Blog List

Monday 26 December 2016

Mansonone E and F accumulation in Ulmuspumila resistant to Dutch elm disease

Author

The presence of mansonones E and F in Ulmuspumila L. seedlings was determined 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, and 9 weeks after inoculation with aggressive and nonaggressive strains of Ophiostomaulmi (Buisman) Nannf. Mansonones E and F were accumulated in greater quantities by the seedlings inoculated with either strain than the seedlings inoculated with autoclaved distilled water or the control seedlings. No difference in mansonone induction was observed between the aggressive and the nonaggressive strain. Mansonones E and F accumulated until 2 weeks after inoculation and subsequently declined. Both aggressive and nonaggressive strains were recovered in the same frequencies from the inoculation wounds. The accumulation of mansonones E and F by Upumila is discussed in regard to resistance to Dutch elm disease.
For further details log on website :
http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/abs/10.1139/x86-078

Biomass estimation equations for Norway spruce in New York

Author

Biomass estimation equations for plantation-grown Norway spruce (Piceaabies (L.) Karst.) were developed from data of 30 sample trees and expressed using the linear form of the following allometric equation: In Y = b0 + b1 ln X + ln ε, where Y is dry weight and X is dbh or D2H. The accuracy of the equations for biomass estimates were ranked as follows: total tree > stem wood > stem bark > foliage > live branches > dead branches. Diameter alone was a strong predictor of biomass and the addition of height to the model only slightly reduced the standard error of the estimate for the stem component equations. Comparison of results to equations developed in Sweden showed similarity in predictions for total biomass, but also showed disparity in predictions for individual tree components. Factors that influence tree morphology and distribution patterns of dry matter accumulation, such as stocking and site quality, may be responsible for these differences.
For further details log on website :
http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/abs/10.1139/x86-078

Compatible cubic volume and basal area equations for red pine plantations

Author

Compatible equations for projecting total cubic volume, merchantable cubic volume to any top diameter limit, quadratic mean stand diameter, and basal area per hectare are given for red pine plantations. A ratio method is used for estimating merchantable volume. The system of equations is developed and tested using data from plantations in upper Michigan.
For further details log on website :
http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/abs/10.1139/x86-078

Somatic embryogenesis in tissue cultures of Liriodendrontulipifera

Author

Tissue cultures of yellow poplar (Liriodendrontulipifera L.) were initiated from immature and mature zygotic embryos. Nodular embryogenic callus developed from a low percentage of the cultures initiated from immature embryos on solid media supplemented with 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid, 6-benzyladenine, and casein hydrolysate. Embryoids differentiated from these culture lines within 1 month following transfer of embryogenic callus to hormone-free solid media. Although most embryoids appeared abnormal, embryoids with well-formed cotyledons and radicles were capable of developing into normal plantlets.
For further details log on website :
http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/abs/10.1139/x86-078

Menu Magnetic resonance imaging of wood

Author
A magnetic resonance scanner has been used to obtain images at 0.14 T, based on the water in aspen (Populustremuloides Michx.). In addition to visualization of the expected structural features such as annual growth-rings and knots, several additional features appear that require further study. Kiln-dried wood does not contain sufficient water to give an image, but can do so after impregnation with water.

For further details log on website :
http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/abs/10.1139/x86-078

I Was Fired for Posting a Map

Bush’s war against information

Author 

BY IAN THOMAS

I have been fired for posting to the Internet a single Web page with some maps showing the distribution of caribou calving areas in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).

My entire website [http://www.mbrpwrc.usgs.gov/geotech] was, at one point, removed from the Internet. This represents about three years’ worth of work and 20,000-plus maps showing bird, mammal and amphibian distributions, satellite imagery, land cover and vegetation maps for countries and protected areas all around of the globe.

Last week, I published over 1,000 land-cover maps online covering every National Wildlife Refuge and National Park in the lower 48 states. These maps have now been removed from the Internet, too.

As far as I am aware, it was one of the biggest collections of maps online and certainly the biggest collection showing maps of biodiversity and the environment.

All of this comes as a rather big surprise to me. I was given no chance to remove the webpage or even finish writing an appeal before my position was terminated. I have received no written explanation stating the exact reasons for the termination decision and I understand that although this would be a reasonable courtesy to expect, it is unlikely to be forthcoming.

From my viewpoint, my dismissal was a high-level political decision to set an example to other federal scientists. I base this belief on the following information I received from a colleague in Alaska who is a leading researcher on the issues involved:

"[H]ad the timing of what you did not been so inappropriate... I doubt that anyone would have noticed. Your work showed a lot of initiative... The fallout would not have been so great... had we not been briefing the Secretary [of the Interior] at the nearly exact time your website went up."

I reiterate: a request to remove the maps from the website and to follow whatever review procedure necessary for future Internet publications would have been complied with and followed promptly and absolutely. My termination by USGS was instead a gross over-reaction due to the sensitive political considerations USGS is currently operating under about caribou and the ANWR.

The migration of caribou in North America is the closest thing that we have to the great mammal migrations that occur in Africa. African protected areas are also under great pressure from possible development for mineral extraction.

I thought that I was helping further public and scientific understanding and debate of the issues at ANWR by making some clearer maps. I made no statement about what the maps might mean with regard to oil development of the refuge.

I believe my only recourse is to appeal to the public in the hope that in the future what happened to me will not happen to others.

I would recommend anybody in similar circumstances to contact the fine people at Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility [http://www.peer.org].

I very much appreciate how quickly people have acted on my behalf and helped publicize my plight and I especially thank the international mapping community. The USGS has now reposted some of my maps. We have filed a Freedom of Information request to obtain the whole website maps. When we get them I will put them up on the Web [http://www.peer.org/anwr].

These events are also affecting my colleagues at Patuxent. Patuxent was a great place to work, has amazing researchers and everybody I worked with is very supportive.
Over the last three years, I have put more maps up on the Internet (approaching 20,000 to 30,000 static individual maps), equaling any other website on the World Wide Web. So, out of the tens of thousands of maps (and hours), I finally publish one that got me fired.
Ian Thomas is a former mapping specialist at the GIS & Remote Sensing Unit Biological Resources Division, USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center. Ian Thomas now has a new job – making maps for the World Wildlife Fund.

For further details log on website :
http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/eij/article/i_was_fired_for_posting_a_map/

The Jetcraft Juggernaut

More Airplanes, More Airports, More Delays and More Pollution

Author 

BY PETER FISHER

San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown would like to get rid of "flitterbugs," those vexatious turboprop commuter planes that account for just a tenth of the flights and two percent of the passengers passing through SF International Airport.

These small planes take up valuable runway space and control tower time. If only Mayor Brown could get people hooked on bigger, less-frequent planes, he could stave off an environmental disaster – expanding the airport into San Francisco Bay.

San Francisco’s problem is all too familiar to managers of the world’s increasingly busy airports. The Southern California Association of Governments sees demand at LA International growing from 60 million to 94 million passengers per year between 1997 and 2020, a jump of 64 percent. Orange County demand could grow 379 percent, from 8 million to 29 million. Airbus says the world cargo fleet is destined to double.

Until frequent-flyer programs and fare discount wars, the passenger side of the industry tended to be the preserve of jetsetters and business travelers, but the past couple of decades has seen air travel extend well down the income scale. Global air traffic has grown 9 percent per annum since 1960. By 2015, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) believes that a billion passengers will travel by air in the US alone. Europe expects air travel to double by 2010.

Air Traffic’s Dirty Trail

Recently, the EPA added electricity utilities, coal and metal mining, chemical wholesalers, petroleum bulk plants and terminals, and solvent recovery and hazardous waste facilities to the list of sites that must lodge emissions data. Surprisingly, airports continue to escape this monitoring requirement despite the fact that arriving and departing planes generate a witch’s brew of nitrogen oxide, hydrocarbons, sulfur dioxide, naphthalene, known carcinogens benzene and formaldehyde, and dust ["Airports’ Poison Circles," Winter 2000-1 EIJ].

The air-cargo sector is by far the worst offender. Many cargo jets are pensioned off from passenger work. Some can be up to 40 years old. Toiling in the night skies of Europe and America, these veterans are fitted with US-made "hush kits’’ that cut their noise to legal limits. But they remain 10 decibels louder than modern aircraft.

Their heavier loading requires these jets to remain on full throttle longer as they strain to gain a respectable altitude. People living near busy airports, especially in Europe, are being driven bonkers in the name of flourishing world trade. Outside Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, residents from surrounding districts have blocked access highways, demanding an overnight pause in takeoffs and landings.

In 1999, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned that excessive or persistent noise "interferes with communication; induces sleep disturbance effects; cardiovascular and psycho/physiological effects; performance-reduction effects; annoyance responses; and [affects] social behavior." The WHO argues that "nighttime aircraft movements should be discouraged where they impact residential communities."

This nocturnal derangement prompted the Aviation Environment Federation’s "Green Skies" campaign (a coalition of 25 environmental and citizens groups from more than 20 countries) to launch a "Save Our Sleep" initiative in May 2000. This issue has now been taken to the European Court in Strasbourg. Mitigation can be costly, however: Chicago recently spent more than $78 million to soundproof 37 schools near O’Hare Airport.

A 1999 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that aircraft were responsible for 3.5 percent of global climate change through carbon dioxide (C02) emissions, and this could rise fourfold by 2050, with the cargo sector making a disproportionate contribution.
The IPCC assumed that fuel efficiency would improve by 40 to 50 percent by 2050 while progress in aircraft management would reduce fuel-burn by another 8 to 18 percent. Nonetheless, the sheer growth in air traffic (estimated at about 2 to 4 percent per year) is expected to swamp these gains. C02 emissions are expected to rise to 4 percent of the industrial total, ozone concentrations will increase 13 percent, condensation trails will increase by 0.5 percent and cirrus formation 400 percent.
In the meantime, airport planners are trying to meet traffic growth by adding runways, using new technologies and management systems, and building new airports. In the US, the Airports Expansion Act provides $40 billion to build new airports and to extend runways at 2,000 existing metropolitan airports.
An Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast device, linked to the satellite-based Global Positioning System, will enable planes to fly closer together. Under the FAA’s "free flight" concept, pilots would have more discretion to select paths within predetermined areas and would be encouraged to maintain "minimum separation" – i.e., fly closer together.
Airports – along with hazardous waste facilities, nuclear waste repositories, powerplants, prisons and road tunnels – are archetypal LULUs (locally unwanted land uses). There may be a societal need for them but no one wants one in their locality.
The International Civil Aviation Organization is due to debate a jet fuel tax as a way to encourage use of more fuel-efficient aircraft. At the moment, taxes on aviation fuel are illegal under the convention that regulates international civil aviation. Britain’s Institute for Public Policy Research has suggested introducing an emissions-trading scheme for aircraft with a cap on C02 and the equal splitting of emissions cuts between departure and arrival countries. However, such schemes leave out the issues of water vapor and nitrogen dioxides.
The British air transport industry has proposed a voluntary agreement to lower the government’s air passenger duty up to 80 percent for the use of more fuel-efficient planes. It wanted the government to provide enhanced capital allowances for fleet revamps. The British plan also suggested that a portion of the air passenger duty could be used to invest in carbon offsets.
Australia’s two major carriers have signed up to the Greenhouse Challenge. With 97 percent of the energy usage consumed in takeoff, there has been an attempt to reduce this by adjusting takeoff angles and routes. Some carriers have begun to offer frequent flyers the chance to buy trees for carbon sequestration – in effect, asking their customers to share emission offsets. However, reports in the New Scientist cast doubt on the short-term wisdom of using trees as a carbon sink.
There is no escaping the fact that the sheer volume of global traffic will eventually erode any fuel and emission savings achieved by taxes or efficiency measures. Some believe the answer lies in fewer, bigger planes like the Airbus A3XX-100 – a 540- to 960-seat double-deck super jumbojet. But precisely the same thing was said of the Boeing jumbojet and look what happened.
Technical innovation can accomplish a good deal, but it won’t carry the day on its own. Eventually, the industry will have to commit to bringing ecologically sustainable development into its core business operations.

For further details log on website :
http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/eij/article/the_jetcraft_juggernaut/

The Nuclear Body Count

Nuclear Power is Neither ‘Cheap’ nor ‘Clean’

Author 

BY EDUARDO GONCLAVES

The Ecologist

The equivalent of a nuclear war has already happened. Over the last half-century, millions have died as a result of accidents, experiments, lies and cover-ups by the nuclear industry.

Today, Kosovo is littered with destroyed tanks and pieces of radioactive shrapnel. NATO forces fired 31,000 depleted uranium (DU) shells during the Kosovo campaign and 10,800 into neighboring Bosnia. The people NATO set out to protect – and the soldiers it sent to protect them – are now dying. According to Bosnia’s health minister, Boza Ljubic, cancer deaths among civilians have risen to 230 cases per 100,000 last year, up from 152 in 1999. Leukemia cases, he added, had doubled.

Scientists predict that the use of DU in Serbia will lead to more than 10,000 deaths from cancer among local residents, aid workers and peacekeepers.

Far from the war-torn Balkans is Newbury, a prosperous white-collar industrial town in London’s commuter belt. On its outskirts is Greenham Common, the former US Air Force station that was one of America’s most important strategic bases during the Cold War.

In August 1993, Ann Capewell – who lived just one mile away from the base’s former runway – died of acute myeloid leukemia. She was 16. Her parents were surprised to find a number of other cases of leukemia in their locality.

What none of them knew was that they were the victims of a nuclear accident at Greenham Common that had been carefully covered up by successive British and US administrations.

On February 28, 1958, a laden B-47 nuclear bomber was suddenly engulfed in a huge fireball. A secret study by British scientists documented the fallout, but the findings were never disclosed. Virtually all the cases of leukemias and lymphomas are in a band stretching from Greenham Common into south Newbury. The Americans still insist there was no accident.

In 1981, the Pentagon publicly released a list of 32 "Broken Arrows" (the military term for an accident involving a nuclear weapon). But another secret government document states that "a total of 1,250 nuclear weapons have been involved in accidents during handling, storage and transportation," a number of which "resulted in, or had high potential for, plutonium dispersal."

We may never know the true toll from all the bomb accidents, as the nuclear powers classify these disasters as matters of "national security."

The War on Civilians

The US government recently admitted its nuclear scientists carried out more than 4,000 experiments on live humans between 1944 and 1974. They included feeding radioactive food to disabled children, irradiating prisoners’ testicles and trials on newborn babies and pregnant mothers. Manhattan Project scientists injected people with plutonium without telling them.

In Britain too, scientists have experimented with plutonium on newborn babies, ethnic minorities and the disabled. They also conducted experiments similar to America’s "Green Run" program, in which the scrubber filters on the vent stacks at the Hanford plutonium factory were deliberately switched off, releasing "dirty" radiation over populated areas of Washington and Oregon, contaminating crops and water. Scientists, posing as agriculture department officials, found radiation contamination levels on farms hundreds of times above "safety" levels. America’s farmers and consumers were not told. Similarly, the British public was never officially told about experiments on its own soil.

Forty Thousand Hiroshimas

An estimated 1,900 nuclear tests conducted during the Cold War have released fallout equivalent to 40,000 Hiroshimas in every corner of the globe. Fission products from the Nevada Test Site can be detected in the ecosystems of countries as far apart as South Africa, Brazil and Malaysia.
A 1957 US government study predicted that US nuclear tests had produced an extra 2,000 "genetically defective" babies in the US each year, and up to 35,000 every year around the globe.
In 1900, cancer accounted for only 4 percent of US deaths. Now it is the second leading cause of premature mortality. Worldwide, the World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates the number of cancers will double in most countries over the next 25 years.
Those who lived closest to the test sites – such as the 100,000 people who were directly downwind of Nevada’s
fallout – have seen their families decimated. In the Mormon community of St. George, Utah, 100 miles away from "Ground Zero" – the spot where the bombs were detonated – cancer used to be virtually unheard of among its population. Just a few years after the tests began, St George had a leukaemia rate 2.5 times the national average. The number of radiation deaths are said to have totaled 1,600 – in a town with a population of just 5,000.
When the leukemia cases suddenly began to appear, doctors had no idea what it was. Women who complained of radiation sickness symptoms were told they had "housewife syndrome." Many gave birth to terribly deformed children that became known as "the sacrifice babies." As President Eisenhower had said: "We can afford to sacrifice a few thousand people out there in defense of national security."
Former army medic Van Brandon later revealed how his unit kept two sets of radiation readings for test fallout in the area. "One set was to show that no one received an [elevated] exposure" while "the other set of books showed the actual reading. That set was brought in a locked briefcase every morning."

Continuous Fallout

The world’s population is still being subjected to the continuous fallout of the 170 megatons of long-lived nuclear fission products blasted into the atmosphere and returned daily to earth by wind and rain – slowly poisoning our bodies via the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink. Scientists predict that millions will die in centuries to come from tests that happened in the 1950s and 1960s.
More than 400 nuclear bomb factories and powerplants around the world make "routine discharges" of nuclear waste into the environment. Thousands of nuclear waste dumping grounds, many of them leaking, are contaminating soil and water. The production of America’s nuclear weapons arsenal alone has produced 100 million cubic metres of long-lived radioactive waste.
The notorious Hanford site in Washington state has secretly discharged more than 440 billion gallons of contaminated liquid into the surrounding area, contaminating 200 square miles of groundwater. Officials knew as early as the late 1940s that the nearby Columbia River was becoming seriously contaminated, yet they chose to keep the information secret.
In Britain, there are 7,000 sites licensed to use nuclear materials, 1,000 of which are allowed to discharge wastes. Three of them are located near the River Thames – despite opposition from government officials who objected that the six million inhabitants of London derived their drinking water from the Thames.
Cancer clusters have been found around nuclear plants across the globe – from France to Taiwan, Germany to Canada. A joint White House/US Department of Energy investigation recently found a high incidence of 22 different kinds of cancer at 14 different US nuclear weapons facilities around the country.
A Greenpeace USA study of the toxicity of the Mississippi River showed that from 1968 to 1983 there were 66,000 radiation deaths in the counties lining its banks – more than the number of Americans who died during the Vietnam war.

Don’t Blame Us

Despite the growing catalog of tragedy, the nuclear establishment consistently claims that the everyday doses from nuclear plant discharges, bomb factories and transportation of radioactive materials are "insignificant."
It is only very recently that clues have surfaced as to the massive destructive power of radiation in terms of human health. The accident at Chernobyl will kill an estimated half a million people worldwide from cancer, and perhaps more. Ninety percent of children in the neighboring former Soviet republic of Belarus are contaminated for life – the poisoning of an entire country’s gene pool. US physican and nuclear researcher Ernest Sternglass calculates that, at the height of nuclear testing, there were as many as 3 million fetal deaths, spontaneous abortions and stillbirths in the US alone. In addition, 375,000 babies died in their first year of life from radiation linked diseases.
Using the official "radiation risk" estimates published in 1991 by the International Commission on Radiological Protection and 1993 radiation exposure data calculated by the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, researcher Rosalie Bertell (author of the classic book No Immediate Danger) has come up with a terrifying tally:
  • 358 million cancers from nuclear bomb production and testing.
  • 9.7 million cancers from bomb and plant accidents.
  • 6.6 million cancers from the "routine discharges" of nuclear power plants.
  • As many as 175 million of these cancers could be fatal.
Added to this number are no fewer than 235 million genetically damaged and diseased people and a staggering 588 million children born with a range of teratogenic effects, including brain damage, mental disabilities, spina bifida, genital deformities and childhood cancers.
Bertell argues that we should consider these nonfatal cancers and debilitating damages when accounting for insurance and liability purposes. This would include the 500 million babies lost as stillbirths because they were exposed to radiation while still in the womb. They currently are not counted as "official" radiation victims.
The holocaust that peace campaigners warned of if war broke out between the old superpowers has already
happened – and with barely a shot being fired. Its toll is greater than that of all the wars in history, yet no one is counted as among the war dead.
Rosalie Bertell argues that we need to learn a new language to express a terrifying possibility: "The concept of species annihilation means a relatively swift, deliberately induced end to history, culture, science, biological reproduction and memory. It is the ultimate human rejection of the gift of life, an act which requires a new word to describe it: omnicide."
Eduardo Goncalves, a freelance journalist and researcher, is author of Broken Arrow – Greenham Commons: Secret Nuclear Accident and Nuclear Guinea Pigs: British Human Radiation Experiments. This is an edited version of a longer article that first appeared in The Ecologist Vol 31 No 3 [Unit 18, Chelsea Wharf, 15 Lots Road, London SW10 OQ UK, or MIT Press Journals, 55 Hayward St., Cambridge, MA 02142].

For further details log on website :
http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/eij/article/the_nuclear_body_count/

Woodland actions for biodiversity and their role in water management


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Scrapbook


Authors:Publication date:Publication type:Pages:
2008Research report24
Woodland Actions For Biodiversity And Their Role In Water Management
Woodland actions for biodiversity have an important ecological role to play ...
These actions may have considerable potential to contribute to economic and other benefits. This report reviews national and international literature on the impacts of trees and woodlands on water resources. The report considers the implications for water resources in the UK in terms of maintaining the existing area of woodland cover, ancient woodland restoration and woodland creation.

For further information log on website :
https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/publications/2008/03/woodland-actions-for-biodiversity-and-their-role-in-water-management/

Ancient tree guide 4: What are ancient, veteran and other trees of special interest?


What is Scrapbook?

Scrapbook

Authors:Publication date:Publication type:Pages:
2008Practical guidance8
Ancient Tree Guide 4 Definitions
What are ancient, veteran and other trees of special interest?
Across the UK there are many special trees. They may be outstanding because they are old, are the biggest of their species or  linked with an important historic event. Find out how to recognise and identify ancient and veteran trees.

For further information log on website :
https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/publications/2008/11/what-are-ancient-veteran-and-trees-of-special-interest/

Ancient tree guide 2 - trees in historic parks and landscape gardens


What is Scrapbook?

Scrapbook


Authors:Publication date:Publication type:Pages:
2008Practical guidance12
Ancient Tree Guide 2 Parks And Gardens
Today many remarkable and rare ancient trees survive and need conserving for the future...
Parks have been a status symbol from mediaeval times when they were enclosed to keep deer. Covering ancient trees in historic parks and landscape gardens this information and advice for those restoring, conserving and farming designed landscapes with ancient and ageing trees will help protect these trees.

For further details log on website :
https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/publications/2008/12/ancient-tree-guide-2/

Advantages and Disadvantages of Fasting for Runners

Author BY   ANDREA CESPEDES  Food is fuel, especially for serious runners who need a lot of energy. It may seem counterintuiti...