Rewilding & Conservation News and Discussions

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caltrek
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This next article potentially is a much more difficult issue than might be assumed on first glance. For many, lobstering is not just an industry, but a way of life. For purposes unrelated to saving whales, otherwise sustainable practices have been instituted by (or at least in coordination with) the lobstering industry itself. What is unclear to me is just how big an impact there will be on lobstering in Maine as a result of this particular court decision.

Ban on Lobster Fishing to Save Whales is Back, Court Rules
by Patrick Whittle
November 17, 2021

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireSto ... s-81227802

Introduction:
(ABC) PORTLAND, Maine -- A U.S. appeals court has reinstated a ban on lobster harvesting in hundreds of miles of productive fishing waters off the Maine coast to try to protect rare whales.

The Maine Lobstering Union had won emergency relief to stop the closure of lobstering grounds, which federal regulators ruled was needed to help protect endangered North Atlantic right whales from extinction.

But the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that the closure is back on. Removing the ban prevents the government from performing its task of protecting the whales from death by entanglement in gear, the court ruled.

The government's role is “assuring the right whales are protected from a critical risk of death,” the court ruled.

The whales number less than 340 and are vulnerable to lethal entanglement in fishing gear and collisions with large ships. The New England lobster fishery has had to contend with a host of new restrictions to try to protect the whales. The new rules make an approximately 950-square-mile area of the Gulf of Maine essentially off limits to lobster fishing from October to January.
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Re: Rewilding & Conservation News and Discussions

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After record low, monarch butterflies return to California
Source: AP

By HAVEN DALEY and OLGA R. RODRIGUEZ
PACIFIC GROVE, Calif. (AP) — There is a ray of hope for the vanishing orange-and-black Western monarch butterflies.

The number wintering along California’s central coast is bouncing back after the population, whose presence is often a good indicator of ecosystem health, reached an all-time low last year. Experts pin their decline on climate change, habitat destruction and lack of food due to drought.

An annual winter count last year by the Xerces Society recorded fewer than 2,000 butterflies, a massive decline from the tens of thousands tallied in recent years and the millions that clustered in trees from Northern California’s Mendocino County to Baja California, Mexico, in the south in the 1980s. Now, their roosting sites are concentrated mostly on California’s central coast.

This year’s official count started Saturday and will last three weeks but already an unofficial count by researchers and volunteers shows there are over 50,000 monarchs at overwintering sites, said Sarina Jepsen, director of Endangered Species at Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation.


Read more: https://apnews.com/article/climate-scie ... e00966d025
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funkervogt
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Re: Rewilding & Conservation News and Discussions

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If anyone here is interested in doing his part to rewild the planet, consider donating to the World Land Trust. They're a very honest charity with minimal overhead costs, and they use donations to buy wild lands across the world to protect them from human development. Effective altruists endorse them.

I donated $100 to purchase 3/4 of an acre of land somewhere. With that action, I wiped out whatever negative effects my habit of chopping down trees near my property and burning the wood may have had on the environment.

https://www.worldlandtrust.org/
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caltrek
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Feds to Take New Look at Protections for Dwindling Grouse Species
by Erika Williams
November 19, 2021

https://www.courthousenews.com/feds-to- ... e-species/

Introduction:
(Courthouse News) — The Biden administration announced plans on Friday to consider extending protections for a declining type of grouse found in the U.S. West.

The Bureau of Land Management said it is starting a process to consider further protections for the greater sage grouse, a western game bird species suffering from critical habitat loss.

Scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey found this year that sage grouse numbers are down 65% from 1986.

The BLM attributes the chicken-sized bird’s decline to a variety of environmental pressures including development, invasive grasses, wildfire and drought made worse by climate change.

“Safeguarding sagebrush habitat is considered essential to the long-term health of sage-grouse populations as well as more than 350 other species,” the agency said in Friday’s announcement
The remainder of the article includes a review of this issue as it was handled in the Obama and Trump administrations. Another example of a fairly dramatic difference between Trump and Biden.
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Efforts to restore Indonesian peatlands could save billions in wildfire costs
https://phys.org/news/2021-12-efforts-i ... dfire.html
by University of Leeds
Plans to restore Indonesian peatlands are a cost-effective strategy for reducing the impacts of peatland fires to the environment, climate and human health, says a new study.

The analysis, led by the University of Leeds, demonstrates that the benefits of effective Indonesian peatland restoration will outweigh the cost of restoration, and provides evidence to support ongoing peatland restoration efforts in Indonesia.

Currently, the Indonesian government has committed to restore 2.5 million hectares of degraded peatland, with a projected cost of US$3.2-7 billion.

Published today in Nature Communications, the study uses satellite data and models to estimate that peatland restoration could have resulted in economic savings of US$8.4 billion for 2004–2015.

The 2015 fires in Indonesia, the largest in recent years, resulted in economic losses totaling US$28 billion, while the six largest fire events between 2004 and 2015 caused a total of US$93.9 billion in economic losses resulting from damage to plantations, forestry and agriculture, CO2 emissions and health impacts due to exposure to air pollution.

The study states that if restoration had already been completed, the area burned in 2015 would have been reduced by 6%, reducing CO2 emissions by 18%, and fine particulate matter (PM2.5) emissions—which can penetrate deeply into the lungs—by 24%, preventing 12,000 premature mortalities.
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caltrek
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Re: Rewilding & Conservation News and Discussions

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Ensia recently published on line an article that touches in shot gun fashion a wide variety of environmental issues. Included in that article was this brief discussion of mangroves.

Mangrove Revival
by Mary Hoff
November 29, 2021

https://ensia.com/articles/conservation ... sity-2022/

Introduction:
(Ensia) The mangrove forests that coat coastlines in the tropics and subtropics harbor abundant plant and animal species that thrive at the intersection of land and sea. In past decades development has decimated many, destroying the biodiversity-nurturing and carbon-sequestering services they provide. But in recent years that tide has turned. Conservationists’ efforts to restore and preserve these rich habitats have helped reduce loss. In addition, these wetlands are also the accidental beneficiaries of other ecosystem changes: As inland forests are cut, erosion moves soil toward the coast where it can nurture new mangroves, and climate change is creating more of the warm habitat they need. Together, these changes have reduced mangrove loss to near zero, though local areas of depletion continue.
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Re: Rewilding & Conservation News and Discussions

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Tropical forests can regenerate in just 20 years without human interference

Thu 9 Dec 2021 19.00 GMT

Tropical forests can bounce back with surprising rapidity, a new study published today suggests.

An international group of researchers has found that tropical forests have the potential to almost fully regrow if they are left untouched by humans for about 20 years. This is due to a multidimensional mechanism whereby old forest flora and fauna help a new generation of forest grow – a natural process known as “secondary succession”.

These new findings, published in Science, could play an important role in climate-breakdown mitigation and provide actionable advice on how to act next. They also suggest that it is not too late to undo the damage that humanity has done through catastrophic climate change over the last few decades.

“That’s good news, because the implication is that, 20 years … that’s a realistic time that I can think of, and that my daughter can think of, and that the policymakers can think of,” said Lourens Poorter, professor in functional ecology at Wageningen University in the Netherlands and lead author of the paper.

This idea of natural regeneration is frequently disregarded in favour of tree plantations, but according to Poorter, the former yields better results than restoration plantings. “Compared to planting new trees, it performs way better in terms of biodiversity, climate change mitigation and recovering nutrients.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... terference


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Photograph: Igor Dudkovskiy/AP
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caltrek
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American Buys Tree on Nagasaki Island to Stop It from Being Felled
by Takuya Miyano

https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14489704

Introduction:
(The Asahi Shimbun) GOTO, Nagasaki Prefecture--For Nicholas Sutton, a banyan tree he passed by on his daily stroll on Fukuejima islet here is more than just an old piece of timber.

Touching the smooth bark, Sutton, 38, an English teacher, feels as if he could extract power from the massive tree, which stands on a narrow path in the local community with its boughs extending in all directions.

The American saw the tree on his daily walks on the islet in the Goto island chain off Nagasaki Prefecture, as well as when jogging around his neighborhood and going to and from the English school where he works.

In December last year, Sutton heard a cracking sound from the banyan while on his way home from a language class. He quickly turned the corner and found thick branches of the tree being cut down by heavy machinery.

Sutton asked the worker using the machinery “how much of the tree will you cut down,” and he learned that the property owner who resides outside of Nagasaki Prefecture wanted it completely chopped down.
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20 endangered sea turtles flown to Florida to avoid freezing
Source: AP
MARATHON, Fla. (AP) — Twenty critically endangered juvenile Kemp’s ridley sea turtles were flown from New England to the subtropical Florida Keys to convalesce at the Marathon Turtle Hospital after being rescued from Cape Cod Bay’s frigid coastal waters.

Each of the turtles suffers from “cold stunning,” a hypothermic reaction that occurs when sea turtles are exposed to cold water for a prolonged time, according to hospital manager Bette Zirkelbach. They arrived Friday by private plane.

“These sea turtles are at the Turtle Hospital in the Florida Keys to warm up just like the tourists that come to the Keys to warm up,” said Zirkelbach. “The Kemps ridley is the most critically endangered sea turtle in the world, so it’s important to help these little ones survive.”

The flight transport to Florida Keys Marathon International Airport was conducted in collaboration with Turtles Fly Too, a nonprofit group that engages general aviation pilots who donate their aircraft, fuel and time to provide emergency transportation for rescued sea turtles.




Read more: https://apnews.com/article/science-flor ... 8d5e67afa7
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caltrek
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Horseshoe Crabs are in Danger Because Everyone Wants Their Blood
by Chris Lovenko
December 17, 2021

https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/17/228 ... ontroversy

Extract:
(The Verge) Relying on horseshoe crabs for pharmaceuticals has knock-on effects to other species. As part of the bleeding process, Charles River Laboratories, one of the primary producers of LAL, sequesters crabs in holding pens away from the beach from May to June — the season when they lay eggs. During that window, a female horseshoe crab can lay as many as 80,000 eggs. Environmentalists contend that removing horseshoe crabs from the beach decreases the availability of horseshoe crab eggs as a food source for shorebirds such as the migratory red knot. The population of red knots, a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, has dropped 80 percent in recent decades. Conservationists maintain that this decline is linked to a diminished supply of horseshoe crab eggs.

As a result of this linkage, the environmental nonprofits Defenders of Wildlife and the Coastal Conservation League recently notified the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources and Charles River Laboratories of their intent to sue both entities for alleged violations of the Endangered Species Act. The lawsuit seeks to protect the red knot’s food source and habitat by asking the state to end Charles River Labs’ practice of penning horseshoe crabs.
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