Oil and gas wells, including those involved in hydraulic fracturing operations, scar a major portion of southwest Wyoming, according to a recent analysis by the U.S. Geological Survey.
Nearly 17,000 well pads and former drilling areas associated with oil and natural gas production were
A new set of maps highlights the importance of habitat corridors in helping wildlife deal with the effects of climate change and deforestation. The series of maps shows more than 16,000 habitat corridors — swaths of land that connect forests or protected areas and allow animals to move between them — in tropical regions of Africa, Southeast Asia, and
Wildlife may play a more important role in the global carbon cycle than researchers have previously given it credit for, according to a study from an international group of scientists.
Although models generally include carbon cycling by plants and microbes, they often ignore the ways
In a case important beyond the State of Washington, the State’s highest court expressly acknowledged the dynamic tension of balancing the competing interests of the ecology versus generating electricity, coming down on the side of electricity, all be it renewable energy from wind turbines.
Element Power, a company that develops renewable energy products, has just finalized its plans for a hybrid solar-wind farm. The Wildflower Renewable Energy Farm Project will be located in California’s Antelope Valley. The Antelope Valley, part of the Mojave Desert that lies in northern Los Angeles County, is
Wind power is often criticized for the harm wind turbines can cause to birds. Now the American Wind Energy Association has launched a campaign to counter claims that turbines are bird-grinders and that, in fact, wind can be beneficial to wildlife.
“Expanding the use of wind power improves
Last week the Interior Department released draft voluntary federal guidelines on the impacts of wind energy on wildlife. But neither the wind industry and bird conservationists are happy.
The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) today released a statement to say it cannot support the guidance on wildlife
New research shows that the wind turbines’ color could be the key to avoiding wildlife deaths.
Conservationists’ biggest criticism of wind turbines placed in natural areas is that the swirling blades can be deadly for birds,
The revolutionary advances in the study of bird populations and migrations made possible by the Internet have now found their way into birders’ hands.
BirdsEye, a new iPhone app, gives birders instant access to the National Audubon Society’s and Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s eBird, the largest open-source database of bird sightings in Mexico and North America.
Once users identify their locations, BirdsEye generates a list of all the resident or recently reported migratory birds within a designated radius. Confirmed sightings of rare or notable birds are also mapped and directions to their locations provided.
With nearly $800 billion in drugs sold worldwide, pharmaceuticals are increasingly being released into the environment. The “green pharmacy” movement seeks to reduce the ecological impact of these drugs, which have caused mass bird die-offs and spawned antibiotic-resistant pathogens.
The standard that new drugs be safe for human consumption was first enshrined in U.S. regulations in 1938, after an antibacterial drug dissolved in a poisonous solvent killed 100 children. Now, armed with a range of evidence suggesting that wildlife and human health may be threatened by pharmaceutical residues that escape into waterways and elsewhere, a growing band of concerned ecotoxicologists and environmental chemists are calling for yet another standard for new medications: that they be designed to be safe for the environment.
The movement for “green pharmacy,” as it has been dubbed, has grown as new technology has allowed scientists to discern the presence of chemicals in the environment at minute concentrations, revealing the wide dispersal of human and veterinary drugs across the planet.
U.S. researchers have developed broadband acoustic systems that they say will improve the ability to count and classify fish and zooplankton, an advance they liken to jumping from black and white television to high-definition TV.
While oceanographers have long used acoustic measurements to determine what lies under the sea, existing technologies use sound waves that measure only one or a few frequencies, producing data that can be ambiguous and open to different interpretations, particularly for small fish and zooplankton.