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Understanding the Impacts of Land-Use Policies on a Threatened Species: Is There a Future for the Bornean Orangutan?

The geographic distribution of Bornean orang-utans and its overlap with existing land-use categories (protected areas, logging and plantation concessions) is a necessary foundation to prioritize conservation planning. Based on an extensive orang-utan survey dataset and a number of environmental variables, we modelled an orang-utan distribution map. The modelled orang-utan distribution map covers 155,106 km2 (21% of Borneo's landmass) and reveals four distinct distribution areas. The most important environmental predictors are annual rainfall and land cover. The overlap of the orang-utan distribution with land-use categories reveals that only 22% of the distribution lies in protected areas, but that 29% lies in natural forest concessions. A further 19% and 6% occurs in largely undeveloped oil palm and tree plantation concessions, respectively. The remaining 24% of the orang-utan distribution range occurs outside of protected areas and outside of concessions. An estimated 49% of the orang-utan distribution will be lost if all forest outside of protected areas and logging concessions is lost. To avoid this potential decline plantation development in orang-utan habitats must be halted because it infringes on national laws of species protection. Further growth of the plantation sector should be achieved through increasing yields in existing plantations and expansion of new plantations into areas that have already been deforested. To reach this goal a large scale island-wide land-use masterplan is needed that clarifies which possible land uses and managements are allowed in the landscape and provides new standardized strategic conservation policies. Such a process should make much better use of non-market values of ecosystem services of forests such as water provision, flood control, carbon sequestration, and sources of livelihood for rural communities. Presently land use planning is more driven by vested interests and direct and immediate economic gains, rather than by approaches that take into consideration social equity and environmental sustainability.

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Study Finds Greenland’s Ice Cover is Sliding Into the Ocean

By ClickGreen

Like snow sliding off a roof on a sunny day, the Greenland Ice Sheet may be sliding faster into the ocean due to massive releases of meltwater from surface lakes, according to a new study by the University of Colorado Boulder-based Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences.

Such lake drainages may affect sea-level rise, with implications for coastal communities, according to the researchers. "This is the first evidence that Greenland's 'supraglacial' lakes have responded to recent increases in surface meltwater production by draining more frequently, as opposed to growing in size," says CIRES research associate William Colgan, who co-led the new study with CU-Boulder computer science doctoral student Yu-Li Liang.

During summer, meltwater pools into lakes on the ice sheet's surface. When the water pressure gets high enough, the ice fractures beneath the lake, forming a vertical drainpipe, and "a huge burst of water quickly pulses through to the bed of the ice sheet," Colgan said.

The study is being published online today by the journal Remote Sensing of the Environment. The study was funded by the Arctic Sciences Program of the National Science Foundation.

The researchers used satellite images along with innovative feature-recognition software to monitor nearly 1,000 lakes on a Connecticut-sized portion of the ice sheet over a 10-year period. They discovered that as the climate warms, such catastrophic lake drainages are increasing in frequency. Catastrophic lake drainages were 3.5 times more likely to occur during the warmest years than the coldest years.

During a typical catastrophic lake drainage, about 1 million cubic meters of meltwater - which is equivalent to the volume of about 4,000 Olympic swimming pools - funnels to the ice sheet's underside within a day or two. Once the water reaches the ice sheet's belly that abuts underlying rock, it may turn the ice-bed surface into a Slip 'N Slide, lubricating the ice sheet's glide into the ocean. This would accelerate the sea-level rise associated with climate change.

Alternatively, however, the lake drainages may carve out sub-glacial "sewers" to efficiently route water to the ocean. "This would drain the ice sheet's water, making less water available for ice-sheet sliding," Colgan said. That would slow the ice sheet's migration into the ocean and decelerate sea-level rise.

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It’s Official: March was Warmest Ever in United States

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has maintained records of weather and climate since 1895. According to these records, the month of March, 2012 has set a new record as the warmest March ever for the contiguous United States. Across the nation, 15,000 local warm temperature records were broken. The average temperature was 51.1 degrees F, which is 8.6 degrees higher than the average 20th century March temperature. It is 0.5 degrees higher than the previous warmest March in 1910. The record high March also pushed the average temperature for the first quarter (January-March) to a new record high.

This recent NOAA release makes official what everybody already knew. Last month, the amazing warm weather was all people were talking about, using words like "crazy" and "incredible". People reveled in the beautiful weather, enjoying it to the fullest, but all the time knowing that it just did not make sense.

The eastern two-thirds of the country were subject to the high temps while the Pacific states were spared. In fact, the only state within the lower 48 that had below average temps for March was Washington. Since US climate records began over 117 years ago, only one other month has seen a greater departure from the average, and that was January 2006.

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ECU Research Reveals Impact From 2010 Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

By East Carolina University

Research by East Carolina University faculty and students has confirmed that oil from the April 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico made it into the ocean’s food chain.

The ECU researchers worked with colleagues at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, the Georgia Institute of Technology, Oregon State University and the United States Geological Survey. In their study published by Geophysical Research Letters, the researchers found that crude oil from the spill entered the food chain through the tiniest of organisms, zooplankton, which forms the base of the food chain in marine ecosystems.

Funded by the National Science Foundation, ECU biology graduate student Ben McGlaughon, geological sciences graduate student Kim Scalise, and undergraduate biology student Jessica Snyder, worked alongside Dr. Siddhartha Mitra from the Department of Geological Sciences and Dr. David Kimmel from the Department of Biology and Institute for Coastal Sciences and Policy to analyze samples of zooplankton extracted from the Gulf of Mexico during August and September of 2010.

The researchers were able to determine the extent to which oil and oil pollutants had affected the ecosystem by extracting polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which can be used to identify oil and determine its origin.

“Our research helped to determine a ‘fingerprint’ of the Deepwater Horizon spill; something that other researchers interested the spill may be able to use,” Mitra said.

“Furthermore, our work demonstrated that zooplankton in the Northern Gulf of Mexico accumulated toxic compounds derived from the well.”

The researchers found the fingerprint of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in low levels among zooplankton in the area as much as a month after the leaking wellhead was capped. In addition, the extent of the contamination seemed to be patchy. Some zooplankton at certain locations far removed from the spill showed evidence of contamination, whereas zooplankton in other locations, sometimes near the spill, showed lower indications of exposure to the oil-derived pollutants.

The ECU researchers will follow up on their study to confirm if Deepwater Horizon oil compounds made it to the North Carolina coastline at any point after the 2010 spill.

For additional information on the current findings, or for information about the follow-up study, contact Mitra at 252-328-6611 or mitras@ecu.edu.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

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Persistent Droughts Plaguing Much of the World

Long dry spells have been a problem in various parts of the world including China, Africa, Russia, Australia, the southern and western United States, and Western Europe. Many are hoping that this is just a cyclical nuisance and not evidence of a permanent change in climate patterns. England in particular is used to being a damp and rainy island, but has been surprised now with three straight winters of drought-level precipitation. The first to notice and be affected by the changing levels of rainfall are the farmers. However, now public officials are beginning to worry about the long-term stability of their water supplies and the effects that lower rainfall will have on the environment as a whole.

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Fires and Deaths From Deforestation Linked

By R Greenway, Environmental News Network

A new study links smoke from the burning of wood waste from deforestation to deaths from the effects of breathing all that smoke.

Worldwide, smoke from these fires (called landscape fires) contributed to an average of 339,000 deaths per year between 1997 and 2006, according to new research published in Environmental Health Perspectives and released today during the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia were the hardest hit by fire-smoke deaths, with an estimated annual average of 157,000 and 110,000 deaths, respectively, attributable to fire smoke exposure, said researcher Fay Johnston, who represented a global team at the 2012 AAAS Annual Meeting in Vancouver, Canada.

Johnston and her co-authors specifically assessed the health impacts of particulate matter smaller than 2.5 micrometers, an important byproduct of landscape fire smoke. First, they looked at satellite data to gather information on areas burned each year during the study period; particulate matter exposures were estimated using a chemical transport model, satellite-based observations, and other data. They applied an accepted World Health Organization framework for determining annual mortality in different regions, and they used results from previous research on the health effects of smoke-related particulate matter to estimate deaths attributable to fire smoke. They further calculated annual mortality during a La Niña period, and an El Niño period. Worldwide, deaths from fire smoke during those periods were estimated at 262,000 and 532,000, respectively, compared with an estimated 10-year global average of 339,000 deaths.

"Fire emissions are an important contributor to global mortality," the EHP article concludes. "Adverse health outcomes associated with landscape fire smoke could be substantially reduced by curtailing burning of tropical rainforests, which rarely burn naturally. The large estimated influence of El Niño suggests a relationship between climate and the burden of mortality attributable to landscape fire smoke."

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The Decline of Wild Salmon

The Chinook salmon, Oncorhynchus tshawytscha, is the largest species in the pacific (Oncorhynchus) salmon family. Other commonly used names for the species include King salmon, Quinnat salmon, Spring salmon and Tyee salmon. Chinook are an anadromous fish native to the north Pacific Ocean and the river systems of western North America ranging from California to Alaska. Scientists have found that only about ten percent of the fall-run Chinook salmon spawning in California's Mokelumne River are naturally produced wild salmon. A massive influx of hatchery-raised fish that return to spawn in the wild is masking the fact that too few wild fish are returning to sustain a natural population in the river. The study, published in the online journal PLoS ONE, highlights the danger of relying on ordinary census techniques to evaluate the health of wild salmon populations and their habitats. Most hatchery fish in California are unmarked and therefore undetectable in population surveys. For this study, the researchers were able to identify hatchery fish by using a novel technique to detect traces of a hatchery diet preserved in the ear bones of adult fish.

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Himalayan Ice melt less than thought

Estimates from satellite monitoring suggest the melt rate from the Himalayas and other high-altitude Asian mountains in recent years was much less than what scientists on the ground had estimated, but those monitoring the satellite data warn not to jump to the skeptical conclusion.

The region's ice melt from 2003-2010 was estimated at 4 billion tons a year, far less than earlier estimates of around 50 billion tons, according to the study published Wednesday in the peer-reviewed journal Nature.

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Heat is Power Association Launches

In his recent State of the Union address, President Obama called upon an America built to last, "an economy built on American manufacturing, American energy, skills for American workers, and a renewal of American values." Today, the Heat is Power Association is ready to answer this call in this country and beyond.

A coalition focused on the wide-scale development of a robust Waste Heat to Power (WH2P) market re-launched today as the Heat is Power Association to bring together everyone with a stake in clean energy and industry to capture an opportunity we're wasting every day—waste heat.

And we're not alone. From the White House to the campaign trail to state houses across the country, almost everyone can agree on two things: that the way to spur the global economy is through manufacturing, and we must shore up clean energy supplies to power and protect cities and towns everywhere. Alongside President Obama's call for a renewed manufacturing sector, he touted the thousands of jobs that have been created at the hands of clean energy investments. By expanding our focus on the output of energy resources – emission-free electricity – we can grow those numbers exponentially.

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Canada Uranium and Other Mines: The Future

Canada was the world's largest uranium producer for many years, accounting for about 22% of world output, but in 2009 was overtaken by Kazakhstan. Production is expected to increase significantly from 2013 as the new Cigar Lake mine comes into operation. Canada is also a large producer of many other mineral products. The problem is that many mining operations produce significant amounts of waste in an environment with a fragile ecosystem and limited resources to deal with environmental issues. While the government of Canada has introduced legislation to ensure that at least some of the costs associated with reclamation are accounted for in future developments, critics believe there are still serious risks.

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