Browse Items (128 total)
- Collection: Environmental Systems & Societies
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Invasion, Competition, and Biodiversity Loss in Urban Ecosystems
The global decline in biodiversity as a result of urbanization remains poorly understood. Whereas habitat destruction accounts for losses at the species level, it may not explain diversity loss at the community level, because urban centers also…
Island Biogeography, the Effects of Taxonomic Effort and the Importance of Island Niche Diversity to Single-Island Endemic Species.
Island biogeography theory is fundamentally reliant on measuring the number of species per island and hence has taxonomy at its foundation. Yet as a metric used in tests of the theory, island species richness (S) has varied with time according to the…
Long-term decline of the Amazon carbon sink
The capacity of Amazonian forests to sequester carbon has weakened with potentially important implications for climate change.
Mapping tree density at a global scale
Ground-sourced tree density data is assembled to provide a global map of tree density, which reveals that there are three trillion trees (tenfold more than previous estimates); tree numbers have declined by nearly half since the start of human…
Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe
A genome-wide analysis of 69 ancient Europeans reveals the history of population migrations around the time that Indo-European languages arose in Europe, when there was a large migration into Europe from the Eurasian steppe in the east (providing a…
Migration, Urbanization, and Political Power in Sub-Saharan Africa
African political geographies have been overlooked in the discussion of internal migration and urbanization. Yet institutional changes since the early 1990s altered the practices of acquiring and keeping power across Africa, and it is now possible to…
North Pacific deglacial hypoxic events linked to abrupt ocean warming
Marine sediments from the North Pacific document two episodes of expansion and strengthening of the subsurface oxygen minimum zone (OMZ) accompanied by seafloor hypoxia during the last deglacial transition1, 2, 3, 4. The mechanisms driving this…
Ocean impact on decadal Atlantic climate variability revealed by sea-level observations
The circulation of the North Atlantic Ocean, interpreted via the sea level gradient along the US coast, is found to respond to atmospheric drivers from the North Atlantic Oscillation, and in turn influences the oceanic temperature changes…
Onset of Antarctic Circumpolar Current 30 million years ago as Tasmanian Gateway aligned with westerlies
Neodymium isotopes from fossil fish teeth and tectonic reconstructions show that the deep Tasmanian Gateway opened up about 33 million years ago and that the Antarctic Circumpolar Current arose 30 million years ago, when the gateway probably moved…
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Aleksander Stamboliski and the Bulgarian Contract
Bulgaria suffered a swift and devastating defeat in the First World War, due, G.D. Sheppard argues, to its peasant leader-in-waiting’s shrewd use of…