Map the Herps You Spot

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Spotted Salamander by Brian Magnier

In the spring of my penultimate year at Cornell, I took a Herpetology class that introduced me to the world of reptiles and amphibians, or “herps,” as they’re affectionately known. Thanks to that exposure, I was able to enjoy the spring migration of certain salamander species and learn the basics of the main families of frogs, lizards, snakes, and other herps like alligators, crocodiles, and all the other slimy or scaly animals in the classes Amphibia and Reptilia. If I had known of the existence of the citizen science project HerpMapper at the time (it wasn’t released until September of the same year as that salamander migration) I’d have certainly submitted some observations and photos to the organization! From their About page:

HerpMapper is a cooperative project, designed to gather and share information about reptile and amphibian observations across the planet. Using HerpMapper, you can create records of your herp observations and keep them all in one place. In turn, your data is made available to HerpMapper Partners – groups who use your recorded observations for research, conservation, and preservation purposes. Your observations can make valuable contributions on the behalf of amphibians and reptiles.

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Good News in Plastics

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Compiled illustrations of a nylon chain above and PET chain below, both thermoplastic polymers, or simply put, types of plastic. Via WikiMedia, created by users YassineMrabet and Jynto, respectively.

There’s some cause to celebrate from a couple findings published recently in two journals, Nature and Animal Conservation, related to plastics, though of very different sorts. The first paper deals with a new method of plastic production using carbon dioxide and agricultural waste rather than petroleum as the raw input for PET plastic, and the second article studies the feasibility of introducing biodegradable fishing nets to replace nylon ones.

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Worldwide Vegetarian Lifestyle Calculated to Reduce Global Food Emissions by 44%

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Probably fewer than half the contributors and readers of this blog are vegetarian, with a tiny percentage perhaps being vegan. A new study from Oxford University published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States might set some of us thinking about changing that, however.

With food in general creating over 25% of all global greenhouse gas emissions (including the need for transportation and all the rest), to think that about 80% of those emissions are linked to livestock makes one realize (once again, if we didn’t already know) the massive impact of eating red meat. Sarah DeWeerdt reports for Conservation magazine’s online section:

If every person on Earth adopted a vegan diet – without milk, meat, honey, or any other animal-sourced foods – the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the food system in 2050 would fall by more than half compared to 2005/2007 levels. That’s one of several striking findings from an analysis of food and climate published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Birding Apps Re-reviewed by Boucher

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I visit Tim Boucher’s blog on The Nature Conservancy’s website every week or so to see what’s new, and this last check-up I noticed an old post from 2013 that’s been edited to include observations on fresh updates for phone apps that help identify birds, like Merlin, which I’ve covered in the past.

So far I haven’t purchased any bird identification application for my phone, mostly because there are good ones like Merlin and Audubon available for free in the US, but I’ve been considering a $9.99 app for the birds of Costa Rica, made by bird-watching guides both in CR and Panama.

Boucher doesn’t rank the apps in his order of preference, but it looks like from his reviews that he prefers the Audubon and Merlin apps for the fact that they’re free and utilitarian, though Merlin is geared more towards beginners. He’s also pretty positive about the Sibley and Peterson apps, both of which started with physical book versions of their guides.  Continue reading →

Handy Bamboo

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bamboo20sticks_zpsoqedjljxBamboo is a highly malleable, fibrous plant that has many impressive capabilities that often serve a variety of utilitarian needs. At Xandari, we’ve used this resilient, rapid-growing grass (yes, it’s part of the grass family and some species are known to grow up to 90cm in a single day!) to create wind chimes for birds and now, we’ve been inspired once again to create a different, yet handy tool.

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An Unusual Library With A Conservation Mission

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A short note here to link out to a story of interest because of its intersection of conservation, commerce and education. Thanks to this new (to us) source of interesting (to us) news:

The Harvard Library That Protects The World’s Rarest Colors

The most unusual colors from Harvard’s storied pigment library include beetle extracts, poisonous metals, and human mummies.

Today, every color imaginable is at your fingertips. You can peruse paint swatches at hardware stores, flip through Pantone books, and fuss with the color finder that comes with most computer programs, until achieving the hue of your heart’s desire. But rewind to a few centuries ago and finding that one specific color might have meant trekking to a single mineral deposit in remote Afghanistan—as was the case with lapis lazuli, a rock prized for its brilliant blue hue, which made it more valuable than gold in medieval times. Continue reading →

Finding The Silver Lining

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A worker cuts a cluster of grapes in the Burgundy region of France during the harvest period. Global warming has made conditions historically associated with great wines more frequent in Bordeaux and Burgundy, a study finds. But things look less bright for California vineyards. Jeff Pachoud/AFP/Getty Images

We admit that we stretch, as frequently as we can, to find alternatives to doom and gloom environmental news.  We submit the following as Exhibit A if a case is to made to prove the point that there is always a silver lining to be found (thanks to National Public Radio, USA):

An Upside To Climate Change? Better French Wine

While climate change threatens coastal cities and generates extreme weather, the effects of global warming could bring good news to some of France’s most esteemed vineyards. Continue reading →

Trees Are More Remarkable Than We Thought

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Trees in temperate forests, like these redwoods in Northern California, may adapt to climate change by releasing less carbon dioxide than previously predicted by scientists. Getty Images

And in other “kind of good news”:

Trees Deal With Climate Change Better Than Expected

The bend-don’t-break adaptability of trees extends to handling climate change, according to a new study that says forests may be able to deal with hotter temperatures and contribute less carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than scientists previously thought. Continue reading →

Spiral Jetty: Art that Informs

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Photo by George Steinmetz, September 2002

In 1970, artist Robert Smithson built a massive sculpture as a piece of land art, or an “earthwork,” that is normally found just below the surface of the water of Great Salt Lake at Rozel Point. In drought conditions, the art piece, titled Spiral Jetty, becomes visible, often with salt encrustations that decorate the basalt spiral formation. Great Salt Lake, in addition to being salty, is also home to microorganisms that live or even thrive in extremely salty conditions and produce pigments that give them a red to orange color, which becomes visible in the water at times. Chau Tu reports for this week’s Science Friday written piece:

Great Salt Lake is known as a terminal basin, meaning its water has no outlet. “Water escapes through evaporation, and everything else stays there,” says Jaimi Butler, coordinator of the Great Salt Lake Institute. At the time the sculpture was built, the water level of the lake was particularly low. But by 1972, the water rose again to near-average levels, submerging the artwork.

“Smithson anticipated that the lake would rise and fall, the residue of salt crystals causing the black rocks to glisten white whenever the water level dropped,” the New York Times Magazine wrote in 2002. And indeed, that very year, regional droughts caused the jetty to reappear “for the first prolonged period in its history,” according to the Dia Foundation, which now owns the sculpture. (The Great Salt Lake Institute partners with the Dia Foundation and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts to oversee the Spiral Jetty.)

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Is It This Simple?

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ghost-fishing

A serious problem with a relatively simple solution (thanks to Conservation magazine’s website):

BIODEGRADABLE GILLNETS COULD HELP RID THE OCEAN OF GHOST FISHING

Researchers have found that biodegradable gillnets catch fish as well as conventional nylon nets—and more quickly lose their ability to entangle animals when discarded at sea. Even more, the degradable nets tend to trap fewer young fish and bycatch. Continue reading →

The Nechisar Nightjar

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Cover Art © Pegasus Books

Although I haven’t read this book yet, I do know what it’s like to be on an expedition to find a bird that hasn’t been seen in several decades, which is the subject of Vernon Head’s book, freshly published in the US this month. “The Rarest Bird in the World” tells the story of the search for a bird related to potoos called the Nechisar Nightjar, which had been identified as a new species in the 1990s by Cambridge scientists who found a single wing of the bird in a remote area of Ethiopia.

The publisher blurb makes it sound pretty engaging:

Part detective story, part love affair, and pure adventure storytelling at its best, a celebration of the thrill of exploration and the lure of wild places during the search for the elusive Nechisar Nightjar. In 1990 an expedition of Cambridge scientists arrived at the Plains of Nechisar, tucked between the hills of the Great Rift Valley in the Gamo Gofa province in the country of Ethiopia. On that expedition they found three hundred and fifteen species of birds; sixty one species of mammal and sixty nine species of butterfly were identified; twenty species of dragonflies and damselflies; seventeen reptile species were recorded; three frog species were filed; plants were listed. And the wing of a road-killed bird was packed into a brown paper bag. It was to become the most famous wing in the world.

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How to Prevent Extinction

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Illustration by Jon Han for the New York Times

In last Sunday’s edition of the New York Times, the eminent ecologist E. O. Wilson–who we’ve posted about several times in the past for his inspiring and erudite thoughts on nature and biophilia–wrote an opinion editorial on “The Global Solution to Extinction,” in which he partly reminisced about his studies in biology, and also offered his suggestion on how to prevent further extinctions: increase the area of nature refuges, or in other words, boost habitat conservation. Here’s an excerpt of the first half of his piece:

DURING the summer of 1940, I was an 11-year-old living with my family in a low-income apartment in Washington, D.C. We were within easy walking distance of the National Zoo and an adjacent strip of woodland in Rock Creek Park. I lived most of my days there, visiting exotic animals and collecting butterflies and other insects with a net that I had fashioned from a broom handle, coat hanger and cheesecloth. I read nature books, field guides and past volumes of National Geographic. I had already conceived then of a world of life awaiting me, bottomless in variety.

Seventy-six years later, I have kept that dream. As a teacher and scientist I have tried to share it. The metaphor I offer for biological diversity is the magic well: The more you draw, the more there is to draw.

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Bird of the Day: Fiery-throated Hummingbird

/ Juan K Gamboa / 1 Comment
Fiery-throated Hummingbird by Juan Gamboa - La Paz Group

The fiery-throated hummingbird (Panterpe insignis) is a medium-sized hummingbird that breeds only in the mountains of Costa Rica and western Panama. It is the only member of the genus Panterpe.

male – Poás Volcano National Park, Costa Rica

Celebrating the Oldest National Park in Costa Rica

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Poas Volcano crater on a clear day. Photo credit: Juan K Gamboa

Poas Volcano crater on a clear day. Photo credit: Juan K Gamboa

Today in Costa Rica we celebrate Poás Volcano National Park, which is the oldest national park in the country. It was founded on January 25th, 1971 and is the most visited national park by locals and foreigners alike. The volcano remains active to this day, with clouds of smoke frequently emitting from the main crater. Since 1989 the size of the lake crater has been shrinking and the amount of acid rain increasing, damaging some of the flora in the surrounding areas of the park and farming lands nearby.

Poas Volcano National Park, Lake Botos fills an extinct crater at the end of one trail, and is home to many cloud forest birds including hummingbirds, tanagers, flycatchers, toucanets, Costa Rica’s national bird the clay-colored robin. Photo credit: Juan K. Gamboa

The story behind the name Poás is a curious one. Continue reading →

Putting All That Gee Whiz Technology And Creative Knowhow To Much Better Use

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Two scenes from a virtual-reality “ride” that takes viewers into the realm of whales, fish and sonic and plastic pollution. Credit Dell

One of our favorite sources of “green news” in the early days of this blog five years ago, Mr. Revkin reappears every now and then with something really cool:

To Cut Ocean Trash, Adrian Grenier and Dell Enlist Filmmakers and Virtual Reality

By ANDREW C. REVKIN
 
On a weekend visit to South by Southwest, the annual Austin festival focused on the intersection of ideas, technology, music and film, I ran into Adrian Grenier, who’s best known as an actor but is building a career as a filmmaker and campaigner with a focus on the environment.
 
Grenier, who last year signed on as the “social good advocate” for Dell, was there with the company’s sustainability and supply-chain directors and a remarkable virtual-reality “ride,” for lack of a better description, in which goggle-wearing people siting in vibrating, hissing chairs plunge deep beneath the sea. They are greeted by shoals of fish, carpets of plastic pollution, the booms of seismic probes used to prospect for oil and an imagined rendering of a “lonely whale” that I wrote about long ago. That whale, detected because its voice was at a 52-hertz frequency distinct from other large cetaceans, is the subject of a film and multimedia project that Grenier has been developing with the filmmakers Josh Zeman and Lucy Cooper.

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Disruptive Urban Energy-Generation

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Brooklyn Microgrid wants to increase the amount of renewable energy generated in the community by members of the community. Photo credit: Brooklyn Microgrid

Thanks to Ecowatch for this story:

Many U.S. cities have taken the lead on sustainability efforts, particularly when it comes to adopting renewable energy. Already, at least 13 U.S. cities—including San Diego; San Francisco; Burlington, Vermont; and Aspen, Colorado—have committed to 100 percent clean energy.

Other American cities, though not generating all their electricity from renewables, have innovative projects that could soon become widely adopted and transform our energy system.

Here are three cities leading the way: Continue reading →

This Earth Hour Could Be Epic

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This Earth Hour, join the biggest solar revolution ever – go solar!

This Earth Hour, switch off your lights and switch on the power of the sun. Find out how you can join the biggest solar revolution ever, right here in India, and be a part of the global climate action!

We clicked on the India option first (since so many of our own initiatives are there), which led us to India’s activities related to Earth Hour. Next, Costa Rica. If you visit the website WWF set up to explain and promote Earth Hour, you will get the simple explanation:

As the world stands at a climate crossroads, it is powerful yet humbling to think that our actions today will decide what tomorrow will look like for generations to come. This Earth Hour, ​switch on your social power​ to shine a light on climate action. This is our time to #ChangeClimateChange…our future starts today.

Earth Hour is on Saturday, 19 March 2016 8:30 p.m. local time. Continue reading →