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-happens first; physical isolation of populations for a long period

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-gene splicing

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roles have a large effect on the types and abundances of other species.

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Provide early warning of damage to a community. Can monitor environmental quality.

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Pattern of living: everything that affects survival and reproduction

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rate of new species immigrating should balance with the rate of species extinction. Island size and distance from the mainland need to be considered.

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- the number of different species in a given community

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- One species splits into two or more species

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- acts on individuals. Second step in biological evolution

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- Random changes in DNA molecules

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AP Enviornmental Science Flashcards Learn with flashcards, games, and more - for free.

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Keystone species, such as sharks are vital to other species and the ecosystem depends highly on them. Without them, the ecosystem would be very different.

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Generalist species such as a raccoon are those who can survive in a wide range of setting and are able to adapt to certain surroundings very easily. This is important in determining where a certain species is more suitable in compared to others.

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The first step in biological evolution are mutations in DNA molecules. These mutations like smaller body such as the example in the gif help an organism or a species survive and adapt to their environment.

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In part one of a two-part series, contributing sustainability editor Rachel Cernansky outlines the ways clothing production is contributing to biodiversity loss. Next week's instalment will spotlight the solutions.

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In part one of a two-part series, contributing sustainability editor Rachel Cernansky outlines the ways clothing production is contributing to biodiversity loss. Next week's instalment will spotlight the solutions.

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Three families of beavers are to be introduced on land managed by the National Trust as part of plans to ease flooding and improve biodiversity.

Two Eurasian beaver families will be released next spring into enclosures at Holnicote estate on Exmoor, in Somerset, and another group will arrive at Valewood on the Black Down estate, on the border of West Sussex and Surrey.

Beavers were hunted to extinction 400 years ago in the UK for their fur, meat and scent glands. In recent years there has been a series of controlled reintroductions, including one by the government in the Forest of Dean, in Gloucestershire, as solutions are sought to tackle flooding. A wild colony also appears to have re-established itself spontaneously in the River Otter, in Devon.

The schemes at Holnicote and Black Down are the first led by the National Trust and have been approved by Natural England. It is not yet clear how many animals will be brought in but it could be as many as 12: six adults and six kits.

Ben Eardley, the project manager for the National Trust at Holnicote, said: "Our aim is that the beavers become an important part of the ecology at Holnicote, developing natural processes and contributing to the health and richness of wildlife in the area.

"Their presence in our river catchments is a sustainable way to help make our landscape more resilient to climate change and the extremes of weather it will bring."

The beavers, which will live in two wooded enclosures, are one element in a range of measures being introduced at Holnicote that includes a pioneering project to return a tributary of the River Aller to its natural path.

Eardley said: "The beavers will help us achieve a more natural flow pattern, slowing, cleaning and storing water and developing complex river habitats. The dams the beavers create will hold water in dry periods, help to lessen flash flooding downstream and reduce erosion and improve water quality by holding silt."

Releases at both National Trust sites will be into fenced enclosures of 2-4 hectares (5- 10 acres) each so that the impact of the animals on the local ecology and the river can be properly assessed and understood.

The beavers will be transferred from Scotland, where they have been successfully breeding since being reintroduced in 2006. The National Trust beavers are expected to breed and when the young become mature they will need to be moved, possibly to other sites owned or run by the charity.

David Elliott, the lead ranger for Valewood, said: "Beavers are nature's engineers and can create remarkable wetland habitats that benefit a host of species including water voles, wildfowl, craneflies, water beetles and dragonflies. These in turn help support breeding fish and insect eating birds such as spotted flycatchers.

"There are just a handful of sites in the British Isles that have beavers. This is a different way of managing sites for wildlife - a new approach, using a native animal as a tool.

"The beavers will live along the stream at Valewood and gradually create little ponds, dams and rivulets. Making a habitat that is perfect for them and for many birds, amphibians and invertebrates."

Both projects will be monitored with help from Exeter University and others, to note both ecological and hydrological changes to habitat.

A footpath passes through the Valewood enclosure and close to one of the Holnicote pens so it may be possible for members of the public to glimpse the animals - though they tend to be active at dawn or dusk and can be shy.
Topics

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Beavers to be released in plan to ease flooding and aid biodiversity

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Three families of beavers are to be introduced on land managed by the National Trust as part of plans to ease flooding and improve biodiversity. Two Eurasian beaver families will be released next spring into enclosures at Holnicote estate on Exmoor, in Somerset, and another group will arrive at Valewood on the Black Down estate, on the border of West Sussex and Surrey.

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Marine scientists in Brazil are closely monitoring the incursion of a mysterious oil spill into the largest biodiversity hot spot in the South Atlantic Ocean. The region, known as the Abrolhos Bank, shelters almost 9000 square kilometers of reefs in shallow, warm waters along the central part of the Brazilian coastline.

More than 4000 tons of crude oil residue from an unknown source have landed on the country's northeast seaboard since late August, contaminating hundreds of beaches, estuaries, reefs, and mangroves along a 2500-kilometer stretch of shoreline.

Concerns escalated earlier last week as the wave of sticky oil patches began to encroach on the Abrolhos Bank's northern border, on the southern coast of Bahia state. By Saturday morning, the first small blobs of petroleum had landed on the rocky shores of the Abrolhos Marine National Park archipelago, 60 kilometers offshore-home to some of Brazil's most iconic marine species, such as the endemic Brazilian brain coral ( Mussismilia braziliensis) and the endangered blue parrotfish ( Scarus trispinosus).

A fleet of navy ships has been patrolling the region since Wednesday, looking to spot and intercept any large incoming oil patches. But there is nothing it can do for smaller blobs, which have to be cleaned up by hand.

"The oil is coming. How much of it will land here and what ecosystems will be impacted remains to be seen; but it could be tragic," says Rodrigo Leão Moura, a marine scientist at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, who is monitoring the crisis.

Chemical analysis indicated early on that the oil was from Venezuela, but the source of the spill was a complete mystery for the first 2 months. President Jair Bolsonaro's government was heavily criticized for not responding quickly or strongly enough to the wave of contamination. Although it eventually deployed ships and troops to help with the cleanup, the administration also tried to blame nongovernmental organizations and left-wing conspirators for the crisis, as it did for massive fires and a rising deforestation rate in the Amazon. Minister of the Environment Ricardo Salles even tweeted a picture of a Greenpeace ship on 24 October, suggesting-without any proof-that it was responsible for the spill.

The oil is coming. ... It could be tragic.

Rodrigo Leão Moura, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

On Friday, the Brazilian Federal Police finally released the name of a real suspect: the Bouboulina, a Greek tanker that passed the Brazilian northeast coast in late July, carrying 1 million barrels worth of crude oil from Venezuela to Malaysia. According to the investigation, satellite images show a big oil stain appearing offshore on 29 July, about 730 kilometers off the coast of Paraíba state, just as the Bouboulina passed by. The company responsible for the ship denies responsibility and says the Bouboulina delivered all of its cargo to Malaysia.

But the suspicion fits well with computer simulations run by UFRJ's engineering institute (Coppe), which indicate that the oil came from an offshore source about 700 kilometers away and was spilled about 1 month before it hit land. "The distribution pattern of the oil along the coast and the possible source indicated by the police are both consistent with our model," Coppe oceanographer Luiz Assad told Science.

Federal investigators estimated that the Bouboulina spilled-either accidentally or intentionally-about 2.5 thousand tons of crude oil, but it's unknown how accurate that estimate is or how much of the spilled oil will reach land. Any amount of oil that reaches Abrolhos is reason for concern, however, says Ronaldo Francini Filho, a marine biologist at the Federal University of Paraíba in João Pessoa, whose team plans to inspect the reefs with a remotely operated vehicle this week. "It's an extremely sensitive environment, already suffering the effects of climate change and other anthropogenic impacts," Francini Filho says.

In addition to its many coral reef habitats, Abrolhos is an important sanctuary for seabirds and humpback whales and an important destination for marine ecotourism. Its 880-square-kilometer marine national park, founded in 1983, is Brazil's oldest.

doi:10.1126/science.aba1003

Herton Escobar is a science and environment journalist in São Paulo, Brazil.

More from News

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Mysterious oil spill threatens marine biodiversity haven in Brazil

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Marine scientists in Brazil are closely monitoring the incursion of a mysterious oil spill into the largest biodiversity hot spot in the South Atlantic Ocean. The region, known as the Abrolhos Bank, shelters almost 9000 square kilometers of reefs in shallow, warm waters along the central part of the Brazilian coastline.

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There are certain times in life - whether in our relationships, personal health or scientific research - when we think that we know something but the evidence is less than conclusive. An accumulation of clues or symptoms might suggest a particular interpretation without being strong enough to clinch the argument. In such situations, it can be a relief to finally get a definitive answer, even if the news is bad. Once we know that a problem definitely exists, we may be able to do something about it. Readers might feel the same way when they read the results reported in Nature by Seibold et al., which provide compelling evidence of a major problem - large-scale declines in the numbers and diversity of insects and other jointed invertebrates known as arthropods.

Insects have pivotal roles in terrestrial ecosystems. These organisms dominate global animal biodiversity in terms of their biomass, species numbers and total population numbers, and they perform important ecosystem functions and services such as pollinating flowers, disposing of dead organisms and waste, and forming crucial links in food webs. Insect declines have been implicated as possible drivers of declines in insect-eating birds and in animal-pollinated plants. Thus, massive losses in insect diversity (Fig. 1) and abundance would be grounds for serious concern.

The rumours of such declines have been around for some time. In the 1990s, researchers warned that extinctions among insects probably outstripped those of more highly studied organisms such as vertebrates and plants. Evidence subsequently grew of declines in particular insect groups, including butterflies and bees. Most such studies have focused narrowly on particular insect orders or families, although a recent global meta-analysis provides strong indications that insect losses are geographically widespread and occur across a range of taxonomic groups.

However, much of this evidence has come from biodiversity databases - records of species sightings, mostly collected by volunteers, and usually gathered in a haphazard fashion. Analytical techniques can use such records to assess changes in the local species richness or species' distributions, but analyses of this sort are frustratingly indirect. The models used to analyse data can attempt to take into account the often strong temporal and spatial biases in these data sets. However, such results could still be influenced by changes in the nature of the biodiversity recording over time, fuelled by changes in observers' goals and methods. Such analyses are also limited in scope. Although they can reveal changes in diversity, such data, recording a glimpse of a species at a given site on a particular date, do not reveal shifts in insect abundance, which is arguably the most crucial aspect to assess when monitoring ecosystem services.

Standardized sampling can fill that gap. A previous study reported the data collected from a network of standardized insect traps set by amateur entomologists in German nature reserves over a 27-year period. That study indicated that the biomass of insects captured declined by 75% over the period studied. This research raised serious concerns, but it had limitations: the sampling of sites was opportunistic and not always consistent over time, and although the biomass of the specimens caught was recorded, the species were not identified or even counted, meaning that species richness and abundance couldn't be assessed.

Seibold and colleagues finally complete the circle by reporting species richness, abundance and biomass for a wide range of arthropod taxa recorded using standardized sampling. They describe the results of monitoring over nearly ten years of intensive study in grasslands and woodlands in three regions of Germany as part of the country's interdisciplinary Biodiversity Exploratories project.

The results show clear evidence of substantial declines in arthropod abundance and biodiversity (Fig. 2). Grasslands were particularly badly affected: species richness of arthropods fell by 34% over the monitoring period, and the arthropod biomass and numbers recorded dropped by 67% and 78%, respectively. These declines were particularly strong in landscapes dominated by farmland, suggesting that agricultural management could be driving this drop. The losses among forest-dwelling arthropods were less precipitous by comparison, with a 36% drop in species richness, a 41% loss of biomass and no statistically significant population decline. The verdict is clear. In Germany at least, insect declines are real, and they're every bit as severe as had been feared.

Such long-term standardized monitoring as carried out by Seibold and colleagues is not cheap. However, the expense is dwarfed by the expenditure needed to address the problem. Agri-environmental programmes in the European Union, for example, spend tens of billions of euros to encourage farmland biodiversity, a substantial portion of which is aimed specifically or partially at insects (see go.nature.com/35pvdtv). Similarly, EU restrictions on the use of neonicotinoid insecticides were instituted specifically to protect insect pollinators, and (industry-funded) research suggests that this restriction has cost EU oilseed-rape farmers more than €500 million (US$549 million) annually, because of reduced production and the consequential increased costs.

Ignorance is expensive. Given that substantial investments of public and private funds for insect conservation are deemed appropriate by society, then surely it is sensible to spend a tiny proportion of such funds on monitoring, allowing us to assess the effectiveness of these actions and to adjust them if necessary.

The Biodiversity Exploratories project would be a good model for such an effort. This is because it extends beyond population monitoring to provide a platform for cross-disciplinary science to address the large-scale and long-term issues that are crucial in driving declines of insect communities, but which aren't amenable to analysis by controlled experimentation. The project not only helps to document declines in insect populations and biodiversity, but also assists with diagnosing their potential causes. If such in-depth, landscape-scale field research and monitoring were rolled out more widely across Europe and beyond, we could begin to build land-use and agricultural policies on the basis of compelling scientific evidence. The results reported by Seibold and colleagues might not be good news, but at least now we know where we stand and what we should start to do.

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Robust evidence of declines in insect abundance and biodiversity

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There are certain times in life - whether in our relationships, personal health or scientific research - when we think that we know something but the evidence is less than conclusive. An accumulation of clues or symptoms might suggest a particular interpretation without being strong enough to clinch the argument.

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Connects concepts to each other.

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A certain species can be labeled as having a niche and is important for the survival of others and the ecosystem. They provide vital signs towards the health of the environment and without some of these species, the whole chain would not work.

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Ecosystems with more species diversity tend to be able to 'increase productivity and stability or sustainability, and provide insurance against catastrophe' (Unit 2 notes).

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Populations change through genetics changing over periods of time and is important for studying how a species developed. Evolution can be affected through various environmental conditions.