ECOLANDSCAPES
Category: Gray Merriam’s Ecology Blog
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CANADIANS LOVE BIRDS – BUT
A new study published by Canadian scientists in the fully electronic, open-access journal Avian Conservation and Ecology reveals how we kill birds by the millions. Human-related activities destroy about 269 million birds and 2 million bird nest per year. About 99% of these bird deaths are caused by pet and feral cats and collisions with:
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Ecological Connectivity — Some Basics
Simply adding or identifying “corridors” does not necessarily achieve connectivity. Connectivity is a measure of how well organisms can move through the landscape. The spatially mappable connections in the landscape are better referred to as connectedness and do not necessarily indicate connectivity. The objective of conserving or repairing connectivity is to ensure population survival. Populations
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The Watershed – Where Biodiversity is Made and Maintained
Humans relate to living things at a very fundamental level. We value living beings. Most households have something living in them. Cats, dogs, birds or houseplants. Sometimes snakes or turtles. We relate to the Biodiversity of our watershed in similar ways but at a greatly expanded level. In the Salmon River watershed where we live,
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Fast Food on the Fly
The Red Knot, a robin-sized shorebird, nests in the arctic on Southampton Island. They winter in Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of Argentina. The Knots make this trip of 15,000 kilometres twice yearly. These little birds fly as much as 8000 km non-stop but usually their long trip takes a few days.
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Environmentalism, Sustainability and Ordinary Chores
If you grew up in the woods or in a rural home a few decades ago, you would have looked after a great many things that now are classed as ‘environmental’. Things like tin cans and other household garbage, a supply of drinking water and yes, human waste. Such things could be called ‘personal utilities’
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Pay for Your Own Environmental Footprint?
Land taxes and modern economic theory do not account for the environmental costs that we cause. Are you willing to pay your real costs? Here’s the idea. Ecological footprinting, an idea begun at the University of British Columbia, is a way to estimate how much demand on resources we generate by our normal way
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Forests and Carbon Neutrality
There are some questionable media reports and resulting public discussion of the role of forests in carbon storage (“sequestration”) and the balance of carbon stored and carbon released by our forest management practices. Perhaps a review of the variables and the processes will clarify this potentially misleading discussion. All the carbon in trees came
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DEPLETION
When we visit or move to a lake or other semi-natural environment, we commonly are seeking a desirable emotional state. That emotional state differs for each of us, may not be easily achieved and is easily damaged. Our activities and just our “normal” way of life marginally degrade the qualities that attracted us to this
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PEERLESS INSECTICIDE
Even before the cold, while the leaves were still on the maples and oaks and ashes, the canopies of those trees started to dance with migrating warblers fluttering from branch to twig checking under every leaf to pick off little insects, spiders and mites. We may see these creepy-crawlies as possible pests. Warblers see them
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SAVING THE ENVIRONMENT BY USING MORE WOOD
A recent study by forest ecologists at Yale University reexamined the widespread notion that leaving trees unharvested in the forest was the best way to keep carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the atmosphere, thus preventing climate change(Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, May 2014 & see J. Sustain. Forest. 2014). Researchers at Yale’s Global