Background Articles

Scientist Brad Lister returned to Puerto Rican rainforest after 35 years to find 98% of ground insects had vanished

Thousands of female penguins are being stranded along the coast of South America because of water pollution and fishing, research shows. A new study of Megellanic penguins, which breed in Patagonia in southern Argentina, explains for the first time why so many become stuck on beaches hundreds of miles further north.  Researchers found the man-made threats encountered as the

A 2008 report by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency said there were at least 486 invasive alien plant species alone in Canada.

Climate change is ravaging the natural laboratory that inspired Darwin. The creatures here are on the brink of crisis.

Industrial fisheries are starving seabirds like penguins and terns by competing for the same prey sources, new research from the French National Center for Scientific Research in Montpellier and the Sea Around Us initiative at the University of British Columbia has found.

Bad weather is bad news, also for the red-listed kittiwake. New research reveals that wind conditions combined with the availability of different prey species are determinants of chick production in this seabird.

For millennia, ecosystems in Greenland and throughout the Arctic have been regulated by seasonal changes that govern the greening of vegetation and the migration and reproduction of animals. But a rapidly warming climate and disappearing sea ice are upending that finely tuned balance.

Mass die-offs and breeding failures, now ongoing for years, have marine biologists worried that this is a new normal caused by climate change.

'Shocking' decline of Arctic skua revealed in study. Conservation scientists say a lack of food is behind the drop in the UK population.

Wild and free. That’s the new life for a herd of 31 plains bison which have finally been fully reintroduced to the backcountry of Banff National Park for the first time in 140 years.“These are not a captive display herd.

Bird Notes columnist Julian Hughes of RSPB Conwy reveals how the Snowy Owl got twitchers in a flap, and outlines 11 birding events in the coming days

In the fall of 2014, West Coast residents witnessed a strange, unprecedented ecological event. Tens of thousands of small seabird carcasses washed ashore on beaches from California to British Columbia, in what would become one of the largest bird die-offs ever recorded.

A network of more than

Coastal sand ecosystem returning to health after 1.5 years of work

The studies have established that even in places where plant diversity and abundance have improved, insect numbers still declined.

On a remote Alaskan sandbar, under the watchful eye of a devoted scientist for more than four decades, climate change is forcing a colony of seabirds into a real-time race: evolve or go extinct.

Serious and unusual outbreaks of illness from eating raw or undercooked walrus to call attention to the risks.

An assistant professor at the University of Alaska–Fairbanks suspects that changes seen in the auklet population on Little Diomede may be related to changes in climate.

Since the mid 1990s, the number of black brant (Branta bernicla nigricans; brant) nests on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta (YKD), Alaska, USA, the historically predominant breeding area of brant, has declined steadily.

In the Arctic, brown bears (Ursus arctos) are expanding their range northward, in some cases competing with and even mating with polar bears (Ursus maritimus). Beavers (Castor canadensis) have been found as far north as the coast of the Beaufort Sea. The list includes mammals, amphibians, fish and insects.

The latest research shows that diminishing Arctic sea ice caused by climate change is forcing some species to travel further to find food or look for alternative food sources.