articles

Remote motion-sensitive photography, or camera trapping, is revolutionizing surveys of wild animal populations. Camera trapping is an efficient means of detecting rare species, conducting species inventories and biodiversity assessments, estimating site occupancy, and observing behaviour. If individual animals can be identified from the images obtained, camera trapping data can also be used to estimate animal density and population size – information critical to effective wildlife management and conservation.

For this reason, camera traps were initially popularized by researchers studying big cats and other species with distinctive coat markings. Since then, thousands of camera traps have been deployed in wildlife habitat across the globe, especially in tropical forest ecosystems where animals are difficult to survey by other means. However, methods for estimating abundances of species which cannot be individually identified are still in development, and none is generally accepted or broadly applied.

More children could wind up in hospital emergency rooms suffering from allergy-induced asthma if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise and cause longer oak pollen seasons, according to a new study.

NASA's Terra satellite captured an infrared image of Tropical Cyclone Donna as it was being sheared apart by winds southeast of New Caledonia.

An infrared image taken May 10 at 11:55 UTC (7:55 a.m. EDT), from the MODIS instrument aboard NASA's Terra satellite showed cloud top temperatures of the dying storm. Strongest thunderstorms with cloud tops so high in the troposphere they were as cold as minus 70 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 56.6 degrees Celsius) were pushed to the southeast of the center from northwesterly wind shear.

A warming climate could affect the stability of alpine grasslands in Asia’s Tibetan Plateau, threatening the ability of farmers and herders to maintain the animals that are key to their existence, and potentially upsetting the ecology of an area in which important regional river systems originate, says a new study by researchers in China and the United States. 

More than 400 years ago, renowned mathematician and scientist Johannes Kepler speculated about the creation of one of nature’s most angelic and unique shapes: the six-sided snowflake. Although atoms would not be discovered until two centuries later,  Kepler openly pondered about the microscopic building blocks that lead to the ice crystal’s hexagonal formation, including the myriad of factors behind this recurring phenomenon.