Ecology, The Environment and Conservation

Wine lovers take note: global warming is already tinkering with your favorite indulgence.

A study of the world’s top 27 wine regions’ temperatures and wine quality over the past 50 years reveals that rising temperatures have already impacted vintage quality. As for the next 50 years, climate modeling for these same wine regions predicts a 2°C temperature rise that is likely to make cool growing regions better producers of some grape varieties, and already warm wine regions

A recent study conducted in eastern Greenland and published in the October 31 issue of the Science magazine provides new understanding of the dynamics of arctic lemming populations. Olivier Gilg and Ilkka Hanski from the University of Helsinki, Finland, and Benoît Sittler from the University of Freiburg, Germany, combined long-term field observations and mathematical modelling of what is probably the simplest vertebrate predator-prey community in the world. In the study area in the Karup Valley, at

The treatment of waste has become a problem of international importance. Concretely, the recycling of plastics from waste electrical and electronic equipment is particularly significant due to use in their manufacture of critical components such as specific bromates or heavy metal additives. Thus the need to find ecological solutions for the treatment of these goods.

This European project arose as a result of the need to continue with the work started in 1998 with the COMBIDENT project, fina

The only natural habitat of the polar bear is under increasing threat as a consequence of the dramatic thinning of the Arctic sea ice. The link between the thinning of the ice and rising temperatures has been discovered by scientists at UCL and the Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, whose findings are due to be published in the 30th October edition of Nature.

The thinness of the ice covering the Arctic Ocean, approximately three metres deep, makes it far more vulne

The reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park may be the key to maintaining groves of cottonwood trees that were well on their way to localized extinction, and is working to rebalance a stream ecosystem in the park for the first time in seven decades, Oregon State University scientists say in two new studies.

The data show a clear and remarkable linkage between the presence of wolves and the health of an entire streamside ecosystem, including two species of cottonwoods and the

Cornell University microbiologists, looking for bioremediation microbes to “eat” toxic pollutants, report the first field test of a technique called stable isotopic probing (SIP) in a contaminated site. And they announce the discovery and isolation of a bacterium that biodegrades naphthalene in coal tar contamination.

Although naphthalene is not the most toxic component in coal tar, the microbiologists say their discovery might eventually help to speed the cleanup of hundreds of 19th and 20