Posts Tagged → Biodiversity

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.”

The Guardian: Listen to Britain’s Dawn chorus of 1976, illustrating the Dramatic Loss of Birdsong in 50 years

The Guardian: Listen to Britain’s dawn chorus of 1976 – the dramatic loss of birdsong in 50 years.

The Guardian recreated a decade-by-decade audio landscape of what the past morning symphonies of birds sounded like before 73 million of them were lost over the past five decades in Great Britain. The story also mentions a ‘shifting baseline syndrome’, a gradual shifting of accepted norms that applies, in this case to the natural environment, be it habit loss, species decline or the rapidly rising temperatures brought on by the climate crisis.

“What we have is a shifting baseline,” said Dr Rob Robinson, a senior scientist at the BTO who researches wild bird populations. “People engaging in nature today are going to think the numbers they are seeing are normal, particularly children. But if you go back 50 years, they would have been able to experience a much richer environment.”

And

This “shifting baseline syndrome” – a gradual shifting of the accepted norm when it comes to the natural environment – is, said nature writer Robert Macfarlane, an “enormously powerful and I think very pernicious, psychological mechanism whereby each new generation measures loss from the degraded baseline that it grew up into. We’re part of a web. We’re wired into the wild world. Birds help us remember that, and they can do it in a very everyday way.”

Give it a listen – possibly the most mindful 35 seconds you’ll experience today.

Study: Temperate local extinctions from climate change are outpacing tropical extinctions

Study: Temperate local extinctions from climate change are outpacing tropical extinctions.

From a study published yesterday (18 June 2026) in Nature Climate Change, “Climate change may soon cause a catastrophic loss of global biodiversity”. From the abstract:

For decades, tropical species have widely been considered more vulnerable than temperate species. However, some studies have suggested the opposite.

Using a global-scale dataset from resurvey studies spanning 5,151 plant and animal species encompassing 39,157 sites, we show that climate-related local extinctions were significantly more frequent among temperate (49% of surveyed species) than tropical species (33%).

We then tested whether these more frequent temperate extinctions were explained by greater sensitivity to warming among temperate species, by faster warming at higher latitudes, or both. We found that extinction probabilities increased significantly with the magnitude of recent warming in temperate regions, and that temperate species also showed a general trend towards higher sensitivity to warming.

Overall, our findings challenge the long-held view that climate change more strongly impacts tropical species and suggest that temperate species are increasingly vulnerable.

Link.