British chicken driving deforestation in Brazil’s “second Amazon”

THE BUREAU OF INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM

This satellite shot shows soybean production in Cerrato, Brazil. Green represents
areas cleared before 2001 and purple - between 2007-2013. NASA.

Soya used to feed UK livestock linked to industrial-scale destruction of vital tropical woodland. Story here.

As giant ice shelves collapse amid global warming in the Arctic, experts call for more protection for the "Last Ice Area" (LIA). The vast communities of plants and animals living there could be lost, they warn, before we even get to understand them!

    by Larry Powell 

                                The vast Milne Ice Shelf broke up this summer. Animals found 

living within its ice cavity (red box), are shown on the right. 
Photo credits: Left: Joseph Mascaro, Planet Labs Inc. 
Right: Water and Ice Laboratory, Carleton University.

Using tools which included video taken by a robot submarine, a Canadian research team recently discovered an amazing array of plants and animals, living in the heart of Milne, the very ice shelf which broke apart just this summer north of Ellesmere Island (above), losing almost half of its mass.

Dr. Derek Mueller, Professor of Geography and Environment Science at Ottawa's Carleton University, is a team member who's worked in the area for decades. In an email to PinP, he can barely disguise his excitement over what they found.

"There are really neat microbial mats (communities of micro-organisms including cyanobacteria, green algae, diatoms, heterotrophic bacteria, and viruses) that live on the surface of the ice shelves. Similar microbial mats can be found in ponds on the bottom of shallow lakes... Inside the sea ice and clinging to its underside are communities of algae and lots of kinds of phytoplankton in the ocean as well." 

Small animals from marine waters under the sea ice in Tuvaijuittuq, a Marine Protected Area in the region. Photo credit: P. Coupel and P. Tremblay, Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

So what might the world lose if these organisms disappear with the ice?

"This Last Ice Area will hopefully serve as a refuge for ice-dependent species," Dr. Mueller explains, "both on land and in the marine environment.  We know relatively little about these organisms - how they are adapted to their surroundings, how unique they are (or perhaps how similar they are to their cousins in analogous environments in the Antarctic) and many more questions!  We won't get to ask these questions if global temperatures rise unabated and this ice melts away."

The images above come from just a tiny part of the vastness Mueller refers to, called the "Last Ice Area." And, in the face of a rapidly-warming Arctic, events involving the break-up of sea ice are all too common there.

What's left of the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf in the Last Ice Area 

after breaking apart in 2011. Credit: CEN, Laval University.

Here's how Dr. Mueller describes the LIA. 

"'The Last Ice Area' means the region in the Arctic Ocean where sea ice is most likely to survive in a warming world." 

It sprawls for up to 25 hundred kilometres along the coastlines of northern Canada and Greenland and well out to sea. It's there that the thickest sea-ice in the entire Arctic can be found. Because of its importance as a home for ice-dependant marine life and its cultural significance to the Inuit people living there, they and the World Wildlife Fund have long promoted it as worthy of conservation. (Local Inuit elders call it “Similijuaq - place of the big ice.”) 

Dr. Mueller and a colleague, Dr. Warwick Vincent of Laval University in Quebec City, are now sounding the latest alarm bells over why additional measures are needed to protect the area from increased human activity.

While Dr. Mueller remains optimistic for the future, he suggests, further steps need to be taken to expand those existing, protected areas. 

"The good news is, we do still have a window to make a difference. We can augment the existing conservation areas - the marine one, Tuvaijuittuq MPA and the terrestrial one - Quttinirpaaq National Park,  with more optimal coverage of the LIA - from Greenland in the east to the NWT in the west and perhaps there could be more protection by expanding across the coastal region reaching both inland and offshore." 

The Government of Canada announced the creation of Tuvaijuittuq Marine Protected Area a year ago, aimed at protecting a large part of the LIA.

 It's not just marine life that will be vulnerable to melting ice. So, too will terrestrial (land) animals 

such as the Peary caribou, known to migrate across the sea ice. 

Photo by Paul Gierszewski - Nunavut.

"This would recognize the important interconnection between the terrestrial and marine environments. With vulnerable ice-dependent ecosystems protected from human activity, this will guarantee the removal of multiple environmental stressors.  The big stressor is, of course, climate change. But, if we can make good on our Paris commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally, then the chances of the LIA remaining, increase dramatically."   

The team's findings were published recently in Science Magazine.

As South Africa clings to coal, a struggle for the right to breathe

YaleEnvironmnt360

A small coal Mine, Highveld, South Africa. A Sierra Club photo.

Close ties between the ruling elite and the coal industry have helped perpetuate South Africa’s dependence on the dirtiest fossil fuel for electricity. But now residents of the nation’s most coal-intensive region are suing to force the government to clean up choking air pollution. Story here.

The role we humans play in the continuing decline of Earth's biosphere knows no boundaries. Sadly - an essential part of human life - food production - remains part of the problem.

by Larry Powell

 A thick blanket of smoke again darkens skies over northern India. Every year, farmers light large numbers of small fires between September and December—after the monsoon season—to burn off rice stalks and straw leftover after harvest, a practice known as stubble or paddy burning. (A NASA satellite image.) 

Details here.

Smoke from burning stubble hovers over a small town in southwestern Manitoba, CA.
Nov. 2020. A PinP photo.

Canada is no stranger to the same practise. While "stubble-burning" in this country did not approach that of India's (at least not this year), numerous such fires were still common again this fall over the eastern prairies (See above) and in past years (below).

Stubble-burning in Manitoba - circa 2005. Photos by PinP.

Wildfire smoke (see brown) over the Canadian prairies last year. A NASA photo.

Smoke from several large wildfires in Canada (now proven to be more severe, frequent and prolonged thanks to manmade climate change) was so thick and widespread that it was easily visible from 1.5 million kilometres away from Earth. NASA captured this image in May, 2019, when a river of smoke was streaming east across Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba.

Snarl for the camera! An international team of scientists and software developers use facial recognition technology to identify individual grizzlies in the wild.

 By Larry Powell

An adult female grizzly (Ursus arctos). "BearID," as the program 

is called, captures a bear’s face in a photo image, rotates, 

extracts and embeds it in order to classify the individual.  

Facial recognition techniques have long been used to identify primates, including humans. But, up 'til now, there's really been no effective way of identifying wild species like the grizzly (brown) bear who, unlike the zebra or giraffe, lacks unique and consistent body markings.

     

In co-operation with two US software developers, four scientists from the University of Victoria bought their idea to reality. They tested their system on grizzlies at two locations - Knight Inlet, BC, and Katmai National Park, Alaska. After taking thousands of pictures, they were able to positively identify 132 individuals with almost eighty-four percent accuracy. 

An adult female in another colour phase.
Both images by Melanie Clapham, U of Victoria, Canada. 

The technology enables wildlife monitoring on larger scales and in higher resolution than before. And it can be applied, not only to the grizzly, but to many other mammals, as well. This, in turn, could allow conservationists and lawmakers to tackle global challenges such as biodiversity and habitat loss.

Knight Inlet, one of the two locations for the research, is home to a First Nations Lodge where bear-watching forms part of the local eco-tourism industry. 

A band official there, Dallas Smith is impressed with the results. 

“This amazing technology will help us identify individual bears and better understand their movement and interactions throughout our territories, which will enable us to build better management plans around habitat protection. It will also help us manage and mitigate the impact of wildlife viewing, as well as positioning ourselves to more effectively and efficiently deal with bear-human conflicts that are becoming more and more prevalent.”

These new ways of using facial recognition technology, referred to as a "deep learning approach," were published recently in the journal, Ecology and Evolution.

Concentration Matters. Farmland Inequality on the Canadian Prairies

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives 

 by Darrin Qualman, Annette Aurélie Desmarais, André Magnan and Mengistu Wendimu

A scene typical to the Canadian prairies - a big farm at harvest time.
A public domain photo by cj berry.

The ownership and control of Canada’s food-producing land is becoming more and more concentrated, with profound impacts for young farmers, food system security, climate change and democracy. 

On the Canadian prairies, small and medium-sized family farms are often portrayed as the primary food production units. Yet, the reality of farming in Western Canada is quite different. In fact, a small and declining number of farms are operating the lion’s share of Prairie farmland and capturing the lion’s share of farm revenue and net income. 

The authors analyse the extent of farmland concentration in Canada’s three Prairie provinces (Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba), where over 70 per cent of the country’s agricultural land is situated. They find that 38 per cent of Saskatchewan’s farmland is operated and controlled by just 8 per cent of farms. In Alberta, 6 per cent of farms operate 40 per cent of that province’s farmland, while Manitoba sees 4 percent of farms operate and control 24 per cent of the land. Such concentration makes it much harder for young and new farmers to enter agriculture, with the number of young farmers in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba declining by more than 70 per cent within just one generation

The persistent decline in the number of farmers, farm size expansion, growing farm income inequality, and increased land concentration have other effects as well. Rural economies, communities, businesses, and services are also affected as there are fewer farm families to patronize local shops and services, while farmers lose their capacity to democratically influence governments and legislation as their voting numbers fall. Meanwhile, non-farmers lose their connections to farms and rural culture as fewer and fewer urban residents count farmers among their family members or friends. A series of policy measures are urgently needed to counter the market forces that will otherwise drive us toward even more concentrated farmland ownership and drive half of Canadian farm families off the land in the next one to two generations.

RELATED:

Just 1% of Farms Control 70% of Global Farmland: Study Finds 'Shocking State of Land Inequality'

Recent research shows: More rare, endangered sharks are dying in the worldwide trade in shark fins than earlier feared.

by Larry Powell

  The "Grey Nurse" or "Sand Tiger," shark ( Carcharias taurus), a coastal species on the ICU's Red List as critically endangered. A public domain photo by Richard Ling. 

Here's how sharks are "finned."

After hauling them aboard their vessels, the fishermen cut off their fins, then toss them back into the ocean. Still alive, they sink to the bottom where they're either eaten by other predators or die of suffocation. 

 

About 100 million sharks are believed to be taken by fishers each year, most of them for their fins alone. 

It's an industry estimated to be worth US$400 million a year. 

The blue shark (Prionaceglauca). Photo by Mark Conlin/NMFS.

If one were to believe official trade records over the past twenty years, most fins traded on world markets have come from more abundant "pelagic" species (ones which live in the open ocean) like the blue shark (above). 

The leopard shark (Stegostoma fasciatum). An ADV photo by Jeffrey N. Jeffords. 

Using advanced techniques in barcoding and genetic tracing, scientists are now painting a different picture. By analyzing more than five thousand fins from markets on three continents, they still found a lot had come for those "pelagic" populations. But they also found "an additional 40 'range-restricted' coastal species" which did not show up in previous records. These populations live closer to shore and do not range as widely as those in the open oceans. With local jurisdictions providing little protection for them, their populations now face "dramatic declines" and are "typically less abundant."  

However, even the more common deep-sea species have been falling victim to "chronic exploitation" by fishers who are "collapsing" their populations, too. 

New DNA tracking techniques are revealing a greater number of threatened and coastal sharks from stockpiles of intact shark and processed fins (pictured). Image credit: Paul Hilton.

So, if we want to conserve sharks and curb the "unsustainable global trade in shark fins," conclude the researchers, "stronger local controls of coastal fishing are urgently needed."

Their study was published this summer in the proceedings of The Royal Society.

But this is hardly the first cautionary tale pointing to the plight of Earth's marine life in general and sharks, in particular. Another research paper published in 2017 warns, they face "possibly the largest crisis of their 420 million year history. Many populations are overfished to the point where global catch peaked in 2003, and a quarter of species have an elevated risk of extinction."

RELATED:

The Health of Canadian Fisheries Continues to Decline

Canada's Governing Party Blows a Golden Opportunity to Curb the Brutal Practice of "Shark-Finning" on the High Seas