On the third Friday of May every year, thousands of people celebrate Endangered Species Day by visiting parks, wildlife refuges and zoos and attending events in support of nationwide conservation efforts underway protecting America’s threatened, endangered and at-risk species. The Endangered Species list, co-administered by the U.S Fish & Wildlife Service and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has prevented hundreds of listed species from becoming extinct.

“Endangered Species Day provides an opportunity to celebrate our successes and strengthen our partnership with the American public to conserve our shared natural resources,” said U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe. “By taking action to help our threatened and endangered plants and animals, we can ensure a healthy future for our country and protect treasured landscapes for future generations.”

The FWS and the Endangered Species Coalition are cosponsoring events around the country. Events are as varied as educational programs at the local libraries to the Youth Art Contest and week-long events that include International Migratory Bird Day. Go to your Facebook page and support the cause by changing your profile picture or cover photo to an Endangered Species to promote awareness.

“Endangered Species Day celebrates America’s natural heritage and our country’s successful efforts to protect imperiled species,” said Leda Huta, Executive Director of the Endangered Species Coalition. “As Americans, we can be proud that we have one of the strongest endangered species programs in the world. Americans have established a legacy of protecting endangered species for our children and grandchildren.”

Endangered Species need protection all year round, not on just one day. Here are 10 things you can do all year to help the cause.

Source: Endangered Species Coalition and U.S Fish & Wildlife Service

Agricultural and rural development are getting more money in some African countries. Source: Flickr/Oxfam International

[NAIROBI] The number of African countries delivering on the Maputo Declaration to boost investment into agricultural and rural development to ten per cent of their national budgets is growing, a conference in Kenya has heard.

Five more countries — Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, Niger, and Senegal — have met the pledge made at the Second Ordinary Session of the Assembly of the African Union in July 2003, according to Estherine Fotabong, director of programme implementation and coordination at the directorate of the NEPAD Planning and Coordinating Agency.

They had also invested in research, food production, and provided financing and market access support to farmers, she said.

“Significant progress has been made towards encouraging African countries to increase their budgetary allocations to agriculture. About 12–13 countries [in total] have achieved the ten per cent target,” she told the told the 8th Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme Partnership Platform Meeting this month (3–4 May).

Countries such as Burkina Faso, Ethiopia and Rwanda are investing more than ten per cent, she added, noting that these nations had also shown good governance, addressed institutional capacity and focused on producers.

But despite the positive trend, she said that there were still significant challenges to attracting private sector investment, policy coordination, funding agricultural research and fighting corruption.

She warned that failure to overcome these problems could undermine the ability to attract funding from the public, donor and private sectors for research and infrastructure.

Gibson Guvheya, senior partnership officer with the Kenya-based African Capacity Building Foundation, told SciDev.Net: “There is still the need to strengthen the capacity of key actors in the sector for more agricultural transformation in Africa”.

“Surprisingly, countries just emerging from conflicts, such as Central African Republic, Liberia and Sierra Leone, have scored well in terms of capacity for agricultural transformation [compared with] countries that have been reforming for some time,” he said.

Selina Sannu, a participant from Kenya, gave a cautious welcome to Fotabong’s comments, noting that: “It is true that more countries are now investing in agriculture, but the question is where the funding is going to. If it is just paying salaries and buying vehicles, this will be wrong. It should be directed at smallholder farmers.”

Participants at the meeting said domestic funding through private-public partnerships should be a priority for Africa, instead of relying heavily on foreign donors. They called for greater investment in infrastructure, and loans for smallholder farmers at lower interest rates.

Once a shining example of successful environmental regulation, the Potomac River is once again under threat -- from both pollution and lawmakers.

The nonprofit, advocacy group, American Rivers released it’s 2012 report on the nation’s most threatened rivers today, highlighting issues that impact clean water while outlining actions citizens and policymakers can take to protect America’s waterways.

Appropriately — if not ironically — topping the list this year is the Potomac River which flows through Washington, D.C., and where clean water regulation has come under fire in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Since 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson declared the highly polluted Potomac “a national disgrace,” the “nation’s river” became one of the premier examples of how environmental protections can improve a surface water ecosystem.

More recently, however, rapid urban and suburban growth have sent increasing amounts of polluted runnoff and pharmaceuticals into the system, while intensified agricultural operations upstream funnel fertilizers and animal waste into the river, creating marine life dead zones.

Kayaker running the Great Falls of the Potomac River. Credit: anoldent (flickr); Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0

Aside from providing drinking water for more than five million people and myriad recreational opportunities, the Potomac is the second largest tributary of the constantly threatened Chesapeake Bay.

As the 40th anniversary of the Clean Water Act approaches this October, the lower House of the U.S. Congress is seeking to undermine provisions  of clean water regulation that would exacerbate threats to the Potomac and other river systems nationwide.

Thus far, the U.S. Senate has been able to thwart highly-partisan House attacks on clean water safeguards, but the upcoming fall elections could alter current Congressional and Presidential dynamics, making rollbacks of clean-water protections a near certainty.

Founded in 1973, American Rivers has more than 65,000 members and supporters, with offices in Washington, D.C., and nationwide.

To learn more about the America’s most threatened rivers and what you can do to protect them, visit the links shown in the sidebar, or visit www.americanrivers.org/.

Ash from Mexico’s Popocatepetl volcano forced the closing of the international airport serving the country’s fourth largest city, Puebla, on Saturday – the third such closure in less than a week.

Eruptions Friday night and Saturday morning sent red-hot rock more than a mile from the crater and a cloud of ash and vapor 4 km (2.5 mi) into the air, as tremors and loud rumbling sent residents scurrying into the streets as far as 10 km away. The weekend activity was strongest since the alert level was raised to yellow stage-3 last month – fifth on a seven-step scale.

More than 30 million people live within sight of the 17,900 ft. volcano, located 30 km (18.6 mi) west of Puebla and 80 km (50 mi) southeast of Mexico City in Central Mexico.

Although no evacuations have yet been called for, emergency centers have been set up in the event the eruptions intensify. Those living near the volcano have been urged to be prepared to leave on short notice should conditions change.

Popocatepetl’s most recent, major eruptions occured in 1994 and 2000, the latter causing nearly 50,000 residents to evacuate.

Developed by a team from Yale University and the University of Colorado Boulder, the application draws upon a database containing hundreds of millions of records on the abundance and distribution of Earth’s flora and fauna.

“We are taking 200 years of different types of knowledge coming from different sources, all documenting the locations of species around the world and compiling them in a way that will greatly enhance our knowledge of biodiversity,” said CU-Boulder Associate Professor Robert Guralnick of the ecology and evolutionary biology department, part of the Map of Life research team. “Such information could be used by any organization that needs to make informed decisions regarding land management, health, conservation and climate change.”

Click image to enlarge.

The initial public version of the mapping tool that was released Thursday allows users to see several levels of detail for a given species — at its broadest, the type of environment it lives in, and at its finest, specific locations where the species’ presence has been documented. Users can click a point on the map and generate a list of vertebrate species in the surrounding area. More functions will be added over time, according to the team.

“It is the where and the when of a species,” said Walter Jetz, associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale and the project lead. “It puts at your fingertips the geographic diversity of life. Ultimately, the hope is for this literally to include hundreds of thousands of animal and plant species and show how much or indeed how little we know of their whereabouts.”

By highlighting the known abundance and distribution of species, the researchers hope to identify and fill knowledge gaps while offering a tool for identifying changes over time. They expect the map tool will prove useful for professional scientists, wildlife and land managers, conservation organizations and the general public.

Thus far, the team has used information gleaned from a wide variety of sources, including field guides, museum collections and wildlife checklists that involved scientists, conservation organizations and “citizen scientists,: but the project’s ultimate success will depend on participation by other scientists and informed amateurs. Subsequent versions of the mapping tool will enable users to supply new or missing information about the distribution and abundance of particular species.

Jetz called the Map of Life “an infrastructure, something to help us all collaborate, improve, share and understand the still extremely limited geographic knowledge about biodiversity.” The team continues to work on several other tasks and challenges, including who will be contributing data and how information supplied by the contributors will be verified and curated.

“A small but powerful next step is to provide a means for anyone, anywhere on the globe to use their mobile devices to instantly pull up animal and plant distributions and even get a realistic assessment on the odds of encountering a particular species of wildlife,” said Guralnick, who also is the curator of invertebrate zoology at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History.

Guralnick said the Map of Life project is following in the footsteps of other knowledge repositories like the GenBank project, a National Institutes of Health-funded effort with a public database of more than 135 million gene sequences from more than 300,000 organisms that allows users to explore genes and genomes using bioinformatics tools. In the biodiversity arena, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility in Copenhagen has developed an important resource that provides access to more than 300 million records of plant and animal occurrences, which is one of the distributional databases being used by the Map of Life team.

The National Science Foundation has provided initial support for the Map of Life project. Other supporters include the Encyclopedia of Life; the International Union for the Conservation of Nature; and the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum, and the Biodiversity and Climate Research Center, both in Germany.

Friday May 11 is National Public Gardens Day, sponsored by The American Public Gardens Association (APGA). In conjunction with Better Homes and Gardens and Rain Bird, visitors to local botanical gardens and arboretums can get free admission. Numerous gardens around the country are participating in the event and you can search for one close to you here. National Public Gardens Day was established by the APGA in 2009 to  increase public awareness of the educational resources public gardens provide to local communities.

More Than Just Flowers and Trees

Public Gardens are often involved in research and offer programs in landscaping and other garden related activities. The gardens are wonderful places to take children, especially city kids suffering from nature deficit disorder, where they can learn about trees and flowers and get involved with nature. APGA has a website just for kids that has games, comics, coloring and learning activities for all ages.

Let’s Move! Museums and Gardens is a public gardens and museum initiative that supports First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! initiative which is dedicated to combating obesity and putting America’s children on the path to a healthy future. APGA has worked in partnership with the Association of Children’s Museums, the American Association of Museums, and the Institute for Museum and Library Services to develop Let’s Move! Museums & Gardens.

Currently, 495 museums and gardens are participating in the program.

In the summer of 2011, NOAA and APGA launched a broad agreement regarding climate change programming. The program links NOAA’s internationally recognized climate services and APGA’s public gardens, which receive more than seventy million visitors a year.

APGA works with various government and private organizations such as the North American Plant Collections Consortium (NAPCC) and the Sentinel Plant Network (SPN). SPN is a collaboration between the APGA and the National Plant Diagnostic Network(NPDN), whose mandate is to enhance agricultural security through protection of the health and productivity of plants in agricultural and natural ecosystems in the U.S. NAPCC “is a network of botanical gardens and arboreta working to coordinate a continent-wide approach to plant germplasm preservation, and to promote high standards of plant collections management.”

World Migratory Bird Day is a global, annual awareness campaign to promote the conservation of migratory birds and their habitats worldwide.

This year’s theme, “Migratory Birds and People—Together through Time,” highlights the cultural, social, historic, economic and spiritual connections we have with birds and the importance of ensuring their well-being for future generations.

Learn more about how you can participate in this year’s event by visiting www.worldmigratorybirdday.org

Launched in March 2002, the eight-ton spacecraft exceeded its intended 5-year lifetime by a factor of 2 before falling silent without warning on April 8.

Over the course of its 10-year mission, Envisat data supported than 2,500 scientific papers and 4,000 projects in over 70 countries. Loss of the craft represents a major setback to many of the ongoing projects that were dependent upon its continuous flow of observational data.

As the largest non-military satellite ever built, Envisat carried 10 sophisticated instruments that provided precise information about Earth’s land, oceans, ice caps and atmosphere and contributed to our understanding of climate change.

Envisat: 10th Anniversary Video

Envisat documented the gradual shrinking of Arctic sea ice and the regular opening of the polar shipping routes during summer months. Together with other satellites, it monitored global sea-level height and regional variations, as well as global sea-surface temperatures with a precision of a few tenths of a degree. Years of Envisat data also led to a better understanding of ocean currents and chlorophyll concentrations.

In the atmosphere, the satellite observed air pollution increase in Asia and its stability in Europe and North America. It measured carbon dioxide and methane concentrations and also monitored variations in the Antarctica ozone hole.

Over land, it mapped the speed of ice streams in Antarctica and Greenland. Its images were used regularly to update the global maps of land use, including the effects of deforestation.

Using its imaging radar, Envisat mapped ground displacements triggered by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, improving understanding of tectonics and volcanic mechanisms.

In addition to providing scientific data, Envisat also monitored floods and oil spills, helping civil authorities to manage natural and man-made disasters.

Where possible, Envisat’s most critical data-gathering responsibilities are being shifted to other satellites, but loss of the craft only highlights the need for ESA to meet its often-delayed schedule for launching the next generation of earth-observing satellites known as Sentinals 1-5. The first of those missions is now scheduled for 2013.

Optical, radar and laser observations of Envisat during the past month indicate that it continues to circle the Earth in a stable, near-polar orbit. Given its mass and altitude, and left to its own devices, the satellite appears destined to become the largest piece of orbital space-junk before falling to Earth in about 150 years.

The fragile and rapidly changing Arctic is home to large reservoirs of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. As Earth’s climate warms, that methane is vulnerable to possible release into the atmosphere, where it can add to global warming.

Researchers have known for years that large amounts of methane are frozen in Arctic tundra soils and in marine sediments (including gas hydrates). But now a multi-institutional study led by Eric Kort of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has uncovered a surprising and potentially important new source of methane: the Arctic Ocean itself.

The photograph above was taken by Kort, and it shows leads and cracks in the ice cover of the Arctic Ocean north of Alaska. During five research flights in 2009–10, Kort and colleagues measured increased methane levels while flying at low altitudes north of the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas in a National Science Foundation/National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Gulfstream V aircraft as part of the HIAPER Pole-to-Pole Observations (HIPPO) airborne campaign.

The methane level detected during the flights was about one-half percent higher than normal background levels.
 But where was the methane coming from? The team detected no carbon monoxide in the atmosphere, which would have been a signature of methane coming from the human combustion of fuels. And based on the time of year, the location, and the nature of the emissions, it was unlikely that the methane was coming from high-latitude wetlands or geologic reservoirs.

By comparing the locations of the enhanced methane levels with airborne measurements of carbon monoxide, water vapor, and ozone, the researchers from six institutions pinpointed a source: the ocean surface, in places where there were cracks and openings in the sea ice cover. The cracks were allowing methane in the top layers of the sea to escape into the atmosphere. The team did not detect enhanced methane levels over areas of solid ice.

Kort noted that previous studies had detected high concentrations of methane in Arctic surface waters, but no one had predicted that this dissolved methane would find its way into the overlying atmosphere. Scientists are not yet sure how the methane is produced, but Kort suspects biological productivity in Arctic surface waters may be the culprit.

“It’s possible that as large areas of sea ice melt and expose more ocean water, methane production may increase, leading to larger methane emissions,” he said. “While the methane levels we detected weren’t particularly large, the potential source region, the Arctic Ocean, is vast. So our finding could represent a noticeable new global source of methane.”

Source: NASA Earth Observatory


The nationally-averaged temperature for the period May 2011-April 2012 registered 2.8°F above the 1901-2000 long-term average.

Looking just at temperatures for this year to date, temperatures ran 5.4°F above the long-term average, making this the warmest January-April period since recordkeeping began in 1895.

Twenty-six states, all east of the Rockies, were record warm for the four-month period and an additional 17 states had temperatures for the period among their ten warmest.

Last month also ranked as the third warmest April on record, following on the heels of the warmest March ever recorded.

The U.S. Climate Extremes Index (USCEI), an index that tracks the highest and lowest 10 percent of extremes in temperature, precipitation, drought and tropical cyclones across the contiguous U.S., was a record 42 percent during the January-April period, over twice the average value.

Extremes in warm daytime temperatures (82 percent) and warm nighttime temperatures (68 percent) covered a large area of the nation, contributing to the record high value.