View allAll Photos Tagged Ecosystem
The ‘Ecosystem-based Adaptation South’ project seeks to help the Seychelles, Nepal and Mauritania to adapt to climate change, in part by restoring natural habitats across all types of ecosystems. In the Seychelles, on-the-ground ecological restoration will rehabilitate 29 hectares of mangrove and wetland forests, thus providing natural flood barriers. Learn more about UNEP's work on adaptation: www.unep.org/explore-topics/climate-change/what-we-do/cli...
Photo credits: UNEP
On the dunes of Ladispoli, near Rome. What remains of a massive humid zone. All around is an abused land, the only safe sight is to look up at the sky.
This old couch is busily reintegrating itself into the forest ecosystem in a 50-yr old plantation in the Slesse Creek drainage.
A view of the aspects of the activities to support Traded-sector Business Startup. Including Outreach, Business Facilitation, Angel Funding, Business Acceleration and Cluster Development.
The crystal ball contains living shrimp, plants, air and water. It has been sealed for more than ten years now!
Aambyvalley rd., Upper Lonavala Maharashtra India
groups.google.com/g/indiantreepix/c/QrLB9cPrP0E/m/isdHWrc...
The hustle and bustle of Melbourne coupled with Melbourne's biggest ScaleUps. Photos by Tim Carrafa.
A critically endangered Eastern Mountain Gorilla forages on a hillside just outside of Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, Uganda. A large deforested buffer zone of inedible tea plants has been created in order to keep the gorillas from leaving the park and disrupting local farms. However the gorillas still recognize this area as part of their grazing territory and are bypassing the tea crops to access the remaining patches of wild foliage beyond.
Ambyvalley rd.,(Duttawadi rd.,Kurvande)Lonavala,Mah.India
If it wasn't for it's bright colours i would surely have
trampled it.Though shaken quickly steadied myself and shot this video at close range.
Truly a Giant of a Centipede.
Ecosystem infographic shows where your users are active online. Really cool infographic from Zabisco
What is your reaction when hearing that? My first impression was associated with drag net fishing, wreaking havoc to the ecosystems below. And Greenpeace is actively protesting their operation with dangerous intercepts of operations at sea. Is that the whole story then?
What if deep seabed mining of nickel and cobalt was the most environmentally benign alternative on Earth? That would flip my thinking entirely. Well, the alternative is strip mining in the rainforests of Indonesia and Congo, causing massive deforestation and devastation in some of the most valuable ecosystems.
How does that compare to Deep Seabed mining? Well, it’s deep, really deep, in the Abyssal Plain (12-18K ft. down). These Plains are not rare; they cover 50% of the Earth’s surface. And it’s unlike “mining” in the traditional sense. The metallic nodules are sitting on the surface, easily collected by robotic rovers. The smooth plains of silt are stirred up by this collection process, but to no obvious detriment to the main biomass that lives there — bacteria. Ongoing studies may find that they are helped by the agitation, giving more access to their nutrients. And the ecological value of microbe-infused silt is the opposite end of the spectrum from rainforest or coral reef.
The groups seeking permission from the International Seabed Authority to commence operations had to perform numerous studies of their effect on bacteria. Let me digress for a moment to mention how absurd this is. Every 48 hours, 50% of all bacteria on Earth are violently killed by phages. The shear tonnage of the slaughter is staggering: 17 billion tons of bacteria are killed by phage every single day. That’s the baseline. Deep Seabed Mining’s effect on a patch of them, positive or negative, is in the statistical noise by any reasoned analysis. Bacteria adapt quickly to any environment; they should not be the focus of any environmental impact analysis IMHO.
And there’s the rub. Opposition is pushing to try to prevent deep seabed mining by any means possible, reasoned or not. The logical error is the assumption that blocking deep seabed mining will stop mining. That will not happen, ever. Mining will shift to the next lowest cost option (deforesting Indonesia). It’s A versus B, not A versus nothing. Mining will occur, somewhere. How tragic for environmentalists to attack the best option and thereby foster the worst environmental outcomes for humanity. And the harm to the environment is compounded because the minerals in question are used to complete the transition away from oil to EVs. If Greenpeace wanted to promote deforestation and profits for Exxon, they would be hard pressed to find a better way. And, stepping back to consider the ocean's health, the biggest threat to the oceans is climate change and the related acidification that came from our fossil fuel era.
Where have we seen this backfiring behavior before? Nuclear energy. It was nuclear vs coal for the past 60 years, not nuclear vs nothing. Baseload energy will be generated, and environmental fear mongering shut down the best option for the environment back then. Lifelong environmentalist Stewart Brand summarized in his book Whole Earth Discipline: "Coal is now understood to be the long-term systemic horror we once thought nuclear was.” Nuclear was so safe that the nuclear fear mongering did more harm than nuclear energy itself! “Fear of radiation is a far more important health threat than radiation itself.” From the WHO analysis of Chernobyl and its long-term effects, stress from the human dialog on nuclear energy has killed more people than nuclear energy.
Same story with GMO foods, as Brand laments: “The environmental movement has done more harm with its opposition to genetic engineering than with any other thing we have been wrong about. We’ve starved people, hindered science, hurt the natural environment, and denied our own practitioners a crucial tool. We make ourselves look a conspicuously irrational, and we teach that irrationality to the public and to decision makers.”
Must history keep repeating itself with a tragic backfiring of environmental intent? Greenpeace’s position is “no deep sea mining, ever” with no consideration given to the default plan B. Classic A vs nothing thinking. The International Seabed Authority is preparing to process its first applications in 2025. I would hope Greenpeace would pause for a moment of rational consideration to not repeat the mega-mistakes of the past which fostered deforestation and climate change on a massive scale.
• Here is the closest I have seen to an impartial consideration of arguments for an against... with even ocean-obsessed James Cameron calling it a “less wrong” alternative to conventional land-based mining.
• Deep Seabed Mining FAQ by The Metals Company, the group that is farthest along (and it's their robot in photo above)
•Krisztina “Z” Holly, Adviser, National Advisory Council for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, USA; Global Agenda Council on Fostering, •Huang Mengfu, Honorary Chairman, All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce (ACFIC), People's Republic of China Entrepreneurship, - Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, Chief Executive Officer, Fora, Canada; Global Shaper •Kristin Peterson, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Inveneo, USA; Social Entrepreneur •Mariana Mazzucato, R. M. Phillips Professor in Science and Technology Policy, University of Sussex, United Kingdom •Orlando Ayala, Chairman, Emerging Markets, Microsoft Corporation, USA; Global Agenda Council on Competitiveness at the Annual Meeting of the New Champions 2013 in Dalian, China 13 September 2013. Photo by World Economic Forum
Aambyvalley Rd.,Off Lonavala,Mah.,India
www.inaturalist.org/projects/indianmoths/journal/97957-ta...
www.inaturalist.org/observations/126467880#activity_comme...
id.updated.
In Japan and elsewhere, people often wash their produce before eating it. Why? Is it to rinse off the dirt and insects? Or maybe we are hoping to clean off all the dreaded pesticides?
Perhaps the question is: do we really need those pesticides? One pioneering organic apple grower, Akinori Kimura, has proven that we do not. For years now, he has been inundated by more orders than he can handle from those who want a taste of what has been nicknamed the Miracle Apple.
Read more at Our World 2.0!
(Photo by Mathatelle)
Greenbelt Lake in Maryville, Tenn., is drying up Feb. 29, 2012. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Nashville District is working to divert water from two streams that enter the lake in order to remove sediment as part of an aquatic and ecosystem restoration project. (USACE photo by Leon Roberts)
Human Ecosystems in Sao Paulo: the Real-Time Museum of the City
Human Ecosystems is coming to Sao Paulo, at SESC Vila Mariana, from September 23rd to 28th 2014.
From September 23rd to 28th, as a parallel program of the International Meeting on Culture and New Technologies, the SESC Vila Mariana will hosts the Human Ecosystems project, by the Italian artists Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico (Art is Open Source).
Human Ecosystems is a global project which captures the real-time public conversations happening on major social networks in cities, to analyse them, to create real-time interactive visualisations, and transform them into a source of open data.
human-ecosystems.com/home/human-ecosystems-in-sao-paulo-t...
I am sorry, Ecology class today!
One of the most important limiting factors for aquatic fauna in mountain creeks is trophism. In every ecosystem on Earth the main energy source is sunlight, used by photosyntetic organisms to transform some inorganic compounds, water and carbon dioxyde, into organic, mainly glucose sugar. Plants though need more than simple sunlight, as their bodies are also made of proteins and other molecules where Nitrogen and Phosphorus are present as well as Carbon and Hydrogen. The first two elements must be found in the environment, as plants are not able to use athmospheric Nitrogen by their own, and Phosphorus is a relatively rare element. The concentration of N and P are clearly limiting factors for algae and plants growth in many river head stretches.
In that kind of environment algal growth is limited and only microalgae form thin layers on stone surface. Even if the turnover of this organisms is fast, their total biomass is low, so that grazing invertebrates can find poor food sources, while grazing fishes lack.
Energy, Carbon and the so called nutrients (mainly Nitrogen and Phosphorus) are carried into the aquatic ecosystem as organic detritus. This is represented by leaves, wood fragments and dead animals driven into the creek by wind or water rill flow. As soon as leaves are driven into the creek (actually as soon as they leave the tree branch) bacteria and fungi begin their decomposition. On these decomposing leaves a community of microorganisms develops where protozoa prey smaller organisms. Many benthic invertebrates feed cutting and eating fragments of decomposing leaves. These are called detrivorous invertebrates, but are not actually eating leaves, as animals can’t digest cellulose by their own. These cutters ingest leaf fragments and digest the microfauna layer on them. This is the way a large amount of energy and Carbon get into mountain running water ecosystems, the so called detritus food chain. Actually this is simply the most important energy stream into the ecosystem, but the monodimensional concept of “food chain” has been abandoned by ecologists many years ago. It is though an highly intuitive concept, useful in didactic models of freshwater environments.
So, dead leaves are the fuel for aquatic mountain ecosystems. I usually say that the river eats the surrounding forest. A change in forests or lateral river – land connection would change dramatically the energy intake and so the whole system.
Photo taken in torrente Lumiei upstream of the Plan dal Sac dam, Ampezzo (UD).
Aambyvalley rd.(Kurvande),Lonavala,Mah.,India
www.inaturalist.org/observations/6618506
no mood to fly....just rolled over.
see next photo
see comments for earlier photo of this species
Aambyvalley Rd.,Off Lonavala,Mah.,India
www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/75389#page/213/mode/1up
Id.updated.