Category archives: Ecology

More than a billion years ago, in a shallow basin across what is now northern Ontario, a subtropical lake much like modern-day Death Valley evaporated under the sun’s gentle heat, leaving behind crystals of halite—rock salt. It was a very different world than the one we know today. Bacteria were the dominant form of life […]

Authors: Guillem Chust , Head of Climate Change in Oceans and Coasts; Xabier Irigoien , IKERBASQUE Professor; and Naiara Rodríguez-Ezpeleta , Head of Molecular Ecology and Biotechnology at AZTI , Marine Research / Basque Research and Technology Alliance (BRTA) Most nowadays existing animal groups originated in the sea after the Cambrian explosion, 540 million years […]

Author: Gerlinde Bigga, Scientific Coordinator of the Leibniz Science Campus “Geogenomic Archaeology Campus Tübingen”, University of Tübingen The last two decades have seen a revolution in scientists’ ability to reconstruct the past. This has been made possible through technological advances in the way DNA is extracted from ancient bones and analysed. These advances have revealed […]

Autor: Chris Johnson, Professor of Wildlife and Conservation Ecology, University of Northern British Columbia and Justina C. Ray, Adjunct professor, Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Toronto Through the federal Building Canada Act, “projects of national interest” are being fast-tracked while hundreds of major resource projects are already under construction or planned in the […]

Author: Sevrine Sailley, Senior Scientist, Marine Ecosystem Modelling, Plymouth Marine Laboratory Climate change is reshaping fish habitats. Some fish are winners, others are losing out. Fish already face plenty of pressure from overfishing and pollution. Climate change is adding more: warmer waters and shifting food supplies cause what’s known as a predator-prey mismatch. This means […]

In 2023, over 310 million tons of plastics were produced globally, and this volume is projected to reach 710 million tons by 2040 . This extensive use, at the domestic, tourism, industrial, and fishing levels, combined with inadequate waste management, has led to the rapid accumulation of plastics in our environment, making them a widespread […]

DNA sequencing is getting cheaper than ever. This, coupled with advances in speed and portability, are allowing us to apply deep sequencing beyond the lab to environmental substrates, and analyse this eDNA to gain information and monitor biodiversity at a time where it is being lost at an unprecedented rate. This environmental DNA can be […]

Glitter is festive and fun – a favourite for decorations, makeup and art projects. But while it may look harmless, beautiful even, glitter’s sparkle hides a darker side. Those shimmering specks often end up far from party tables and greeting cards. You can even spot them glinting on beaches, washed in with the tide. In […]

In the largest survey of its kind ever conducted researchers from the University of Copenhagen firmly established a fivefold increase in the melting of Greenland ‘s glaciers over the last 20 years. Using both satellite imagery and old aerial photos from the Danish National Archives, researchers from the University of Copenhagen firmly establish that Greenland’s […]

Throughout the past 500 million years, our planet has experienced a total of five mass extinctions. One of these – the Permo-Triassic mass extinction event – led to the demise of roughly 90% of Earth’s species. Most of these events have coincided with the formation of a supercontinent, where Earth’s tectonic plates slowly come together […]