Researchers have found that farmer experience, concerns and motivation influence environmental outcomes for agri-environment schemes (AES), in a study in southern England. Farmers with more environmental-management experience and/or concern for wildlife created habitats that provided more pollen and nectar for bees and butterflies and winter seed for birds. The results suggest that supporting environmental learning among farmers may increase the success of AES.

The willingness of farmers to create wetlands within agri-environment schemes (AES) has been assessed as part of a new study in Sweden. Land-owning farmers and those with prior knowledge of the Water Framework Directive (WFD) were more likely to create wetlands than leasehold farmers or those with no prior knowledge of WFD. Common reasons for not wanting to take part in the scheme included the farmers’ senior age, that wetlands would not be suitable on the farm and high costs — leading the researchers to suggest that changes in subsidy payments may increase wetland creation.

The cost-effectiveness of agri-environment schemes to conserve species and habitats under the Scottish Rural Development Programme (SRDP) has been assessed by a recent study. Cost-effectiveness was found to vary widely between schemes. Improvements in cost-effectiveness relative to specific conservation objectives might be achieved with increased geographical targeting, advice and monitoring of impacts.

A species of mussel has been used to investigate the connectivity of two marine protected areas (MPAs) along the central Portuguese west coast in a new study. The chemistry of mussel shells was used to trace the dispersal routes for larval mussels, demonstrating that the Arrábida MPA is an important source population in the area.

The post Satellite tracking helping to conserve globally important bird habitat appeared first on The Lead SA.

Will Obama’s green cabinet give birth to the next spotted owl?

A freshwater lake the size of the state of West Virginia has practically disappeared. The lessons that the Aral Sea may hold for U.S. waterways.

History has been made. Today is for the hangover, and then the hard work. Six distinguished environmentalists weigh in.

Obama steals a play from the Reagan/Bush playbook, and hopes for the opposite result.

What’s been called the largest wetlands restoration in the Western U.S. was halted in December. California is projecting up to a $42 billion budget shortfall

Sometimes, the big guns in Congress aim to keep stuff 'away' from their states. Senator Harry Reid and the tale of Yucca Mountain is a prime example.

An MNN column causes an uproar in the scientific and not-so-scientific community. Our columnist responds.

OK, I admit. Maybe there's no such thing as climate change. Maybe it's all a hoax. Maybe.

Humanity is often at its worst and wackiest in our search for water. Peter Dykstra on a free-flowing font of bad ideas.

Step right up and watch how the government is misspending your tax dollars on the environment.

Being eco-minded on Earth Day is like being merry on Christmas. It's to be expected. But here are seven things you can actually do to wake you from your eco-slu

You'll never guess who's fighting to stop the construction of a wind farm off the shores of Cape Cod. Environmentalists.

"Enron could've saved us" and four other environmental predictions that didn't come true.

Garbage science isn't rocket science. Each of us throws away a ton of stuff every year. Literally. The problem, and why it's only getting worse.

Obama is an agent of change. Or at least he's supposed to be. Peter Dykstra grades six areas of the Obama presidency.

What happens two months after a major environmental disaster, when the lights go out and everyone stops paying attention?

Sustainability played a key role at this year's CES with both the CEA and Bosch donating materials and funds to Habitat for Humanity green building efforts.

Recession? What recession? Step right up as the coal industry is loading up on lobbyists.

Coal has made Duke Energy wealthy, yet the company's CEO admits it can be dangerous. Will he solve the problem?

Eelgrass is thriving again, thanks to the help of a sea otter rehabilitation program.

Instead of synthetic insecticides, entomologist Rich Hofstetter is recruiting native fungi to protect forests from bark beetles.

NuWave Solutions works with DC Habitat for Humanity to help move them closer to their goal of reducing poverty housing and homelessness.

Le Choix du Consommateur 2019 Trois-Rivières

Higher global temperatures are changing ecosystems in the Arctic. They are becoming greener as the climate and land become more hospitable to taller vegetation.

Martens are small forest carnivores associated with dense, mature forests.

With the passage of the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act of 1960, the U.S. Forest Service has managed its 193 million acres of forest and grassland for multiple uses, including timber, watersheds, and wildlife. Using today’s terminology, some of these purposes are considered ecosystem services, which encompass a breadth of benefits provided by forests, including their ability to absorb and store atmospheric carbon, a greenhouse gas linked to climate change.

We describe a food-based system for quantitatively evaluating habitat quality for deer called the Forage Resource Evaluation System for Habitat and provide its rationale and suggestions for use. The system was developed as a tool for wildlife biologists and other natural resource managers and planners interested in evaluating habitat quality and, especially, comparing two or more patches of habitat or the same patch at different seasons or under different conditions. It is based on the quantity (of biomass) and quality (digestible energy and digestible protein) of the habitat's food resources in relation to user-specified metabolic requirements of deer (which differ with species, age, sex, season, and reproductive status). It uses a linear programming algorithm to determine the suitable forage that can sustain deer at the specified requirements.

In forest reserves of the U.S. Pacific Northwest, management objectives include protecting late-seral habitat structure by reducing the threat of large-scale disturbances like wildfire. We simulated how altering within and among-stand structure with silvicultural treatments of differing intensity affected late-seral forest (LSF) structure and fire threat (FT) reduction over 30 years in a 6070-ha reserve. We then evaluated how different financial requirements influenced the treatment mix selected for each decade, the associated effects on FT reduction and LSF structure in the reserve, and treatment costs. Requirements for treatments to earn money (NPV+), break even (NPVO), or to not meet any financial goal at the scale of the entire reserve (landscape) affected the predicted reduction of FT and the total area of LSF structure in different ways. With or without a requirement to break even, treatments accomplished about the same landscape level of FT reduction and LSF structure. Although treatment effects were similar, their associated net revenues ranged from negative $1 million to positive $3000 over 30 years. In contrast, a requirement for landscape treatments to earn money ($0.5 to $1.5 million NPV) over the same period had a negative effect on FT reduction and carried a cost in terms of both FT reduction and LSF structure. Results suggest that the spatial scale at which silvicultural treatments were evaluated was influential because the lowest cost to the reserve objectives was accomplished by a mix of treatments that earned or lost money at the stand level but that collectivel broke even at the landscape scale. Results also indicate that the timeframe over which treatments were evaluated was important because if breaking even was required within each decade instead of cumulatively over all three, the cost in terms of FT reduction and LSF structure was similar to requiring landscape treatments to earn $0.5 million NPV.

Millions of miles of highway crisscross the United States. Highways fragment the landscape, affecting the distribution of animal populations and limiting the ability of individuals to disperse between those populations. Moreover, animal-vehicle collisions are a serious hazard to wildlife, not to mention people.

The Northwest Forest Plan (the Plan) is a large-scale ecosystem management plan for federal land in the Pacific Northwest. Marbled murrelet (Brachyramphus marmoratus) populations and habitat were monitored to evaluate effectiveness of the Plan. The chapters in this volume summarize information on marbled murrelet ecology and present the monitoring results for marbled murrelets over the first 10 years of the Plan, 1994 to 2003.

On October 18, 2006, a workshop was held in Vancouver, WA, with the title "Managing for wildlife habitat in Westside production forests." The purpose of the workshop was to provide prescriptions and guidelines for people who manage Westside forests (those west of the Cascade Mountains' crest) primarily for wood production, but because of mandate or personal preference, want to integrate wildlife values. The audience included over 150 professionals from forest industry, consulting firms, and public and tribal forest and wildlife management agencies. This proceedings includes ten papers based on oral presentations at the workshop plus a synthesis paper summarizing workshop themes, discussions, and related information. Topics include a history of wildlife management research in the Pacific Northwest, elements of habitat and how to manage for them, the challenges of appropriately implementing ecosystem management, and economic implications to private forestland owners.

This publication provides information about prescribed fire effects on habitats and populations of birds of the interior West and a synthesis of existing information on bird responses to fire across North America. Our literature synthesis indicated that aerial, ground, and bark insectivores favored recently burned habitats, whereas foliage gleaners preferred unburned habitats.

We describe a protocol to monitor the effectiveness of the Tongass Land Management Plan (TLMP) management standards for maintaining fish habitat. The protocol uses juvenile coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch) in small tributary streams in forested watersheds. We used a 3-year pilot study to develop detailed methods to estimate juvenile salmonid populations, measure habitat, and quantitatively determine trends in juvenile coho salmon abundance over 10 years. Coho salmon have been shown to be sensitive to habitat alterations, and we use coho salmon parr as the primary indicator in the protocol. A priori criteria for type I and type II error rates, effect size, and sample sizes for the protocol were derived with estimates of variance computed from the 3-year pilot study. The protocol is designed to detect trends in abundance of coho salmon parr, as well as coho salmon fry and Dolly Varden (Salvelinus malma), in small streams managed according to TLMP standards and guidelines and to compare these to trends in unmanaged (old-growth) watersheds. Trends are adjusted to account for statistically significant habitat covariates. This information provides an important element in monitoring land management practices in the Tongass National Forest. The methods we describe may have application to monitoring protocols elsewhere for fish populations and land management practices.

This report documents the results from the first “5-year” round of understory responses to the Tongass-Wide Young-Growth Studies (TWYGS) treatments, especially in relation to their effects on food resources for black-tailed deer (Odocoileus hemionus sitkensis). Responses of understory vegetation to precommercial silviculture experiments after their first 4 to 8 years posttreatment were analyzed with the Forage Resource Evaluation System for Habitat (FRESH)-Deer model. The studies were conducted in western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla)-Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis) young-growth forests in southeast Alaska. All four TWYGS experiments were studied: (I) planting of red alder (Alnus rubra) within 1- to 5-year-old stands; (II) precommercial thinning at narrow and wide spacings (549 and 331 trees per hectare, respectively) in 15- to 25-year-old stands; (III) precommercial thinning at medium spacing (420 trees per hectare) with and without pruning in 25- to 35-yearold stands; and (IV) precommercial thinning at wide spacing (203 trees per hectare) with and without slash treatment versus thinning by girdling in >35-year-old stands. All experiments also included untreated control stands of identical age. FRESHDeer was used to evaluate the implications for deer habitat in terms of forage resources (species-specific biomass, digestible protein, and digestible dry matter) relative to deer metabolic requirements in summer (at two levels of requirements—maintenance only vs. lactation) and in winter (at six levels of snow depth).

Stem decays of living trees, known also as heart rots, are essential elements of wildlife habitat, especially for cavity-nesting birds and mammals. Stem decays are common features of old-growth forests of coastal Alaska, but are generally absent in young, managed forests. We offer several strategies for maintaining or restoring fungal stem decay in these managed forests that can be used to enhance specific types of wildlife habitat.

This report addresses the need for developing consistent regional guidelines for stand-level management that integrates goals and objectives for dry forest restoration and habitat management for the northern spotted owl.

Northwest Forest Plan—the first 20 years (1994-2013): status and trends of northern spotted owl habitats.

This is the second in a series of periodic monitoring reports on northern spotted owl (Strix occidentalis caurina) population and habitat trends on federally administered lands since implementation of the Northwest Forest Plan in 1994. Here we summarize results from a population analysis that included data from longterm demographic studies during 1985–2008. This data was analyzed separately by study area, and also in a meta-analysis across all study areas to assess temporal and spatial patterns in fecundity, apparent survival, recruitment, and annual rates of population change.

The primary objectives of the effectiveness monitoring plan for the marbled murrelet (Brachyramphus marmoratus) include mapping baseline nesting habitat (at the start of the Northwest Forest Plan [the Plan]) and estimating changes in that habitat over time. Using vegetation data derived from satellite imagery, we modeled habitat suitability by using a maximum entropy model. We used Maxent software to compute habitat suitability scores from vegetation and physiographic attributes based on comparisons of conditions at 342 sites that were occupied by marbled murrelets (equal numbers of confirmed nest sites and likely nest sites) and average conditions over all forested lands in which the murrelets occurred. We estimated 3.8 million acres of higher suitability nesting habitat over all lands in the murrelet's range in Washington, Oregon, and California at the start of the Plan (1994/96). Most (89 percent) baseline habitat on federally administered lands occurred within reserved-land allocations. A substantial amount (36 percent) of baseline habitat occurred on nonfederal lands. Over all lands, we observed a net loss of about 7 percent of higher suitability potential nesting habitat from the baseline period to 2006/07. If we focus on losses and ignore gains, we estimate a loss of about 13 percent of the higher suitability habitat present at baseline, over this same period. Fire has been the major cause of loss of nesting habitat on federal lands since the Plan was implemented; timber harvest is the primary cause of loss on nonfederal lands. We also found that murrelet population size is strongly and positively correlated with amount of nesting habitat, suggesting that conservation of remaining nesting habitat and restoration of currently unsuitable habitat is key to murrelet recovery.

The “Microcosm Terrestrial and Aquatic Landscape Habitat” is a Main Basin Pond 4 surrounded on three sides by artificial rock, “Miniature Mountains” 3 a, 3 b, 3 c or Natural Looking Imitation Rocks. The fourth, front side has no “Miniature Mountains” or Natural Looking Imitation Rocks to enclose the Main Basin Pond. Instead, here I adhere on a Pane of Glass 2 a to the imitation rock surface using Silicon Sealant 2 b or other sealants 2 c: A pond-aquarium hybrid! The “Miniature Mountains” are higher than the water level in the Main Basin Pond. On the top or sides of the “Miniature Mountains” is an Upper Pool 5. Water in the Main Basin Pond is circulated up to the Upper Pool using a Submersible; Electric, Aquatic, Pump 8. From the Upper Pool, the Water then flows down a Water Course to the Waterfalls and back to the Main Basin Pond to oxygenate the water.

A last legislative push is needed to save Nisqually River’s storied steelhead run.

Police say they are concerned for the safety of a man who has gone missing in a well known crocodile habitat in Far North Queensland.

A Gold Coast electrician fishing on the Murray River on the NSW-Victorian border was startled to find that what he thought was a log, or a dead Murray cod, was in fact a partly-skinned freshwater crocodile, thousands of kilometres from its natural northern Australian habitat.

Unperturbed by the region's infamous sharks and 13-degree Celsius sea temperature, Lisa Julian is among a group that swims off the state's south coast each week without wearing a wetsuit.