Last week I came across a reference to the sheer number of acres currently used by our lawns and was pretty impressed at the full extent of the area we water, trim, and curate (around 128,000 square kilometers, which means it uses several times the space used by farmers to grow corn, according to Cristina […]
Archive for the ‘habitat loss’ Tag
A nation of farmers?
Getting our hands dirty
Although some plant species are doing very well around the world (sometimes to the point of becoming invasive), other species are losing ground. In some cases there are focused recovery plans, but oftentimes the issue of habitat loss trumps our best efforts to sustain these populations. So how can we contribute to both habitat availability […]
No plant is an island
When I started looking at the literature on endangered plants, it seemed that many of the issues being faced by these species could be summed up by four main problems: Invasive species outcompeting and/or altering the habitat Loss of habitat through development (and this has particularly hit species with already small ranges- Leavenworthia torulosa, for […]
Slow and steady wins the race?
In my last post, I recounted some of the issues facing tortoises around the world: habitat loss, habitat degradation, disease, hunting, etc. Some of these problems have been impacting tortoises for a long time, while others are more recent in nature. The good news is that concerned individuals have been working to support tortoise populations […]
Life in the slow lane
In some ways tortoises represent an old conservation issue- as early as the 1800s, for example, people were concerned about overharvesting of giant tortoises on islands such as the Galapagos and Seychelles. Because they can be easy to approach (one study I read used the term ‘run’ with a special citation because none of these […]
Giving a hoot for owls
The ups and downs of owl-dom
In my last post, I catalogued a variety of issues facing owls in different places around the world- while a lot of that was focused on the northern spotted owl, the issue of habitat loss is pretty well universal. I had expected that most of the recent literature on owl conservation would investigate complex relationships […]
Why didn’t I spot that?
In deciding to focus on owls for this month’s posts, I clearly had forgotten about one of the biggest debates over timber harvesting- the northern spotted owl (Strix occidentalis caurina) gained lots of publicity as a bone of contention in the discussion of what to do with old-growth forest in the Pacific Northwest. As birds […]
Trapped by the matrix
In my last post, I looked at the consequences of habitat fragmentation when we build roads or dams or other physical structures- we construct barriers that are useful to us, but not so helpful to the plant and animal populations we isolate. And sometimes we create obstacles to movement even when we think we’re making […]
Lights out
In my last post, I mentioned some of the challenges facing firefly populations around the world, including habitat loss and pollution, and this week I wanted to get a better sense of our options for halting population declines and making a human-dominated landscape more firefly-friendly. To be honest, I was kind of hoping to find […]