Posts Tagged → Biodiversity loss

Watch: What does Europe really look like?

This video, just released by the European Environment Agency, takes viewers on a 100-second journey across Europe, with each second representing approximately 1% of the continent’s land area.

Based on land-cover data from the EU’s Copernicus Earth Observation Programme, it provides an aerial perspective of Europe’s diverse landscapes to provide a visualisation of what the continent’s landscape looks like and how the continent’s land is used.

Not surprisingly, the largest chunk of land cover is taken up by farmland, industrial-sized crop fields, livestock pastures and patchworks of fields. The video also shows how little space is allotted to wilderness and nature and asks: “Isn’t it time to rethink how we use our land?”

Daniel Raven-Ellison, a UK-based citizen geographer who trekked across 12 European countries over a three-week period this year to produce the video, said:

“As a geography educator I want everyone to be better informed so that we can make better decisions for people, nature and the climate. I wanted to make a film that uses science-based information to reveal how we are really using our land – and to physically show how we can make more space for nature.”

Yale e360: Arctic Wildlife Research Suffers as Geopolitical Competition Grows

Yale e360: Arctic Wildlife Research Suffers as Geopolitical Competition Grows

Arctic agendas are shifting to national security and the hunt for rare minerals. That has translated to an unprecedented slashing for wildlife research in the region at a time when climate change is dramatically reshaping every facet of life on the planet’s northern reaches.

“There have always been ebbs and flows in the support for environmental monitoring in the Arctic,” said Larry Hinzman, an expert in Arctic change at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. “But what we are seeing now is unprecedented. It’s heartbreaking because we need to know more than ever how to respond to a warming Arctic that is affecting almost every facet of life.”

And:

The decline in Arctic research comes at a time when at least 96 Arctic and sub-Arctic mammal and bird species may be responding to warmer winters, earlier spring snowmelt, and profound landscape changes by migrating earlier in the year and traveling farther afield, sometimes in new directions. But dozens of studies have shown that these journeys don’t always lead to more food. And they often expose birds to additional parasites and pathogens and put them at greater risk of predation.

Link.