Constantine Alexander's Journal

Dead whale found pinned to Alaska cruise ship | Reuters

Alaska (Reuters) - A dead whale was discovered pinned to the bow of a Princess Cruises luxury liner near Juneau, the third such incident involving the company's Alaska fleet in a decade, officials said on Thursday.

The whale, believed to be an adult female humpback measuring 43 feet in length, was found Wednesday on the ship's so-called "bulbous bow," the section of the vessel's leading tip that goes through the water, said Julie Speegle, spokeswoman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Juneau.

The whale is believed to have become attached to the bow overnight before being discovered Wednesday morning.

Officials from the U.S. Coast Guard and NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service briefly detained the ship, the Sapphire Princess, in an area south of Juneau to open an investigation and remove the whale's body. The ship was allowed to proceed in the afternoon.

About a dozen biologists and marine-mammal experts were examining the whale carcass on Thursday, NOAA said. Experts will conduct a necropsy on Friday to try to determine the cause of death, NOAA said.

Humpback whales are protected under the U.S. Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

It was unclear on Thursday whether any legal action might be taken against the cruise line, owned by Carnival Corp. & Plc.

Speegle said it was possible the whale already was dead when it became pinned to the ship's bow.

The whale was discovered on the ship near Tracy Arm, a fjord known for its tidewater glaciers, waterfalls and abundant marine life. Tracy Arm is a popular destination for Alaska cruise ships.

It was the third whale incident involving a Princess Cruises ship since 2001.

Last year, the same ship was discovered to have a dead fin whale pinned to its bow when it returned to Vancouver from an Alaska voyage. Fin whales, like humpbacks, are classified as endangered.

In 2007, the company paid $750,000 to settle a criminal charge related to a dead whale found just outside Alaska's Glacier Bay in 2001.

That whale, a pregnant humpback, was found to have had its skull crushed. Although Princess did not admit in the settlement to striking the whale, the company pleaded guilty to failing to operate one of its vessels, the Dawn Princess, at a safe speed around whales.

In a statement released to Reuters Thursday, Princess said it was "fully cooperating" with the investigation into the Tracy Arm incident.

"We were surprised and concerned by this discovery, as the ship felt no impact. It is unknown how or when this could have happened, as we were not aware that any whales were sighted in close proximity to the ship when the whale was discovered," the company statement said.

"We have strict whale avoidance procedures in place when our ships are in the vicinity of marine life," the company said, adding the cruise line immediately notified government authorities when the whale was found.

The Sapphire Princess is on a seven-day Inside Passage round-trip voyage out of Seattle, the company said.

via www.reuters.com

A blueprint for blue planet protection - CNN.com

London, England (CNN) -- The oceans have become so depleted by over-fishing, pollution and climate change that they can only be saved by a large global network of reserves, according to a growing consensus among marine scientists.

Campaigners say that sea life -- particularly at the top of the food chain -- is suffering to such an extent that there will eventually be no fish left if action drastic action is not taken to protect the oceans.

More than 70 percent of the world is covered by oceans. There are currently more than 4,000 marine protected areas covering just over 1 percent of the oceans, but the vast majority of reserves have only limited protection.

According to Professor Callum Roberts, of the University of York, one of the leading campaigners and author of The Unnatural History of the Sea, only about 0.1 percent of the sea is completely protected from all exploitation. This should be between 25 and 45 percent to give marine species the best chance of recovery, he said.

Video: Bio-Remediation

via edition.cnn.com

Help families of rangers who have died on the frontline of conservation

On 26 July 2010 Achille Vilavu was killed whilst protecting the gorillas of Mount Tshiaberimu against a Mai Mai militia attack in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Achille is just one of a long line of rangers who have given their lives for conservation worldwide.

Rangers are the guards of our protected areas, working in the field to ensure that wildlife can continue to prosper in protected areas. They are the last frontier between species and ecosystems and those that would want to destroy them. Daily confronted by conflict, smuggling or poaching, their job is to ensure effective protection at all costs. More than 1,000 rangers have been killed protecting nature in their line of duty. In many countries they are the only earner of the family and they leave their wives and children in desperate situations.

On 31 July, it’s World Ranger Day, a day for remembering all rangers that have given their lives to conservation. To help the families of rangers, you can either organize an event on 31 July, or visit the Thin Greenline Foundation.

IUCN’s Global Programme on Protected Areas, the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas and the International Ranger Federation support the Thin Green Line Foundation to help the families of rangers killed in the line of duty and to reduce the risk to rangers. The Foundation supports the families of Park rangers killed, and promotes the need to prevent further ranger deaths, on the frontline of conservation. The Thin Green Line Foundation supports 40 widows and families of rangers killed this year, but there are more than 1,000 families worldwide awaiting support.

Sean Wilmore, President of the Thin Green Line Foundation, sold all of his belongings and travelled the world to produce a film to raise awareness of rangers and increase recognition of their essential contribution to conservation. The DVD of the film and other articles are for sale on the Thin Green Line website and all proceeds go directly to support families of rangers. By supporting the Thin Green Line Foundation and its work, you are helping families directly.

Through this article IUCN would not only like to thank all rangers, but supports and grieves with all the families of rangers who have died.

In Memorium of the Rangers who have died since the last World Ranger Day, 31 July 2009

Aaron Harber (Australia)
Felix Rodriguez (Puerto Rico)
Kenneth Betancourt (Puerto Rico)
Mauricio Guillen (Peru)
John Mapheu (South Africa)
Bongo Skotsho (South Africa)
Marvin Williams (South Africa)
Safari Kakule (Democratic Republic of Congo)
Kambale Katambiriki (Democratic Republic of Congo)
Kanyangara Muhima (Democratic Republic of Congo)
Achille Vilavu (Democratic Republic of Congo)

http://thingreenline.org.au/front
http://www.int-ranger.net/

Super-rare 'elkhorn' coral found in Pacific

An Australian scientist has discovered what could be the world's rarest coral in the remote North Pacific Ocean.

The unique Pacific elkhorn coral was found while conducting underwater surveys of Arno atoll in the Marshall Islands, by coral researcher Dr Zoe Richards of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (CoECRS).

The coral bears a close physical resemblance to the critically endangered and fast-vanishing elkhorn coral (Acropora palmata) of the Atlantic Ocean, but genetic analysis has shown it to be a different species.

"When I first saw it, I was absolutely stunned. The huge colonies - five metres across and nearly two metres high with branches like an elk's antlers - were like nothing I'd seen before in the Pacific Ocean," Zoe recounts.

"So far I have only found this new population of coral to occur along a small stretch of reef at a single atoll in the Marshalls group," Zoe explains. "It grows in relatively shallow water along the exposed reef front and, so far, fewer than 200 colonies are known from that small area."

"The Pacific elkhorn coral has regular divergent blade-like branches that radiate out from single or multiple large central stalks. Its colonies are by far the largest of all the Acropora colonies observed at Arno Atoll, indicating that these are relatively old," she adds.

Whether the Pacific elkhorn is an entirely new species or not is subject to scientific debate, because Zoe has uncovered that over a century ago, in 1898, a scientist called Gardiner described a coral from the island of Rotuma, near Fiji in the South Pacific whose description fits that of the Pacific elkhorn. "Unfortunately at this stage, we do not have any genetic material of A. rotumana to confirm whether or not it is the same species as the Pacific Elkhorn."

This finding is of a population of elkhorn coral in the Pacific is of particular scientific interest because it represents one morphological extreme in Acropora, the dominant genus of reef-building corals, the researchers say.

Genetic analysis of the new coral found that its closest relative is Acropora abrotanoides. Zoe considers it possible that A. abrotanoides, the 19th century Fijian coral and the new Pacific elkhorn could turn out to be variants of the same species - but says there aren't enough data to confirm this, at this point.

The uncertainty surrounding the taxonomic status of the Pacific elkhorn poses a conservation dilemma. To be given threatened species status by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), more needs to be known about the coral, its population size and it relationships to other coral species.

"Currently the Pacific elkhorn would be rated as 'data deficient', meaning there isn't enough information to determine whether it is threatened, vulnerable or critically endangered," she explains. This means that the Pacific elkhorn would join 141 other coral species on the IUCN list whose status is uncertain.

However the status of its Atlantic relative, A. palmata is much more certain: regarded by most marine researchers as the outstanding symbol of the plight of Caribbean corals, it is rated as critically endangered after vanishing from most of its Caribbean reef habitat in recent decades.

Zoe says that the current IUCN definitions are unhelpful in terms of the conservation of many rare and newly described corals such as the Pacific elkhorn, adding it is likely that many of the corals classified as 'data deficient' are actually at risk of extinction.

"When Zoe showed me pictures of the Pacific elkhorn, I was shocked," says leading coral geneticist Professor David Miller of CoECRS and James Cook University.

"The colonies look just like the critically endangered Caribbean species A. palmata, one of the most distinctive of all corals. The fact that these colonies might represent a species that has not been seen for over a hundred years (A. rotumana) says something about how much we know about the remote reefs of North Pacific.

"And the fact that it and many other corals don't qualify as at risk under IUCN criteria is very disappointing. The IUCN seems to be too demanding in terms of the criteria for listing, and we urge they should err on the side of caution in cases like this."

Contact: Zoe Richards
[email protected]
045-054-5081
ARC Centre of Excellence in Coral Reef Studies

World's most ancient creatures found in Scottish field | Science | The Guardian

The tadpole shrimp, Triops cancriformis, which was part of two colonies found at Caerlaverock on the Solway Coast of Dumfriesshire. Photograph: Edmund Fellowes/PA

A field near Gretna in Dumfriesshire might not be an obvious place to find the world's oldest living creatures, but a team of scientists has done just that.

Two colonies of a prehistoric shrimp that evolved when the dinosaurs ruled the Earth have been found alive and well in the Caerlaverock nature reserve on the Solway coast.

The discovery has led experts to think there could be more of the little crustaceans, which are listed as endangered species, elsewhere in the area.

The ancient creatures, known as Triops cancriformis or tadpole shrimps, are thought to have the oldest pedigree of any living animal. Fossil evidence suggests they have hardly changed in the more than 200m years that they have been around.

Wild tadpole shrimps can grow to more than 10cm long and are remarkable in surviving three major extinctions in the Earth's history. The shrimps have an extraordinary lifecycle. They live in temporary pools of water in which they lay eggs. When the pools dry out, the adults die off, but their eggs remain dormant until the pools fill up again.

Researchers at Glasgow University discovered the rare shrimps after collecting samples of mud, which were dried out and then made wet again before being placed in glass tanks. A fortnight later Elaine Benzies, a research student, noticed a tadpole shrimp swimming around in one of the aquariums. "I hadn't expected to find it and was just going in to check on the heat and lights. It was great to see everyone in the lab gathering round and peering into the tank to look at this ancient survivor from the past," she said.

Until recently, researchers believed the ancient shrimps lived only in a single pond in the New Forest in Hampshire. Six years ago, Larry Griffin, a scientist at the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, discovered what appeared to be an isolated colony of the creatures in a pool at Caerlaverock.

"At the time it seemed that the Caerlaverock colony was a vulnerable historic outlier," he said. "But now that we know how this curious creature survives, we have realised that there's a good chance there are more populations out there.

"Triops matures rapidly and produces hundreds of eggs in just a couple of weeks. The pond they live in may dry out, but the eggs can survive in the mud for many years. Although in the UK they are all females, they have both male and female reproductive parts, so just one egg needs to survive to regenerate a whole population."

via www.guardian.co.uk

Article on BBC

Oil industry safety record blown open | Environment | The Guardian

A pelican covered in oil from the BP leak is cleaned in Louisiana. Photograph: Reuters

The oil industry has been responsible for thousands of fires, explosions, and leaks over the last decade, killing dozens of people and destroying wildlife and the environment across America, according to a report published today.

None of the individual incidents catalogued by the National Wildlife Federation comes close in scale to BP's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the worst environmental disaster in America's history. But the thousands of lesser offshore spills, pipeline leaks, refinery fires and other accidents demolish the industry argument that BP's ruptured well was a one-off, and that the oil and gas business has grown safer, the report's authors said.

"These disasters make it clear that the BP disaster isn't a rare accident," said Tim Warman, who directs the global warming programme for NWF, which calls itself the country's largest conservation organisation. "These are daily occurrences. These are daily incidents of not paying attention."

In a further grim reminder, the American midwest was in the throes of its own environmental disaster today, with a ruptured pipeline gushing gallons of oil into Michigan's Kalamazoo River.

Enbridge Energy, which is Canadian-owned but based in Houston, said the spill may have reached 1m gallons. Federal government officials in Washington and the state of Michigan were struggling to stop the oil from reaching the Great Lakes.

In the Gulf of Mexico, meanwhile, while BP's oil well remains capped, a tugboat crashed into an abandoned well this week and set off a 100ft gusher of oil and gas.

The coastguard commander, Thad Allen, told reporters today that operations were switching from response to recovery, suggesting that equipment and personnel in the Gulf could be drastically scaled back in four to six weeks. "If you need fewer skimming vessels out there, there is going to be a levelling you need to consider," he said.

The report from the National Wildlife Federation drew on records from the Minerals Management Service, which regulates offshore drilling, and the Environmental Protection Agency, to come up with a figure of 1,440 offshore leaks, blowouts, and other accidents were reported between 2001-2007.

In addition to environmental damage, these caused 41 deaths and 302 injuries.

The safety record for onshore activities was even more dismal. Some 2,554 pipeline accidents occurred between 2001 and 2007, killing 161 people and injuring 576.

"Oil and gas is being produced in 34 states across the country and it is just not being regulated to the extent it needs to be," said Lauren Pagel of Earthworks, which monitors extractive industries.

At times, the accidents occurred far from industrial installations such as offshore drilling rigs or refineries. In one particularly gruesome incident from August 2000, three families with young children on a camping trip in New Mexico were consumed by a 500ft fireball from a ruptured pipeline. All 12 people were killed, and an official investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board later blamed the pipeline company for failing to detect or repair severely corroded pipes.

Four years later, a tanker truck lost control and crossed guard rails outside Washington DC, igniting 8,000 gallons of burning petrol on one of the country's busiest highways. "There w

via www.guardian.co.uk

Discovered: Audubon's first engraving of a bird

		This is a detail of Audubon’s running grouse (Heath Hen) vignette from a Fairman Draper Underwood & Co. sample sheet.

In 1824, three years before he began to publish his famous "double elephant folio" The Birds of America, John James Audubon (1785-1851), the eminent artist of American birds and animals, created a drawing of a running grouse for use in the design for a New Jersey bank note. Although the artist mentions the drawing and the resulting engraved paper money in two separate diary entries, no one has ever been able to locate or identify such an illustration.

Now, after a decade-long search by an Audubon scholar from Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences and a numismatic historian from St. Louis, Audubon's first published illustration of a bird has been discovered.

In a forthcoming article in the Journal of the Early Republic, Robert M. Peck, curator of art and artifacts and senior fellow at the Academy of Natural Sciences, and the article's lead author, and Eric Newman, an authority on American money, reveal their discovery and explain how Audubon's fledgling entry into the visual world of commerce took place. The find is important not only for solving the puzzle of the missing engraving, but also because it illustrates Audubon's development as an artist of American subjects. It also provides a rare, contemporary view of the Heath Hen, a subspecies of running grouse that has become extinct since Audubon portrayed the bird in the early 19th century.

The search for the missing engraving

In 1955, Audubon biographer Alice Ford began a decade-long search for the lost engraving in both the U.S. and Great Britain, but without success. In 1960, William H. Dillistin, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and a noted numismatic scholar, made his own systematic search for the Audubon bank note. Dillistin was no more successful than Ford.

Several of Audubon's more recent biographers also have searched in vain for the bank note Audubon mentioned. Unable to find the evidence of Audubon's claim, some scholars have dismissed it as a red herring, invented by Audubon (a frequent embellisher of his own achievements) to burnish his reputation in the lean years before publishing his landmark book, The Birds of America (1827-1838).

Now, research by Peck and Newman on the 19th-century American banking and engraving companies that furnished paper money at the time confirm the reliability of the artist's assertion and explain how forces beyond his control denied Audubon the numismatic immortality he craved.

By tracing the graphic offerings of the bank note engraver Gideon Fairman (1774-1827), to whom Audubon gave his drawing of a Heath Hen (a subspecies of the Pinnated Grouse or Greater Prairie Chicken), the authors successfully identified the lost Audubon image and provided two possible explanations for the elusiveness of Audubon's first published bird illustration. The ill-fated Audubon grouse image, which the authors found on engraved bank note sample sheets in a private collection, did eventually make its way onto proof bank notes made for at least two independent banks. But because these banks were in Connecticut and Ohio and were made years after the artist's initial contact with Fairman, they were not detected as being by Audubon, until now.

The full account of the engraving and its place in Audubon's celebrated works will appear in the fall issue of the Journal of the Early Republic, the journal of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, published by Penn Press. The society is housed at the Library Company of Philadelphia.

The Academy of Natural Sciences, founded in 1812, is the oldest natural science research institution and museum In the Americas and a world leader in biodiversity and environmental research. The mission of the Academy is the encouragement and cultivation of the sciences.

Contact: Carolyn Belardo
[email protected]
215-299-1043

The Academy of Natural Sciences

Study finds black carbon implicated in global warming

Increasing the ratio of black carbon to sulfate in the atmosphere increases climate warming, suggests a study conducted by a University of Iowa professor and his colleagues and published in the July 25 issue of the journal Nature Geoscience.

Black carbons -- arising from such sources as diesel engine exhaust and cooking fires -- are widely considered a factor in global warming and are an important component of air pollution around the world, according to Greg Carmichael, Karl Kammermeyer Professor of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering in the UI College of Engineering and co-director of the UI's Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research. Sulfates occur in the atmosphere largely as a result of various industrial processes.

Carmichael's colleagues in the study were V. Ramanathan and Y. Feng of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, Calif.; S-C. Yoon and S-W. Kim of Seoul National University, South Korea; and J. J. Schauer of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

In order to conduct their study, the researchers made ground-level studies of air samples at Cheju Island, South Korea, and then sampled the air at altitudes between 100 and 15,000 feet above the ground using unmanned aircrafts (UAVs).

They found that the amount of solar radiation absorbed increased as the black carbon to sulfate ratio rose. Also, black carbon plumes derived from fossil fuels were 100 percent more efficient at warming than were plumes arising from biomass burning.

"These results had been indicated by theory but not verified by observations before this work," Carmichael said. "There is currently great interest in developing strategies to reduce black carbon as it offers the opportunity to reduce air pollution and global warming at the same time."

The authors suggest that climate mitigation policies should aim to reduce the ratio of black carbon to sulfate in emissions, as well as the total amount of black carbon released.

In a paper published in May 2008 in Nature Geoscience, Carmichael and Ramanathan found that black carbon soot from diesel engine exhaust and cooking fires -- widely used in Asia -- may play a larger role than previously thought in global warming. They said that coal and cow dung-fueled cooking fires in China and India produce about one-third of black carbon; the rest is largely due to diesel exhaust in Europe and other regions relying on diesel transport. The paper also noted that soot and other forms of black carbon could equal up to 60 percent of the current global warming effect of carbon dioxide, the leading greenhouse gas.

Carmichael is chair of the scientific advisory group for the World Meteorological Organization's GURME (Global atmospheric watch Urban Research Meteorology and Environment) project and chair of the scientific advisory group for the Shanghai Expo pilot project on air quality forecasting. He has worked with Shanghai authorities for three years to help develop an early warning system for air quality problems and heat waves.

The study was funded by National Science Foundation.

Contact: Jennifer Brown
[email protected]
319-356-7124
University of Iowa - Health Science

Signs of reversal of Arctic cooling in some areas

New data indicate rapid temperature rise in the coldest region of mainland Europe

		This is the Kunijok Valley in the north of Khibiny Low Mountains (central Kola Peninsula in Arctic Russia).

Moscow/Stuttgart/ Halle(Saale). Parts of the Arctic have cooled clearly over the past century, but temperatures have been rising steeply since 1990 also there. This is the finding of a summer temperature reconstruction for the past 400 years produced on the base of tree rings from regions beyond the Arctic Circle. German and Russian researchers analysed tree growth using ring width of pine from Russia's Kola Peninsula and compared their findings with similar studies from other parts of the Arctic. For the past 400 years since AD 1600, the reconstructed summer temperature on Kola in the months of July and August has varied between 10.4°C (1709) and 14.7°C (1957), with a mean of 12.2°C. Afterwards, after a cooling phase, a ongoing warming can be observed from 1990 onwards. Researchers from the Institute of Geography in Moscow, Hohenheim University and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) report in journal Arctic, Antarctic and Alpine Research: "The data indicate that solar activity may have been one of the major driving factors of summer temperatures, but this has been overlaid by other factors since 1990".

The researchers used for this study wood samples from a total of 69 Scots pines (Pinus sylvestris) from the Khibiny Mountains on the Kola Peninsula, situated between the Arctic Circle and the ocean port of Murmansk, not far from the Finnish border. The investigated region is a transition zone between Scandinavia, which is strongly affected by the gulf stream resp. North Atlantic Current, and the continental regions Eurasia. This makes the region particularly interesting for climatological studies.

Kola has a cold-temperate climate with long, moderately cold winters and cool, humid summers. In this part of the Arctic, the mean temperature fluctuates between -12°C in January and +13°C in July, with a growing season of just 60 to 80 days. The northern taiga vegetation is dominated by spruce, pine and birch. The samples came from three locations in the Khibiny Mountains close to recent altitudinal timberline at altitudes of between 250 and 450 m above sea level. The geographical northern timberline lies approximately 100 km further north. In earlier studies, researchers led by Tatjana Böttger from the UFZ were able to show that pine forests on the Kola Peninsula expanded between 7000 and 3500 years ago to about 50 km north of their present-day limit. However, for this study, they used trees from the altitudinal timberline, since they respond very sensitively to temperature fluctuations and provide particularly useful information, as demonstrated by US researchers in November 2009 in the journal PNAS when they used a long-lived species of pine in California and Nevada to show that these trees had grown particularly fast over the last 50 of the past 3500 years because of higher temperatures.

		Yuri Kononov of the Institute of Geography, Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow and Michael Friedrich of the Institute of Botany, University of Hohenheim are collecting tree samples of Scots...

In the Tree-Ring-Laboratory at the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart the German researchers measured the width of the individual tree rings. The calibration of these data with the help of meteorological records for the last 127 years and the interpretation of results occurred together with Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Halle. "Besides of temperature, growth is also strongly influenced by non-climatic factors like light, nutrients, water supply and competition from other trees. So it is vital to isolate these trends to obtain a climate signal as pure as possible," explains Yury M. Kononov from the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.

Following the summer temperature reconstruction on the Kola Peninsula, the researchers compared their results with similar tree-ring studies from Swedish Lapland and from the Yamal and Taimyr Peninsulas in Russian Siberia, which had been published in Holocene in 2002. The reconstructed summer temperatures of the last four centuries from Lapland and the Kola and Taimyr Peninsulas are similar in that all three data series display a temperature peak in the middle of the twentieth century, followed by a cooling of one or two degrees. Only the data series from the Yamal Peninsula differed, reaching its peak later, around 1990. What stands out in the data from the Kola Peninsula is that the highest temperatures were found in the period around 1935 and 1955, and that by 1990 the curve had fallen to the 1870 level, which corresponds to the start of the Industrial Age. Since 1990, however, temperatures have increased again evidently. What is conspicuous about the new data is that the reconstructed minimum temperatures coincide exactly with times of low solar activity. The researchers therefore assume that in the past, solar activity was a significant factor contributing to summer temperature fluctuations in the Arctic. However, this correlation is only visible until 1970, after which time other – possibly regional – factors gain the upper hand. "One thing is certain: this part of the Arctic warmed up after the end of the Little Ice Age around 250 years ago, cooled down from the middle of the last century and has been warming up again since 1990," says Dr Tatjana Böttger, a paleoclimatologist at the UFZ.

In September 2009, another international team presented model calculations showing that the Arctic had gradually cooled down by around 0.2 °C per thousand years over the last two millennia to the start of the Industrial Age. They attributed this to a gradual decline in solar radiation in the summer. However, the last decade was the warmest of the Common Era and was 1.4 °C above the forecasts, report Darrell S. Kaufman and his colleagues in Science. The new data produced by Kononov, Friedrich and Böttger support the thesis that solar activity seems to be a significant factor influencing summer temperatures in the Arctic, but that its influence has weakened considerably over the past few decades.

Publication:

Yu. M. Kononov, M. Friedrich and T. Boettger (2009): Regional Summer Temperature Reconstruction in the Khibiny Low Mountains (Kola Peninsula, NW Russia) by Means of Tree-ring Width during the Last Four Centuries
Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research, Vol. 41, No. 4, 2009, pp. 460�
http://instaar.colorado.edu/aaar/browse_abstracts/index.php
DOI: 10.1657/1938-4246-41.4.460

More information available from: 

Dr Tatjana Böttger (DE+RU+EN)
Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ)
Tel: +49 345 558 5227

Dr Yury M. Kononov (RU+EN)
Russian Academy of Sciences
Tel: +49 345 558 5405
http://igras.ru/

Michael Friedrich (Dipl. agr. biol.) (DE+EN)
University of Hohenheim
Tel: +49 711 459 22196 or 22188
https://www.uni-hohenheim.de/1597.html?typo3state=persons&lsfid=1381

and

Dr Stephan Weise (DE+EN)
Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ)
Tel: +49 345 558 5435
http://www.ufz.de/index.php?de=4371

or from

Tilo Arnhold (UFZ press office)
Telephone: +49 341 235 1635
Email: [email protected]

Related links:

Comparing climatic trends across space and through time (UFZ Magazine 12, 2006)
Paleoclimate research at the UFZ
http://www.ufz.de/index.php?de=17015
http://www.ufz.de/index.php?de=1699

Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_Pine

References:

Matthew W. Salzer, Malcolm K. Hughes, Andrew G. Bunn, and Kurt F. Kipfmueller (2009): Recent unprecedented tree-ring growth in bristlecone pine at the highest elevations and possible causes. PNAS http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/11/13/0903029106.full.pdf+html

Kaufman, Darrell S. et al. (2009): Recent Warming Reverses Long-Term Arctic Cooling. Science 325, 1236 http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/325/5945/1236

Boettger, T., Hiller, A., and Kremenetski, C. (2003): Mid-Holocene warming in north-west Kola Peninsula, Russia: northern pine limit movement and stable isotope evidence. Holocene, 13: 405�. http://hol.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/13/3/403

Grudd, H., Briffa, K. R., Karlén, W., Bartholin, T.S., Jones, P.D. and Kromer, B., 2002: A 7400-year tree chronology in northern Swedish Lapland: natural climatic variability expressed on annual to millennial timescales. Holocene, 12: 657-666. http://hol.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/12/6/657

Hantemirov, R. M., and Shiyatov, S. G., 2002: A continuous multimillennial ring-width chronology in Yamal, northwestern Siberia. Holocene, 12: 717�. http://www.nosams.whoi.edu/PDFs/papers/Holocene_v12a.pdf

Naurzbaev, M. M., Vaganov, E. A., Sidorova, O. V., and Schweingruber, F. H., 2002: Summer temperatures in eastern Taimyr inferred from a 2427-year late-Holocene tree-ring chronology and earlier floating series. Holocene, 12: 727�. http://hol.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/12/6/727

Contact: Tilo Arnhold
[email protected]
49-341-235-1635
Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres

Farmland bird numbers fall to record lows - Nature, Environment - The Independent

Farmland bird numbers fell 5% last year to new record lows, official figures showed today.

The latest statistics covering the fortunes of 19 key species which breed or feed on farmland in England showed populations had more than halved since records began in 1966.

Conservationists said the year-on-year fall between 2008 and 2009 could be the result of a cold winter and the loss of "set-aside" land which farmers were paid to leave fallow, an EU policy which was abolished in 2007.

With another harsh winter this year, the figures for 2009-2010 could be worse still.

The single-year decline is part of a trend in falling farmland bird numbers which has seen populations drop 53% below where they were when monitoring first started in 1966.

Experts at the RSPB said the figures made "depressing reading" and they were most concerned about the fortunes of threatened species including lapwings which saw a 12% decline, corn buntings whose numbers fell 7%, and the grey partridge, which plummeted by 23%.

Lapwings and grey partridges, both "red listed" species because of concerns about the declines they are suffering, were among six birds which saw significant falls in numbers between 2008 and 2009, along with kestrels, skylarks, starlings and greenfinches.

In total 12 species saw numbers fall, while seven farmland birds including jackdaws and goldfinches saw populations increase.

The RSPB said farmers were having success in reversing declines in birds such as lapwings on land which benefits from advanced environmental subsidies, known as the higher level stewardship scheme (HLS), designed to boost numbers of threatened species.

But just 1% of farmland is covered by the higher level scheme, which is paid for by the EU and the Government, and the wildlife charity fears the programme is under threat from coalition budget cuts.

The basic package of environmental subsidies - known as entry level stewardship (ELS), which was designed to reverse the overall trend in falling farmland bird numbers - does not appear to be working as well it should, the RSPB said.

Today's figures showed a five-year decline in bird numbers of 10% up to last year, even though 56% of farmland in England is covered by the basic subsidy scheme.

The RSPB said the longer term decline suggested the different options for managing land under the ELS scheme were not being used in the right ways.

The charity is backing the voluntary Campaign for the Farmed Environment by the agricultural industry that aims to replace the benefits to wildlife of set-aside, and urged more people to join the scheme to help farmland birds.

Dr Mark Avery of the RSPB said it was hard to draw any "hard and fast conclusions" from the one-year fall in bird numbers, but added that the five-year decline was a real cause for concern.

As to why numbers fell last year, he said: "The winter before last was a moderately cold one which could have impacted on birds' ability to find food.

"We may also be seeing the knock-on effect of set-aside being abolished in 2007

via www.independent.co.uk