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Environmental News Network -- Know Your Environment
A team of researchers from the United Kingdom has developed a novel method for assessing human/pathogen interactions in the natural environment, using citizen scientists wearing boot socks over their shoes during walks in the countryside. In the process, they found that slightly less than half of the socks were positive for the gastrointestinal pathogen, Campylobacter. The research is published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology.
Ponds and lakes play a significant role in the global carbon cycle, and are often net emitters of carbon gases to the atmosphere. However, the rate at which gases move across the air-water boundary is not well quantified, particularly for small ponds.
One of the robust features of global warming under increasing greenhouse gas concentrations is that different places warm at different paces.
The United Nations agricultural agency today unveiled guidelines to help Governments balance the needs of farming and climate change when making decisions, such as whether to refill a dried up lake or focus instead on sustainably using the forest on its shore.
A comparison of conditions in the outback on either side of Australia’s dingo fence has revealed that extermination of these apex predators affects not only the abundance of other animals and plants, but also reduces the quality of the soil.
The UNSW study indicates greater control of kangaroo numbers is needed across a third of the Australian continent where dingoes are rare, to reduce damage on ecosystems.
“We have shown for the first time that the presence of dingoes is linked to healthier soils, because they suppress the numbers of kangaroos that graze on the vegetation,” says study senior author UNSW Associate Professor Mike Letnic.
This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows the unusual galaxy IRAS 06076-2139, found in the constellation Lepus (The Hare). Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) instruments observed the galaxy from a distance of 500 million light-years.
