Smart Energy

Climate change in the form of reduced snowfall in mountains is causing powerful and cascading shifts in mountainous plant and bird communities through the increased ability of elk to stay at high elevations over winter and consume plants, according to a groundbreaking study in Nature Climate Change.

The U.S. Geological Survey and University of Montana study not only showed that the abundance of deciduous trees and their associated songbirds in mountainous Arizona have declined over the last 22 years as snowpack has declined, but it also experimentally demonstrated that declining snowfall indirectly affects plants and birds by enabling more winter browsing by elk. Increased winter browsing by elk results in trickle-down ecological effects such as lowering the quality of habitat for songbirds.

via Dramatic links found between climate change, elk, plants, and birds.

A new University of Florida study shows genomes of a recently formed plant species to be highly unstable, a phenomenon that may have far-reaching evolutionary consequences.

the study is the first to document chromosomal variation in natural populations of a recently formed plant species following whole genome doubling, or polyploidy. Because many agricultural crops are young polyploids, the data may be used to develop plants with higher fertility and yields. Polyploid crops include wheat, corn, coffee, apples, broccoli and some rice species.

“It could be occurring in other polyploids, but this sort of methodology just hasn’t been applied to many plant species,” said study co-author Pam Soltis, distinguished professor and curator of molecular systematics and evolutionary genetics at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus. “So it may be that lots of polyploids — including our crops — may not be perfect additive combinations of the two parents, but instead have more chromosomes from one parent or the other.”

Researchers analyzed about 70 Tragopogon miscellus plants, a species in the daisy family that originated in the northwestern U.S. about 80 years ago. The new species formed naturally when two plants introduced from Europe mated to produce a hybrid offspring, and hybridization was followed by polyploidy.

via Newly formed plants could lead to improved crop fertility.

This came in the form of an email from Bruno Clarke to the SLSA listserv. I’ve loved Margulis and Sagan’s books for years. In her youth, Margulis was married briefly to Carl Sagan, the father of her son, Dorion.

Lynn Margulis was Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1983, and in 1999 received the Presidential Medal of Science from Bill Clinton. Read the rest of this entry »

KJ and I recently visited southern California. We spent a day in the Mojave Desert, my old stomping grounds, and shot this video in Joshua Tree National Park. It’s unusual to see water in the desert, much less a big puddle of it like we saw at Barker Dam. And below that, an amazing site: hundreds and hundreds of wind turbines down near the intersection of highways 62 and 10.

So I’ve turned into a time lapse junkie and KJ seems to think it’s pretty cool, too, so here we go again. Just what we need: another project.

I’ve always loved t/l, especially of plants growing, but until recently it’s been expensive to produce decent footage. I mean, you have to leave a camera in a field or the woods for some period of time, taking it out of production and risking it being stolen. Recently, though, I was lucky enough to meet Roger P. Hangarter, a botanist at Indiana University, and an expert and artist of the time-lapse medium. He’s a scientist… and an artist!

He told me to give PlantCam a try. It’s cheap and produces an HD-ish image. It’s early days yet and I’m still learning how to best deploy the cameras, but here is an early effort that isn’t too dumb. This is about 5 days worth of images compressed into 50 seconds. Warts and all.

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo on DVD. The beetle may have conquered Japan, but the film conquers nothing.

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo
Grade: C-
reviewed by Brian Charles Clark
directed by Jessica Oreck

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo promises much more than it delivers. Directed by Jessica Oreck, a contributor to PBS’s Nature, the PR for the film alludes to science and a probing of the Japanese fascination with insects. Although Beetle Queen is a good-looking film with some interesting facets, it on the whole disappoints for its lack of narrative drive and its insistent but meandering obsession with tying together bits of Japanese poetry with shots of landscapes and bugs.

If we expected an in-depth look at Japanese culture and its people’s fascination with insects, I suppose we must be satisfied with the filmmaker’s visual anthropology. There are many arty shots in the film, that’s for sure, but they do not synergize into a narrative, nor do they create lyric intensity. With the emphasis on quoting snippets of Japanese literature, I suspect the latter, lyric mode was Oreck’s intention. I don’t think it works. The film is dry, full of lush (and creepy, no doubt, to the insectophobe) close-ups that ground us in nothing and leave us nowhere, offering nothing more than a macro shot of one bug after another. Read the rest of this entry »

A new study confirms it: Google is altering your brain. More precisely, our growing dependence on the Internet has changed how — and what — our brains choose to remember.

When we know where to find information, we’re less likely to remember it — an amnesia dubbed “The Google Effect” by a team led by psychologist Betsy Sparrow of Columbia University.

The finding, published in Friday’s issue of the journal Science, doesn’t prove that Google, Yahoo or other search engines are making us dumber, as some have asserted. We’re still capable of remembering things that matter — and are not easily found online, Sparrow said.

Rather, it suggests that the human memory is reorganizing where it goes for information, adapting to new computing technologies rather than relying purely on rote memory. We’re outsourcing “search” from our brains to our computers.

“We’re not thoughtless empty-headed people who don’t have memories anymore,” Sparrow said. “But we are becoming particularly adept at remembering where to go find things. And that’s kind of amazing.”

via Google is changing your brain, study says, and don’t you forget it – San Jose Mercury News.

Forest Forensics: A Field Guide to Reading the Forested Landscape by Tom Wessels
review by Brian Charles Clark
4 out of 5 stars
Countryman Press, Paperback, 160 pages, September 2010

Forest Forensics

What snapped that tree? Everybody is asking this and similar questions, obsessed as we are as a culture with forensic investigation. Was it weevils gnawing from within? Was it wind or snow load that toppled it? Or did it die for some other reason and snap due to lack of internal structural integrity?

Read Tom Wessels’ wonderful little book and learn. Better, pop it in your backpack and learn as you hike. Although written for forests of the northeastern part of the U.S., the principles involved are pretty much the same in all forest. (The particulars surely do vary by bioregion, though.)

With dozens of color photos and clear, concise writing, it’s hard to go wrong with this book if you’re interested in forested landscapes. For instance, Wessels’ chapter on how to tell if a forest has overgrown an agricultural field is full of cool details that are widely applicable. Part of this has to do with the fact that – at least in North America – farmers have cleared and abandoned fields in pretty much the same way for hundreds of years.

Read the signs like a real detective and appreciate your forest walks even more with this handy guide from ecologist and environmental biologist Wessels.

Plastic Planet - have you had your Bisphenol A today?

Review by Brian Charles Clark
4 out of 5 stars
Directed by Werner Boote

Originally published on Curled Up with a Good DVD

At the rate we’re going, we’re all going to need to isolate ourselves from the toxins we’ve dumped into our environment by diving into HazMat bubble suits. We’ll have to invent filters that keep the nano-sized particles of cancer-dealing crap out – but, hey, we’ve got the technology for that. And plastics.

On second thought, no: plastics are one of the biggest sources of toxins. Bisphenol A, for instance, is a plasticizer that makes plastic, well, plasticy, and has been a known estrogenic since the 1930s. Estrogenics are those wonderful chemicals that are the secret culprits behind the bitching and moaning of the Iron John crew. Chief among them, Robert Bly has long complained that men have become too feminized, and clearly plastics are to blame, not doting mothers. I mean, look at the amphibians: scientists have been observing them changing sex, male to female, mid-stream for years, so why not humans, too? Is there a problem? Read the rest of this entry »

© Copyright Richard Dorrell and licensed for reuse from http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/1315247

Bolivia will this month table a draft United Nations treaty giving “Mother Earth” the same rights as humans — having just passed a domestic law that does the same for bugs, trees and all other natural things in the South American country.

The bid aims to have the UN recognize the Earth as a living entity that humans have sought to “dominate and exploit” — to the point that the “well being and existence of many beings” is now threatened.

Reflecting indigenous traditional beliefs, the proposed global treaty says humans have caused “severe destruction … that is offensive to the many faiths, wisdom traditions and indigenous cultures for whom Mother Earth is sacred.”

It also says that “Mother Earth has the right to exist, to persist and to continue the vital cycles, structures, functions and processes that sustain all human beings.”

In indigenous Andean culture, the earth deity known as Pachamama is the centre of all life, and humans are considered equal to all other entities.

The UN debate begins two days before the UN’s recognition April 22 of the second International Mother Earth Day — another Morales-led initiative.

Canadian activist Maude Barlow is among global environmentalists backing the drive with a book the group will launch in New York during the UN debate: Nature Has Rights.

“It’s going to have huge resonance around the world,” Ms. Barlow said of the campaign. “It’s going to start first with these southern countries trying to protect their land and their people from exploitation, but I think it will be grabbed onto by communities in our countries, for example, fighting the tar sands in Alberta.”

via UN resolution looks to give “Mother Earth” same rights as humans.