Coming soon: biofuel from forestry waste
As you will have noticed from our previous blog articles, sources of biofuels are a hot topic. There is an ongoing battle to find sources that have a minimal environmental impact. The popularity of food crops such as corn, sugar and vegetable oils, as a source has decreased recently as governments have become more aware…
Who can predict the fate of the Amazon rainforest?
Modellers around the world are trying to predict the fate of the Amazon rainforest under future conditions of climate change. It seems a tiny change in model parameters leads to regular new headlines contradicting previous predictions. The latest of these headlines is that the Amazon forest will survive warming, becoming seasonal forests rather than savannahs,…
Medicinal plants threatened by changing climates
An article (full text here) warning that climate change is affecting medicinal and aromatic plants around the world and could ultimately lead to losses of some key species, was recently published in HerbalGram the journal of the American Botanical Council. The authors note that species endemic to regions or ecosystems that are especially vulnerable to…
A Lot of Land
Last week, The National Trust announced that it would be making land available for 1,000 allotments over the next 3 years. This apparently equates to an estimated 2.6 million lettuces per year, 50,000 sacks of potatoes or £1.5 million worth of mixed produce1. With the increased popularity of growing-your-own, this will be welcome news to…
If you go to Brazil tonight…
You will surely have the time of your life – as it is Carnival time! The Brazilian Carnival is usually associated with Rio de Janeiro and the Samba Schools parading along the Sambadrome, and is said to be the biggest street party in the world. However, it happens throughout Brazil in the streets and in…
Galapagos Islands need tourism, says Sir David Attenborough
As celebrated by fellow handpicked blogger Dave Hemming last week, this year sees the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, as well as the 150th anniversary of the publication of the 'Origin of Species. In the Galapagos Islands, which more than anywhere else have become associated with Darwin's development of the theory of…
Could ecosystem services save the Amazon?
A new report suggests that the Amazonian rainforest may be worth more standing than cut and cleared for farming. Although the idea is not new, a recent report (Keeping the Amazon forest standing: a matter of values) commissioned by the WWF suggests that marketing the ecological services supplied by the Amazonian forest could hold the…
A future climate that is beyond anything we have considered
GHG emissions are now far higher than even the worst-case scenario envisaged by the IPCC's fourth assessment report published in 2007, according to statement by Christopher Field, a lead author on that report. This statement was delivered at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Chicago, USA, last…
Roses are Red but are they ‘green’?
The cheap ones aren't green (i.e. environmentally-friendly kind of green) according to an article by Dr. David Harper, from Leicester University, who has conducted research at Lake Naivasha, Kenya, for 25 years. Dr. Harper warned that cut-price Valentine roses exported for sale in the UK were ‘bleeding Kenya's Lake Naivasha dry'. He said the demand…
Bee mine
We’d be hard pressed in this office to pick up a journal aimed at beekeepers, without reading an article on Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD); a disaster that has taken the bee world by storm. Writing in the September/October 2008 issue of The IPM Practitioner, William Quarles reviews pesticides and CCD.