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Categories: Environmental: Ecosystems, Offbeat: Paleontology and Archeology

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An international team of scientists has recently found that non-native species are expanding their ranges many orders of magnitude faster than native ones, in large part due to inadvertent human help. Even seemingly sedentary non-native plants are moving at three times the speed of their native counterparts in a race where, because of the rapid pace of climate change and its effect on habitat, speed matters. To survive, plants and animals need to be shifting their ranges by 3.25 kilometers per year just to keep up with the increasing temperatures and associated climactic shifts -- a speed that native species cannot manage without human help.

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Some areas of the Amazon rainforest are more resilient to drought than others, new research shows. But if not managed carefully, we could 'threaten the integrity of the whole system,' researchers say.

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A white wine over 2,000 years old, of Andalusian origin, is the oldest wine ever discovered.

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Natural hazards can speed up the extinction process of land animals that have limited distribution and/or small populations. But there is hope to turn the negative development around, says researchers behind new study.

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Archipelago case-study shows that removing invasive rats and restoring native vegetation could help bring back hundreds of thousands of breeding pairs of seabirds lost to tropical islands. Calculating that there are enough fish to sustain restored seabird populations should be an important consideration for restoration projects, scientists say. Restored seabird populations also provide huge boost to the health of surrounding coral reef ecosystems through restored nutrient cycles.

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A new study shows soot from large wildfires in California traps sunlight, making days warmer and drier than they ought to be.

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As the world's largest unfrozen freshwater resource, groundwater is crucial for life on Earth. Researchers have investigated how global warming is affecting groundwater temperatures and what that means for humanity and the environment. Their study indicates that by 2100, more than 75 million people are likely to be living in regions where the groundwater temperature exceeds the highest threshold set for drinking water by any country.

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Abrupt shifts within complex systems such as the Earth's climate system are extremely hard to predict. Researchers have now succeeded in developing a new method to anticipate such tipping points in advance. They successfully tested the reliability of their method using one of the most severe abrupt climate changes of the past: the shift of the once-green Sahara into a desert.

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An international team of scientists has identified the oldest fossil of a sea-going reptile from the Southern Hemisphere -- a nothosaur vertebra found on New Zealand's South Island. 246 million years ago, at the beginning of the Age of Dinosaurs, New Zealand was located on the southern polar coast of a vast super-ocean called Panthalassa. 'The nothosaur found in New Zealand is over 40 million years older than the previously oldest known sauropterygian fossils from the Southern Hemisphere.

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New research has found that sharks retained high levels of functional diversity for most of the last 66 million years, before steadily declining over the last 10 million years to its lowest value in the present day.

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Thirty-by-thirty: protect 30% of the planet by 2030. While conservation is popular in principle, the costs of actually enacting it often stall even the most earnest efforts. Researchers have now proposed a market-based approach to achieving the 30x30 targets in the ocean.

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The new study provides unambiguous evidence that the inner core began to decrease its speed around 2010, moving slower than the Earth's surface.

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Paleontologists have identified a new genus of fossil goby, revealing evolutionary secrets of a lineage that stretches back millions of years.

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The increase in the frequency and intensity of marine heatwaves in recent decades is one of the effects of global climate change. A study shows that the extreme heatwave of 2022 caused an 'unprecedented' increase in mortality of the red gorgonian Paramuricea clavata, affecting 70% of the colonies located in the Montgr Natural Park, the Medes Islands and the Baix Ter. According to the researchers, these results are 'alarming and threaten the viability' of this species of great value for the biodiversity of benthic ecosystems, since it is considered to be an inhabitant-forming species.

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A new machine-learning system can automatically produce detailed maps from satellite data to show locations of likely beetle-killed spruce trees in Alaska, even in forests of low and moderate infestation where identification is otherwise difficult. The automated process can help forestry and wildfire managers in their decisions. That's critical as the beetle infestation spreads.

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Gray whales that spend their summers feeding in the shallow waters off the Pacific Northwest coast have undergone a significant decline in body length since around the year 2000, a new study found.

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Deposits of deep-pink sand washing up on South Australian shores shed new light on when the Australian tectonic plate began to subduct beneath the Pacific plate, as well as the presence of previously unknown ancient Antarctic mountains.

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In addition to its human consequences, cocaine trafficking harms the environment and threatens habitats important to dozens of species of migratory birds, according to a new study.

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New research has identified 100-million-year-old fossilized bones discovered in western Queensland as belonging to a newly identified species of pterosaur, which was a formidable flying reptile that lived among the dinosaurs.

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Rising to power in the wake of the Classic Maya collapse, Chichen Itz was among the largest and most influential cities of the ancient Maya, but much about its political connections and ritual life remain poorly understood. Close kin relationships, including two pairs of identical twins, suggests a connection to the Maya origin myths of the Popol Vuh.