Ecosystems

CLICK HERE - WWF - Living Planet Report 2018: Aiming Higher

"There cannot be a healthy, happy and prosperous future for people" without biodiversity, the report warns.

nbcnews.com - by Rachel Elbaum - October 30, 2018

The population of the planet's vertebrates has dropped an average of 60 percent since 1970, according to a report by the WWF conservation organization.

The most striking decline in vertebrate population was in the tropics in South and Central America, with an 89 percent loss compared to 1970. Freshwater species have also significantly fallen — down 83 percent in that period.

The Living Planet Index, provided by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and included in the WWF Living Planet 2018 report, tracked the population of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians around the world between 1970 and 2014, the latest year for which data was available.

Flying insects caught in a malaise trap, used by entomologists to collect samples. Photograph: Entomologisher Verein Krefeld

Three-quarters of flying insects in nature reserves across Germany have vanished in 25 years, with serious implications for all life on Earth, scientists say

CLICK HERE - STUDY - Plos One - More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas

theguardian.com - by Darian Carrington - October 18, 2017

The abundance of flying insects has plunged by three-quarters over the past 25 years, according to a new study that has shocked scientists.

Insects are an integral part of life on Earth as both pollinators and prey for other wildlife and it was known that some species such as butterflies were declining. But the newly revealed scale of the losses to all insects has prompted warnings that the world is “on course for ecological Armageddon”, with profound impacts on human society.

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By Dr. Kolleh A Bangura

To assist Sierra Leone protected areas in building their resilience to climate change, the PARCC (Protected Areas Resilience to Climate Change) project has assessed future climate impacts of land use change on ecosystem services in Sierra Leone. This includes applying five spatially detailed regional climate model projections developed for the project and scenarios of future land use change.

This article summarizes the main features of projected climate impacts on ecosystem services and their implications for focus project areas in Sierra Leone and future national planning. Findings from the latest annual assessment report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are referred to in order to provide guidance on the way to interpret these results.

Climate Projections

The projections for mean annual temperature in Sierra Leone for the end of the 21st century are for significant increases (with very high confidence):

Image: The Great Barrier Reef is the world's largest living structure and can be seen from space.

bbc.com - March 29th 2016

Evidence that Australia's Great Barrier Reef is experiencing its worst coral bleaching on record has renewed calls for the UN to list it as "in-danger".

The National Coral Bleaching Taskforce says 95% of reefs from Cairns to Papua New Guinea are now severely bleached.

It says only four reefs out of 520 have no evidence of bleaching.

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