Climate Change & Anthropocene Extinction 42: Do grass-eating Arctic geese suffer a climate mismatch?

Arctic geese like the Barnacle goose that breed on the Russian tundra and winter in the Netherlands need to increase the speed of their return trips, as the tundra spring starts weeks earlier – possibly skipping their fuelling stops on … Continue reading

Climate Change & Anthropocene Extinction 38: European migratory birds offer early climate warning

Migratory birds may seem to be well equipped to cope with the consequences of climate change, because their trait of seasonal migration is of course already an evolutionary adaptation to temperature fluctuations that characterise the seasons of Earth’s temperate climate … Continue reading

Climate Change & Anthropocene Extinction 16: Land use & warming exert same stress on tropical biodiversity

Anthropogenic climate change and land use change in the form of agricultural expansion (‘habitat conversion’ – a sweet description for deforestation) act as synergistic drivers of biodiversity loss – in a Costa Rican environmental experiment – literally drying out the … Continue reading

Bird evolution faster than thought, but still 300x too slow to outlive present human-induced extinctions

Doesn’t the Tree of Life make for a beautiful infographic? Shown is bird evolution according to the Hackett backbone tree – one of two studied by the researchers. Using the world’s first family tree linking every known bird species, scientists … Continue reading