Science Committee. Mark Stafford Smith - Chair Dr Mark Stafford Smith is the Science Director of CSIRO’s Climate Adaptation Flagship in Canberra, Australia, where he oversees a highly interdisciplinary programme of research on many aspects of adapting to climate change. He has more than 30 years experience in drylands systems ecology, management and policy, including senior roles such as Program Leader of CSIRO’s Centre for Arid Zone Research in Alice Springs, and then CEO of the Desert Knowledge Cooperative Research Centre. During this time he was a task leader under the Global Change and Terrestrial Ecosystems core project of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP). He was also a key contributor to the AridNET international network of drylands researchers that devised the Dryland Development Paradigm. In the past decade his research focus has turned more to adaptation to climate change.
Belinda Reyers - Vice-chair Melissa Leach - Vice-chair Bina Agarwal Xuemei Bai Eduardo Brondizio Eduardo S. Carrion fly-derived DNA as a tool for comprehensive and cost-effective assessment of mammalian biodiversity - Calvignac-Spencer - 2013 - Molecular Ecology. Untitled. Buy-in delivers sign-up. New estimate narrows global warming range. U. MELBOURNE (AUS) — Scientists have generated what they say are more reliable projections of how much warmer the planet will be in 2100 due to climate change.
The paper, published in Nature Climate Change, suggests that exceeding 6 degrees warming was now unlikely, while exceeding 2 degrees is very likely for business-as-usual emissions. Roger Bodman, a postgraduate research fellow at Victoria University, and Professors David Karoly and Peter Rayner from the University of Melbourne’s School of Earth Sciences made their estimates using new methods that combine observations of carbon dioxide and global temperature variations with simple climate model simulations to project future global warming.
Team leader Bodman says while continuing to narrow the range even further was possible, significant uncertainty in warming predictions would always remain due to the complexity of climate change drivers. “This study ultimately shows why waiting for certainty will fail as a strategy,” he says. The slippery slope to slime – Features – ABC Environment. Australia's Great Barrier Reef is unparalleled in its beauty. But now a new scientific experiment is revealing the future for the reef if climate change continues, and it doesn't look good. ON A LARGE WOODEN deck on a coral cay island in the middle of the Great Barrier Reef, research assistant Aaron Chai removes the lid from one of 12 circular white water tanks. "This is the 'do nothing' tank," he says, peering inside at a careful arrangement of dead, slimy, algae-covered and bleached-white corals.
In July last year, this small reef ecosystem looked very different - corals of vivid purples and blues beside the bright greens of turtle weeds. Since then the levels of carbon dioxide and temperature in the bowl-shaped tank have been changed to the kind of conditions expected by the end of this century if the world 'does nothing' about climate change and its fossil fuel use. The World Heritage-listed Great Barrier Reef is already under stress from natural and man-made hazards. Tanks of tests. This Dutch "Sand Engine" Uses Nature's Destructive Power To Protect From Flooding. The Dutch have long been masters of "hard infrastructure": miles of earthen works, dikes and levies that keep the North Sea from flooding the country, much of which lies below sea level.
Yet Europe’s low-landers are trying a new tact to defend against the ocean’s slow rise: designing with nature, instead of against it. Every engineer faces the fact that even the best designed structures inevitably collapse when faced with nature’s power. The tsunamis in Japan and the rushing tides flooding New York’s low-lying areas are only the latest examples. For the Netherlands’ latest coastal defense, engineers are harnessing nature rather than resisting, it by creating what they’re calling a "sand engine": about 750 million cubic feet of dredged sediment, enough to fill several stadiums, that stretches for almost a mile out into the ocean. This hook-shaped peninsula, at times peaking 20 feet above sea level, is designed to be washed away. And more of the same thinking is coming. To Control Floods, The Dutch Turn to Nature for Inspiration by Cheryl Katz.
21 Feb 2013: Report by cheryl katz On a freezing winter day along the south-central coast of Holland, two beachcombers, hunched against the wind, stroll along a crescent of sand extending more than half a mile into the North Sea. Nearby, a snowkiter skims over the 28 million-cubic-yard heap of dredged sediment spreading along the shore. If all goes as planned, the mound will eventually disappear, rearranged by ocean currents into a 12-mile-long buffer protecting the coastline for the next two decades. This is the Sand Engine, one of the latest innovations from Dutch masters of flood control technology and designed, as the national water board Rijkswaterstaat says, so that “nature will take the sand to the right place for us.” “Normally, there is a lot of erosion here,” says hydraulic engineer Mathijs van Ledden, sweeping an arm toward the snow-covered spit snaking around an elongated lagoon.
View gallery Photo by Rijkswaterstaat/Joop van Houdt “Let’s be honest about it,” said van Ledden. Weatherwatch: The shocking disappearance of England's east coast | News. Holidaymakers visiting familiar sandy beaches along the east coast of England this weekend will have got a shock. Vast quantities of sand have disappeared, cliffs have collapsed, and familiar paths to the beach have had to be roped off because they end in a sudden drop. The culprit has been the unusually bleak winter weather. Weeks of northeasterly gales in the last three months have taken as much as seven metres depth of sand off beaches of Norfolk and Suffolk, and eroded soft material from cliffs all along the east coast. For example what have been for decades gently sloping sandy beaches at Hemsby and Caister-on-Sea in Norfolk were gouged out, temporarily cutting off the two communities' lifeboats from the sea.
The loss of millions of tons of material from Yorkshire to the Thames has alarmed local people. Halting or even slowing the process is a problem. Warmer Temps May Turn Turtles Female : D-brief. The gender of a baby painted turtle is determined by the temperature of the soil in which its egg is incubated. Warmer temperatures produce female turtles and cooler temperatures make males. Scientists now say that as the climate warms, the species is not likely to survive. Scientists at Iowa State University studied the nesting behavior of the painted turtle (Chrysemys picta), the most abundant and widespread species of native turtle in North America. They wanted to see if a mother turtle could shift the timing of her egg-laying enough to impact the gender and survival of her eggs. By observing painted turtles in Illinois, the researchers found that a mother turtle can lay her eggs a few days earlier or later in the season to cope with changing environmental temperatures.
For example, in a warm year she can nest earlier than usual. However the researchers say these behavioral changes aren’t enough. Painted turtle laying eggs in the nest she dug in the ground. The worst news? Temperature-Dependent Sex Determination and Artificial Incubation of Tuatara, Sphenodon Punctatus. Cookies Disabled. Call for DNA biologists to join fight against deadly new threats to wildlife | Environment | The Observer. Conservation workers will this week seek help from an unlikely set of allies. They will ask researchers working on synthetic biology – the science of creating advanced manipulated organisms – to help them save the world's endangered creatures and habitats. Threats that conservationists believe could be countered by a new generation of manipulated organisms include the fungus epidemics that are currently devastating frog populations around the world and which are also attacking bat colonies in the United States.
In addition, ocean dead zones – where marine life has been killed by algal blooms – could also be tackled by synthetic biology, they believe. "We think this is the time to ask science if it can help," said conservation biologist Kent Redford, who has organised this week's meeting in Cambridge, Synthetic Biology and Conservation, on behalf of the Wildlife Conservation Society. Synthetic biology is the technology of designing and building biological devices from scratch. The Scientist as Guardian: A Tool for Protecting the Wild by William Laurance. 25 Mar 2013: Analysis by william laurance In recent years, plant ecologist Zacharie N’Zooh has hiked thousands of kilometers conducting biodiversity surveys for the conservation group, WWF, in the northwestern Congo basin of his native Cameroon.
His work has given him a unique understanding of the region’s rich bioversity and its people. It also has made him a key player in safeguarding the area from illegal poaching and gold mining. In 2011, when poachers killed one of the eco-guards working with N’Zooh, the ecologist played an important role in persuading the Cameroon army to deploy elite troops into the Sangha Tri-National Conservation Complex. View gallery Photo by M. Plant ecologist Zacharie N’Zooh has helped stop poaching in the Congo Basin of Cameroon. N’ Zooh is a prime example of an increasingly important phenomenon: the scientist not only as researcher, but also as a valuable player in safeguarding increasingly threatened protected areas that harbor rich fauna and flora.