five years in the making for visiting curator Stephen Gilchrist, an associate lecturer at the University of Sydney, and its planning required many late-night conference calls. “I felt,” he jokes, “like I was calling from the future.” Continue reading →

NatureNet Science Fellows

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Giant clam in Pacific, Asia Pacific. (ALL RIGHTS GRANTED TNC)

The Nature Conservancy is, among the philanthropic conservation organizations we are aware of, uniquely entrepreneurial beyond their core competency in land conservation. Their communications outreach is among these excellent extensions of their mission.  This article, about one of the NatureNet Science Fellows, is a good case in point:

Adventures in Alternative Energy: Giant Clam Edition

When most people think about alternative energy sources, Pacific giant clams probably do not spring readily to mind. Within their iridescent tissues, however, the world’s largest clams may well hold the missing link to finally enable the efficient (read: commercially viable) large-scale production of clean biofuels from algae.

Giant clams as alternative energy powerhouses. Who knew? Continue reading →