Word: habitats
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...warm, waterlogged soil of wetlands is prime habitat for the anaerobic microbes that produce methane - and in general, the warmer and wetter, the more the methane. Since rice paddies are kept underwater during the wet growing season in Southeast Asia and other major rice producing areas, paddies too serve as ideal factories for methane. "[The farmers] use controlled floods, and that's guaranteed to produce methane," says Palmer...
...away from the Equator and toward the poles. That means many species of plants and animals will also have to move in order to survive. Whether or not they do will depend on several factors, but two of the most important are how fast a species can adjust its habitat range, and how quickly that range is moving out from under it. (See "COP15: Climate-Change Conference...
Nevertheless, while the climate-velocity concept is still crude, it's promising enough that Ackerly is collaborating with an organization called the Bay Area Open Space Council on habitat conservation strategies in central California. The new research informs one of the key challenges conservationists face: having only limited funds to buy up land, and, thus, having to spend wisely. "What we bring," says Ackerly, "is the ability to think about how topography might affect those decisions...
...Clearing land for palm-oil plantations is Indonesia's leading cause of deforestation, says a 2007 U.N. report, with Sumatra, Kalimantan and Papua the three worst-affected provinces. Thanks largely to the global appetite for palm oil, which is found in everything from chocolate bars to biofuels, the natural habitat of endangered animals such as the orangutan and Borneo rhino shrinks further each year. REDD could save them, said a recent study of Kalimantan by researchers from the University of Queensland in Australia. They believe that the revenues generated by preserving a forest could not only compete with the profits...
...trend is part of a larger movement toward voluntourism, i.e., trips with a heavy focus on volunteering. But unlike programs like Habitat for Humanity that pair weeklong projects with unglamorous accommodations, hotel-organized excursions generally take up no more than a day, and participants can cap off the experience back at the ranch with $15 cocktails and a night on high-thread-count sheets...