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"Renewable Resources"
Coffee farmers don’t need to rely just on the presence of landscape-level forests to provide pollinator resources. Their own farm management can have strong impacts on local bee abundance and diversity.
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Research: Shade coffee conserves bee diversity
You had to wonder when it would happen. That moment when someone would take us from talk of how to prevent climate change to acknowledging that it was here already, here to stay, and that it had — and would continue — to irrevocably foreclose on many of the opportunities humanity has taken for granted for millennia. Figures it would be Bill McKibben. His first book, The End of Nature was one of the earliest to introduce global warming into popular culture . His latest book, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Hot New Planet, lays out our grim new reality relentlessly (excerpt here ). Yet it is not, fundamentally, a pessimistic book. McKibben’s premise, that we’re already on a new and different planet just as surely as if we’d boarded a spaceship en masse and arrived at a new world, is presented convincingly. This new world is less friendly, less accommodating, less commodious, just when we needed the old Earth to be more benign. If you are a regular reader of Climateprogress, you already know we’re now inhabiting an alien place but McKibben’s book is still a must read
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Review of Bill Mckibben’s must-read book “Eaarthâ€
One of the epic extreme weather events in U.S. recorded history devastated one of America’s great cities this month.  But the status quo media has barely told the story of Nashville’s Katrina (let alone its link to human-caused climate change). Since the great Tennessee deluge of 2010 foreshadows the shape of things to come for many of the world’s great cities if we stay anywhere near our current emissions path, I’m going to begin a multipart series on it. Uber-meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters and I have already touched on the link to warming already (see AP: Calling deadly Tennessee superstorm an “unprecedented rain event†did “not capture the magnitude†), and I’ll have more scientific analysis on that next week. What follows is some straightforward — but stunning — reporting on the disaster by guest blogger Eric Normand, a Tennessee-based writer and musician. The rain began falling on the morning of Saturday, May 1st, 2010, and by the time it finished, approximately 36 hours later; it had dumped a record rainfall of between 12 and 20 inches across Middle and Western Tennessee, devastating 52 of Tennessee’s 95 counties. Rivers that normally spanned 100 feet across swelled to a half-mile or more, flooding cities, towns, and roadways, washing away homes and bridges, destroying businesses and infrastructure, and leaving thousands homeless. At least 33 people died across Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky; some while trapped in cars on flooding interstates, others who were swept away from flooding homes by the raging waters, while thousands more were left stranded in remote communities without power or communication for days.
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The Tennessee deluge of 2010: Nashville’s ‘Katrina’ and the dawn of the superflood
Urbanization is continually spreading causing fewer and fewer areas left untouched. The impact of this is often clearly felt by the species displaced by urbanization itself. However, what are the impacts on species that are only temporary residents of areas that turn urban? This is the case of migratory birds, which rely on forest area for resting while migrating from one location to another. A four-year study by scientists at Ohio State University tracked 91 migratory birds to determine the impacts urbanization has on their migration. The scientists are Stephen Matthews and Paul Rodewald who co-authored the study now found in the journal Landscape Ecology. The scientists tagged more than 100 Swainson’s thrushes with small radio-transmitter tags weighing only 0.66 grams. Only 91 of these birds were then tracked using the tags, which were able to tell the scientists the location of the birds
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Study: Migratory Birds Rely Upon Urban Forests During Travel