Scientists are, for the first time, objectively evaluating ways to help species adapt to rapid climate change and other environmental threats via strategies that were considered too radical for serious consideration as recently as five or 10 years ago. Among these radical strategies currently being considered is so-called "managed relocation." Managed relocation, which is also known as &...

When the going gets rough, the tough apparently sing slower. As vegetation reclaimed formerly cleared land in California, Oregon and Washington over the last 35 years, male white-crowned sparrows have lowered their pitch and slowed down their singing so that their love songs would carry better through heavier foliage. "This is the first time that anyone has shown that bird songs can shift wit...

For years, genes have been considered the one and only way biological traits could be passed down through generations of organisms. Not anymore. Increasingly, biologists are finding that non-genetic variation acquired during the life of an organism can sometimes be passed on to offspring—a phenomenon known as epigenetic inheritance. An article forthcoming in the July issue of The Quarterly R...

The most comprehensive modeling yet carried out on the likelihood of how much hotter the Earth`s climate will get in this century shows that without rapid and massive action, the problem will be about twice as severe as previously estimated six years ago – and could be even worse than that. The study uses the MIT Integrated Global Systems Model, a detailed computer simulation of global econo...

How will the Netherlands, dominated by water, be affected by future climate change? Dutch researcher Martin van Breukelen hopes to answer that question by analyzing stalagmites from the South American Amazon tributaries in Peru as a way to reconstruct climate changes in the past. Information that can be used to test climate models is stored in various forms: in ice formations, plant remnants, ocea...

Climate change, fishing and commercial shipping top the list of threats to the ocean off the West Coast of the United States. "Every single spot of the ocean along the West Coast," said Ben Halpern, a marine ecologist at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at the University of California at Santa Barbara, "is affected by 10 to 15 different human activit...

Coral reefs could disappear entirely from the Coral Triangle region of the Pacific Ocean by the end of the century, threatening the food supply and livelihoods for about 100 million people, according to a new study from World Wildlife Fund. Averting catastrophe will depend on quick and effective global action on climate change coupled with the implementation of regional solutions to problems of ov...

Oceanographers Jim Bishop and Todd Wood of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have measured the fate of carbon particles originating in plankton blooms in the Southern Ocean, using data that deep-diving Carbon Explorer floats collected around the clock for well over a year. Their study reveals that most of the carbon from lush plankton blooms never reaches ...

An expansion of wetlands and not a large-scale melting of frozen methane deposits is the likely cause of a spike in atmospheric methane gas that took place some 11,600 years ago, according to an international research team led by Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. The finding is expected to come as a relief to scientists and climate watchers concerned that huge accelerations of g...

Ice ages are the greatest natural climate changes in recent geological times. Their rise and fall are caused by slight changes in the Earth`s orbit around the Sun due to the influence of the other planets. But we do not know the exact relationship between the changes in the Earth`s orbit and the changes in climate. New research from the Niels Bohr Institute indicates that there can be changes in t...