Endangered pygmy hippo born at zoo

A rare baby pygmy hippo has been born at Bristol Zoo.

It is now three weeks old and has been enjoying splashing around in the water with its parents.

Pygmy hippos are an endangered species, with fewer than 2,000 left in the wild, as they face threats from hunting and people destroying the forests they live in.

Pygmy hippos only grow to be around 80cm tall, which is half the height of their cousin the Hippopotamus.

Lynsey Bugg, assistant curator of mammals at the zoo, said: "The calf is looking very strong and it certainly feeds well."

The role of zoos in keeping these species alive is very important. In fact, without their work and preserverance many species would no longer have any elements to represent them and therefore the world would be poorer and less balanced.

From CBBC Newsround

Canada: Smartphone app tracks moose population

Wildlife managers in western Canada are getting a helping hand when it comes to tracking the moose population, thanks to a new smartphone app.

The moose population has seen a decline across North America in recent years but environment officials aren't sure why

The MyMoose app shares real time data of where and how frequently the creatures have been spotted across the province of British Columbia, the Globe and Mail website reports. The information is uploaded mainly by hunters - but it isn't intended to encourage hunting. Instead, its main aim is to help environmental officials monitor the moose population in the province, which has seen a steep decline in some areas."Currently we've got 350 members contributing data and we have almost 1,000 surveys submitted," says the app's creator, Sean Simmons. He describes MyMoose users as "committed" to helping collect the information. "What they say is: 'Assure me that what I'm doing is going to be helpful'," he tells the site.

The app, which launched in August, shows the general location of moose sightings, but limits the audience for more detailed GPS data to only wildlife biologists, so that animals won't be at increased risk of being hunted. "This is our first experiment to see what sort of data we can actually generate," says Mr Simmons.

In 2014 the provincial government began investigating why parts of British Columbia have seen moose numbers fall by up to 70% in recent years, a pattern repeated elsewhere in North America. It launched a five-year study which includes the tracking of more than 200 moose using radio collars.

From BBC News-from-elsewhere

Earth's underground water quantified

The total amount of groundwater on the planet, held in rock and soil below our feet, is estimated to be 23 million cubic km.

If this volume is hard to visualise, imagine the Earth's entire land surface covered in a layer some 180m deep.

The new calculation comes from a Canadian-led team and is published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Significantly, little of this water - just 6% - is the kind of bankable resource that is most useful to people.

That small fraction is referred to as "modern" groundwater: it is extractable because it is near the surface, and can be used to supplement above-ground resources in rivers and lakes.

"It's the groundwater that is the most quickly renewed - on the scale of human lifetimes," explained study leader Tom Gleeson from the University of Victoria.

"And yet this modern groundwater is also the most sensitive to climate change and to human contamination. So, it's a vital resource that we need to manage better."

Finite resource

To quantify just how much water is stored in the top 2km of the Earth's surface, Dr Gleeson's team had to combine large data sets with an element of modelling.

They included information on the permeability of rocks and soil, on their porosity, and all that is known about water table gradients, which tell you about inputs from precipitation.

Key to determining the age of all this stored water is a collection of thousands of tritium measurements.

Tritium is a radioactive form of hydrogen that spiked in the atmosphere 50 years ago as a result of thermonuclear bomb tests.

It can therefore be used as a tracer for all the rain that has made its way underground ever since.

The map above shows the distribution of this modern groundwater around the globe.

Dark blue shows where it is very quickly renewed. Light blue shows the older groundwater, which is mostly stagnant and non-renewable.

"Old water is highly variable," Dr Gleeson told BBC News.

"Some places it is quite deep, in some places not. In many places, it can be poor quality.

"It can be more saline even than ocean water and it can have lots of dissolved metals and other chemicals that would need to be treated before it could be used for drinking or agriculture."

This puts further emphasis on the modern reserves and the need to manage them in a sustainable way. The study underlines just how unevenly they are spread around the globe.

The next step, Dr Gleeson said, was to try to work out just how fast some water stores were being depleted.

Also writing in Nature Geoscience, Ying Fan, from Rutgers University, US, commented that "this global view of groundwater will, hopefully, raise awareness that our youngest groundwater resources - those that are the most sensitive to anthropogenic and natural environmental changes - are finite".

Modern groundwater is part of the great hydrological cycle on Earth

From BBC News-Science/Environment

Society 'to be hit by climate change'

Human societies will soon start to experience adverse effects from manmade climate change, a prominent economist has warned.

Prof Richard Tol predicts the downsides of warming will outweigh the advantages with a global warming of 1.1C - which has nearly been reached already.

Prof Tol is regarded by many campaigners as a climate "sceptic".

He has previously highlighted the positive effects of CO2 in fertilising crops and forests.

His work is widely cited by climate contrarians.

"Most people would argue that slight warming is probably beneficial for human welfare on net, if you measure it in dollars, but more pronounced warming is probably a net negative," Prof Tol told the BBC Radio 4 series Changing Climate.

Asked whether societies were at the point where the benefits start to be outweighed by consequences, he replied: "Yes. In academic circles, this is actually an uncontroversial finding."

But it is controversial for climate contrarians, who often cite Professor Tol's work to suggest that we shouldn't worry about warming.

Managing ecosystems

Matt Ridley, the influential Conservative science writer, said he believed the world would probably benefit from a temperature rise of up to 2C.

"I think we probably will see 1.5 degrees of warming. The point is most people think 2C is when it turns catastrophic. That's not right. The literature is very clear; 2C is when we start to get harm. Up until then we get benefit," he said.

"We've got a greening in all ecosystems as a result of CO2. We've got about 11% more green vegetation on the planet than 30 years ago, much of which is down to the CO2 fertilisation effect."

On fertilisation Matt Ridley refers to unpublished work by Professor Ranga Myneni from Boston University.

But he told BBC News Lord Ridley had accurately quoted his research on the impacts of current CO2 levels, but was unduly complacent about future warming.

"I am worried about how this work is being interpreted, by Lord Ridley. In my opinion, [CO2 fertilisation] benefit of greening is not worth the price of all the negative changes," he said.

Richard Tol from Sussex University believes discussion over the impacts of a 2C temperature rise is largely irrelevant as the world is likely to warm by between 3-5C, because politicians at the forthcoming Paris climate summit won't be willing or able to make the scale of cuts needed to keep temperature rises under 2C.

He says a rise of 4C would be undesirable but manageable for Europe and all nations rich enough to cope with the costs of adaptation. The best way of combating climate change, he told BBC News, was to maximise economic growth.

Warming feedback

Tim Lenton, professor of Earth systems science from Exeter University, told us this was a highly optimistic prognosis under a 4C rise.

"The land surface of central Europe would be quite a lot more than 4C warmer on average, changing potentially the pattern of seasonality over Europe.

"We would have lost the summer Arctic sea-ice, [and] would have sea-ice cover radically thinned in winters.

"We're seeing already that appears to have some connection to changes in the pattern of weather and weather extremes and the changes in the distribution of rivers and river flows.

"We might then speculate about how intense Mediterranean drying might drive... movements of people. It would be a very different Europe."

Johan Rockstrom, director of the Resilience Centre at Stockholm University, warns that the further we go above 2C, the more we risk triggering irreversible effects.

"What takes us to 6C is not carbon emissions, it is biosphere response. Will we be able to maintain the natural carbon sinks in the permafrost, in the rainforests, in the boreal forests, in the wetlands and in the coastal regions? Because that's where the big stores are.

"We emit nine gigatons of carbon per year from our burning of fossil fuels, but there's a 100 gigatons lying just under the Siberia tundra. You have many-fold larger stores of carbon in the topsoil of tropical soils, or under the ice in the Arctic.

"If we don't manage the living ecosystems well enough they could start biting us from behind."

From BBC News-Science/ Environment

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