New AI-powered research questions whether a majority of Earth’s mass extinctions were as abrupt as previously believed.

The Chancellor’s budget fails to deliver the investment needed to tackle the climate emergency, while protecting increased military spending, Quakers in Britain have said.

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Up and down the Pacific coast, dead gray whales are mysteriously washing ashore—and scientists think they know why

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Apparently, we're already in the earth's sixth mass extinction wave. A new UN report released last night, the most comprehensive to date, provides a lot of support for that case. It says we're on track to lose a million species of plants and animals, many within a matter of decades. That's about an eighth of all the species currently living on earth. The last five extinction waves have been triggered by natural causes, but scientists say there's no doubt this one is man-made. So does the extinction wave include humans? And is there anything we can do to stop it, if it's already underway? Featured: Professor Corey Bradshaw, Matthew Flinders Fellow in Global Ecology, Flinders University

(Beyond Pesticides, December 8, 2021) The diversity, abundance, and richness of invertebrate species on oceanic islands declines as a result of pesticide use, urban development, and other human activities, finds research published recently in Royal Society Open Science. Oceanic islands, despite their small size, harbor 20% of all species, and 50% of endangered species, making conservation critically important in the context of a sixth mass extinction and insect apocalypse. As the study indicates, “Although agriculture is currently considered the predominant driver of the worldwide species decline, it is crucial to investigate and consider all human land uses for obtaining a global impact assessment, especially in regions where land use types other than agriculture are predominant.” To determine the primary drivers of species declines on oceanic islands, researchers divided land use type into urban, tourist, and uninhabited. To provide a clean delineation between the various land uses, the study was carried out in the Republic of Maldives. Out of the roughly 1,200 Maldives Islands, researchers chose four uninhabited islands without any permanent human activity, four densely inhabited ‘urban’ islands comprised of Maldives residents, of four resort islands focused solely on tourism. Researchers applied a grid of 1 by 1 meter plots […]

A new report sounds the alarm on mounting ocean acidification as Earth breaches the seventh of nine "planetary boundaries."