From the category archives:
The Federal Biodiversity Fund was approved in December with funds to reimburse landowners for improved vegetation and diversity management on their properties. The six-year program has $946 million in funds that are aimed at reforestation, tackling invasive species, and also close management of lands of high conservation value. This biodiversity fund is part of a [...]
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The National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) is being terminated as of Jan. 15, 2012, due to a $3.8 million budget cut. As a result, all resources, databases, tools, and applications within the website terminated and no longer available. The site’s blog has already been terminated as of last week, and will be removed completely as [...]
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A new sensor platform deployed by the Carnegie Institution for Science is revealing whole new details regarding tropical forest structure. The Airborne Taxonomic Mapping System (AToMS) employs two sweeping LiDAR sensors that scan at 400,000 pulses per second, along with an imaging spectrometer, resulting in a highly detailed 3D map with both physical and chemical [...]
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I had the pleasure to meet and interview Javier de la Torre at the recent FOSS4G event in Denver. de la Torre and his team at Vizzuality have been responsible for a wide array of interesting websites and crowdsourcing initiatives that are helping to gain understanding and perspective on issues of global environmental change. The [...]
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The Encyclopedia of Life (www.eol.org), the online directory of species information, has just come out with a new version that adds 20 times more pages since the site launched in August 2009, and improves the navigation. There are now 700,000 of the 1.9 million known species represented, with the aim to build one “infinitely expandable” [...]
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While scientists have cataloged 1.3 million species, the total number of existing species has remained a mystery. The issue is that taxonomy takes time to correctly catalog each species that is discovered, as well as the fact that we simply haven’t encountered and cataloged all species, particularly in our oceans. Researchers have now worked to [...]
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The Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research has released a new book, “Singapore Biodiversity: an Encyclopedia of the Natural Environment.” The 552-page book is the effort of more than 65 contributors who have cataloged the natural environment in Singapores parks, forests and shoreline. While Singapore is a small country, this significant effort is important for its [...]
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The Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) led the project to map the British landscape vegetation and land cover at an unprecedented scale. The latest UK Land Cover Map (LCM) shows the distribution of different habitats throughout the country at a 25-metre resolution. The impetus for the project is the decline in insect pollinators, with [...]
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The International Programme on the State of the Ocean was created to assess and mitigate the decline of the global ocean, “earth’s circulatory system that performs vital functions to make the planet habitable.” The organization just released an international and interdisciplinary report by marine experts that reviews the latest scientific research and concludes that the [...]
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More than a million feral camels wander the arid inland of Australia, harming the fragile rangeland and waterholes. The Australian Feral Camel Management Project has taken a crowdsourcing approach to help get a handle on this invasive species problem. The group have set up an interactive mapping website called CamelScan and are asking travelers to [...]
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