News by Subject Biology

Nitrogen from agricultural production is a major cause of pollution in the Mississippi River Basin and contributes to large dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico. Illinois and other Midwestern states have set goals to reduce nitrogen load through strategies that include different land management practices. A new study from University of Illinois researchers, published in Journal of Environmental Management, uses computer modeling to estimate how those practices may be affected by potential changes in the climate, such as increased rainfall.

An international group of ecologists contests an article published in "Science," which among other cardinal errors proposed "reforestation" of the Cerrado, Brazil's savanna biome.

A new study, published in Science, which focuses on mapping biodiversity change in marine and land ecosystems shows that loss of biodiversity is most prevalent in the tropic, with changes in marine ecosystems outpacing those on land. The research, led by scientists from the University of St Andrews, in collaboration with leading universities across Europe, the USA and Canada, including McGill, aimed at reaching a consensus about variation in biodiversity change.

A new technique for analysing satellite images may help scientists detect and count stranded whales from space. Researchers tested a new detection method using Very High Resolution (VHR) satellite images from Maxar Technologies of the biggest mass stranding of baleen whales yet recorded. It is hoped that in the future the technique will lead to real-time information as stranding events happen.

While the identities of species in local assemblages are undergoing significant changes, their average number is relatively constant. Thus, changes in local assemblages do not always reflect species losses at the global scale. Scientists from the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research, the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and the University of St Andrews found greater changes in species composition in marine systems than on land, with most extreme changes in tropical marine biomes.

Researchers from Aarhus University and Durham University have modelled the fluid dynamics of multi-rotor wind turbines via high-resolution numerical simulations. The simulations demonstrate a clear advantage for a turbine model with four rotors. The researchers found, that the wind turbine wake recovers much faster with multi-rotor turbines, that multi-rotor turbines produce slightly more energy than single-rotor turbines, and that a turbine with four rotors as far apart as possible is the optimal construction.