More than half of Europe’s endemic trees are threatened with extinction as invasive diseases, pests, pollution and urban development take a growing toll on the landscape, according to a study.
“I’ve been keeping an eye on it over the past five years. Last year, I began to get quite worried. This year, huge areas are experiencing a dieback and it’s not just affecting saplings like it was before. Now it’s whole big trees. I drove in some parts of Pembrokeshire recently, and every five or 10 metres there was an ash tree dead or dying. This is a major problem – way worse than I expected it to be.”
The study of trees is part of a wider European red list that examines the status of overlooked species in order to determine priorities for conservation. It found 20-50% of terrestrial molluscs, shrubs and bryophytes, such as moss and liverworts, are threatened with extinction due to a loss of wild areas, expanded agriculture and climate change. Although these species are unglamorous and rarely attract attention, they play a vital role in food production and other natural life support systems through oxygen production, nutrient recycling and soil regeneration.
"Thus, once these species are lost from Europe, they are gone for ever,”
“We are seeing our natural environment being eaten away,” he said. It’s such a wide scale problem, rather like climate"
dohboi wrote:Today I saw what I knew to be a warbler, and thought, maybe that's what I saw a few days ago...They can be a bit hard to distinguish in flight--both are fast and small.
Sinclarsorus wrote:I think the die-off will begin economically in banking in regard to all agriculture loans and operations. Food will be scarce near the end of economically available oil supplies. Most fertilizers and farm operations like pesticides and farming equipment need lots of oil to operate. Its almost 10 pounds of oil for every pound of food from oil drilling to food on your plate. So the Ag business will be the Achilles Heal of Humanity in the end. There may even be wars over food and oil sources near the end if not already. But my dad use to hear stuff like this as a kid and he was born over a hundred years ago and it never happened in his time. So maybe not ours either, hard to tell at this point.
Check out this YouTube: (Bill Gaede on The Extinction of Man)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8vNU_HgnZU
Its along the lines I'm thinking here. This is the most Doom and Gloom version of Agriculture failing.
Bill Gaede lives in Germany and a free-lance Physicist and was sent to jail for espionage in the past. But has a lot of cool theories in Physics and Economics.
Since January 1, 2019, elevated gray whale strandings have occurred along the west coast of North America from Mexico through Alaska. This event has been declared an Unusual Mortality Event (UME).
Full or partial necropsy examinations were conducted on a subset of the whales. Preliminary findings in several of the whales have shown evidence of emaciation. These findings are not consistent across all of the whales examined, so more research is needed.
In 1999, the number of gray whale strandings documented along the west coast of North America increased to approximately seven times the annual mean of 41 animals reported between 1995 and 1998. The unusually high number (283) of stranded whales
The number of stranded animals remained high in 2000, with 368 carcasses reported (a nine-fold increase over the 1995-98 average).
In 2001 and 2002, however, total strandings decreased to 21 and 26 animals, respectively.
Most of the strandings in 1999 and 2000 occurred in Mexican waters during the winter season.
Why did we take so long to invent civilisation? Modern Homo sapiens first evolved roughly 250,000 to 350,000 years ago. But initial steps towards civilisation – harvesting, then domestication of crop plants – began only around 10,000 years ago, with the first civilisations appearing 6,400 years ago.
For 95% of our species’ history, we didn’t farm, create large settlements or complex political hierarchies. We lived in small, nomadic bands, hunting and gathering. Then, something changed.
We transitioned from hunter-gatherer life to plant harvesting, then cultivation and, finally, cities. Strikingly, this transition happened only after the ice age megafauna – mammoths, giant ground sloths, giant deer and horses – disappeared. The reasons humans began farming still remain unclear, but the disappearance of the animals we depended on for food may have forced our culture to evolve.
dohboi wrote:Speaking of die-offs/extinctions, some might find this interesting:
How the extinction of ice age mammals may have forced us to invent civilization
https://www.rawstory.com/2020/01/how-th ... ilisation/
First evidence of farming in Mideast 23,000 years ago
The global Living Planet Index continues to decline. It shows an
average 68% decrease in population sizes of mammals, birds,
amphibians, reptiles and fish between 1970 and 2016.
A 94% decline in the LPI for the tropical subregions of the Americas is the
largest fall observed in any part of the world.
dohboi wrote:The mass dieoff of the non-human world continues apace :/
https://www.wwf.org.uk/sites/default/fi ... report.pdf
The global Living Planet Index continues to decline. It shows an
average 68% decrease in population sizes of mammals, birds,
amphibians, reptiles and fish between 1970 and 2016.
A 94% decline in the LPI for the tropical subregions of the Americas is the
largest fall observed in any part of the world.
Outcast_Searcher wrote:dohboi wrote:Speaking of die-offs/extinctions, some might find this interesting:
How the extinction of ice age mammals may have forced us to invent civilization
https://www.rawstory.com/2020/01/how-th ... ilisation/
Or the assumption it was only about 10,000 years ago is wrong.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 144709.htmFirst evidence of farming in Mideast 23,000 years ago
Or it took that long for our brains to evolve enough for such practices to become widespread. Just as we now think it took a hell of a lot of time for practical human speech to evolve.
https://www.the-scientist.com/features/ ... ial--64351
...
Seriously, there's a hell of a lot more that we DON'T know than we DO know about the times before recorded human history. There are all sorts of theories that can and will be hatched about how/why certain things happened. SOME of them might even turn out to be correct, to whatever extent we can reliably count on the evidence we have.
The study focuses on the discovery of the first weed species at the site of a sedentary human camp on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. It was published in PLOS ONE and led by Prof. Ehud Weiss of Bar-Ilan University in collaboration with Prof. Marcelo Sternberg of the Department of Molecular Biology and Ecology of Plants at TAU's Faculty of Life Sciences and Prof. Ofer Bar-Yosef of Harvard University, among other colleagues.
"While full-scale agriculture did not develop until much later, our study shows that trial cultivation began far earlier than previously believed, and gives us reason to rethink our ancestors' capabilities," said Prof. Sternberg. "Those early ancestors were more clever and more skilled than we knew."
Outcast_Searcher wrote:Or it took that long for our brains to evolve enough for such practices to become widespread. Just as we now think it took a hell of a lot of time for practical human speech to evolve.
https://www.the-scientist.com/features/ ... ial--64351
dohboi wrote:We have been encultured to believe that our most important role is to control (non-human) nature. But our real main task in life is to learn to control our individual and collective 'natures,' especially our propensities to over-consume and to over-propogate, to the detriment of nearly all other life forms, and of course eventually to our own demise.
dohboi wrote:Interesting point about Soviet security.
But as to your general claim, it doesn't seem to apply to sharks, who have been around in one form or another for nearly half a billion years.
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