Will we eat? Dealing with the impact of food shortages
Food shortages are a continuous problem around the world - to deal with them, should countries simply ensure they have a reserve of food? Then why do we still see food crises?
CAB Thesaurus reaches new milestone with over 3 million terms/labels
The 2020 edition of CAB Thesaurus has been published after reaching a significant milestone – it now includes more than 3 million terms/labels with special focus given to the needs of Plantwise, Compendia, VetMed Resource, and the Global Health and the CAB Abstracts databases.
A lesson in ‘resilience’: realities and misconceptions
Resilience is about changing in response to a disturbance; changing the ways parts of the “system” are connected, emphasizing some and de-emphasizing others. It’s the capacity to absorb disturbance and re-organize to keep functioning in the same way.
The Climate Battleground: Grassland or Forest
Nostalgia The title of Tom Jones’ album, ‘The Green, Green Grass of Home’ released in 1967, still rouses powerful nostalgia for the rural landscape of Britain. Similar sentiments are experienced by other nationalities, but grass is particularly relevant in Britain. It ranges in type from lush lowland meadows through upland pastures and heath to open…
From too many to too few: the impact of COVID-19 on overtourism
A few months ago 2020 was predicted to be a record-breaking year for tourism, continuing the apparently unending pattern of annual growth recorded since the tourism industry began collecting data on numbers of people travelling. Even allowing for the fact that the figures included almost everyone crossing an international border for an overnight visit and…
Enjoy two weeks free access to CABI’s Crop Pest Diagnosis online course
CABI is providing two weeks free access to its Crop Pest Diagnosis online course to encourage knowledge expansion on healthy plants – supporting students and plant health specialists during the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic.
Building a new world
Lawrence Alderson is the author of The Quest to Conserve Rare Breeds, to be published by CABI in August 2020. Dealing with the immediate and urgent challenges posed by Covid-19 understandably dominates the news channels. It demands priority. A threat of such global severity has not been encountered in living memory, unless you can remember…
Preparing for a pandemic
Now is not the ideal time to be giving Health Emergency Preparedness and Response its first reading. Co-edited by Chloe Sellwood, NHS England’s National Lead for Pandemic Influenza (for which read: any serious infectious disease), the idea for this book sprang up during the 2009-10 Swine Flu pandemic, and came to fruition following the 2014-15…
Butterflies and climate change
This article was originally posted on Ray Cannon’s Nature Notes. We have heard a great deal about climate change in the last year, with protests by Extinction Rebellion activists in London and the incredible teenager, Greta Thunberg reading the riot act to delegates at the UN, condemning world leaders for failing to act on global…
Mystery Organs of the Stick Insects: Solving A Century-Old Anatomical Puzzle
One would think that scientists had already figured out everything there is to know about animal anatomy, considering how long we have been dissecting and describing. However, several mysteries from the past remain unsolved, either because they were forgotten or because more advanced methods were needed to figure them out.