#defaunation

Key Takeaways Significant Vertebrate Impact on Decomposition: Vertebrates globally enhance litter decomposition, increasing mass loss by an average of 6.7%. Varied Influence Across Ecosystems and Climates: This positive effect is consistent across different litter types, climatic regions, ecosystem types, and vertebrate taxa. Influence on Nitrogen and Phosphorus Release Negligible: The study…

The abundance of wild animals is regressing speedily as the number of domesticated animals and persons keeps escalating. Such demographic contrast signals that we urgently need to modify our model of subsistence and our interaction with Mother Nature. If we had to choose between a biodiverse landscape and one hosting a monoculture of pine trees with ruminating cattle, many would take the first…

Defaunation

The removal of a fauna from...

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One-two carbon punch of defaunation

I’ve just read a well-planned and lateral-thinking paper in Nature Communications that I think readers of CB.com ought to appreciate. The study is a simulation of a complex ecosystem service that would be nigh impossible to examine experimentally. Being a self-diagnosed fanatic of simulation studies for just such purposes, I took particular delight in the results.

In many ways, the results of the

Science Just Revealed the Devastating Impact We’re Going to Have on Our Oceans

[Global] According to two new papers from universities in Australia and the United States, our oceans, and the animals living in them, might be in real trouble if we don’t cut back on our carbon dioxide emissions. The culprit? What’s called carbon dioxide seeps, sites where the gas bubbles out of underwater volcano vents and dissipates into the area around them, making the water more acidic. The…

A Spy in the Sky Against Pirate Fishing

Bluefin tuna (Photo: Franco Banfi/Getty Images)

On a large monitor in a room in Harwell, England, the planet Earth rotated against a black background. Brightly colored dots bunched up against the shorelines of the continents, with other points scattered across the oceans. It looked like something from the latest James Bond film. In fact, those dots represented the location of nearly every…

Why We Need to Save Wildlife to Save Ourselves

Cone snail shells: Not just something pretty to look at.

Midway through the new special issue of Science, about the global loss of wildlife, my heart caught on this idea: We now live with a steady, imperceptible loss “in people’s expectations of what the natural world around them should look like,” and “each generation grows up within a slightly more impoverished natural biodiversity.” It’s…