2006
27 December 2006. Agency
Proposes to List Polar Bears as Threatened.
By FELICITY BARRINGER and ANDREW C. REVKIN,
NY Times. Excerpt:
WASHINGTON, Dec. 27 - The Interior Department
proposed Wednesday to designate polar bears
as a threatened species, saying that the
accelerating loss of the Arctic ice that
is the bears' hunting platform has led biologists
to believe that bear populations will decline,
perhaps sharply, in the coming decades.
... in a conference call with reporters,
Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said
that although his decision to seek protection
for polar bears acknowledged the melting
of the Arctic ice, his department was not
taking a position on why the ice was melting
or what to do about it. ...[he said] it
was not his department's job to assess causes
or prescribe solutions. ...The scientific
analysis in the proposal itself, however,
did assess the cause of melting ice. ...buildup
of heat-trapping gases was probably contributing
to the loss of sea ice to date or that the
continued buildup of these gases, left unchecked,
could create ice-free Arctic summers ...possibly
in as little as three decades. The Interior
Department ...must also work out a recovery
plan to control and reduce harmful impacts
to the species, usually by controlling the
activities that cause harm. It is unclear
whether such a recovery plan could avoid
addressing the link between manmade emissions
of heat-trapping gases and the increase
in Arctic temperatures. Kert Davies, the
research director for Greenpeace U.S.A.,
one of three environmental groups that sued
the Interior Department in 2005 to force
it to add polar bears to the list of threatened
species, said the administration was "clearly
scrambling for credibility of any kind in
this issue." Kassie Siegel, the lawyer
for the Center for Biological Diversity,
...that took the lead in the lawsuit calling
on the department to list the polar bear,
added, "I don't see how even this administration
can write this proposal without acknowledging
that the primary threat to polar bears is
global warming and without acknowledging
the science of global warming." As
a result of the lawsuit, the Interior Department
had a court-ordered deadline of Wednesday
to make a decision. The worldwide population
of polar bears currently stands at 20,000
to 25,000, broken into 19 groups in Russia,
Denmark, Norway, Canada and the United States.
...The most-studied bear population, in
the Western Hudson Bay in Canada, has dropped
22 percent, to 935 from 1,194 from 1987
to 2004....
5 September 2006. Research
Shows That Plants Like a Path to Biodiversity.
By CORNELIA DEAN. NY Times. Excerpt:
For years, ecologists have theorized that
establishing landscape corridors to connect
otherwise isolated plant and animal habitats
would encourage biological diversity. Now
researchers working in South Carolina have
demonstrated it, at least with plants. The
researchers, who report their findings in
the current issue of the journal Science,
surveyed dozens of test plots in forested
areas of the Savannah River Site, a 310-square-mile
swath of southeastern South Carolina originally
set aside to produce nuclear weapons for
the military. ...The researchers surveyed
their sites regularly starting in 2000 and
found that, over time, there was more plant
diversity in patches connected by corridors
than in other patches, even if they had
the same total area or the same amount of "edge" space
between cleared and wooded areas....
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