Colour-banding may help save forest owlets

As many as 25 pairs of the critically endangered forest owlet, which is endemic to India, will be colour-banded to study their distribution, population, demography, and ecology. City-based Wildlife Research and Conservation Society (WRCS) plans to carry out the project in Melghat and Tadoba tiger reserves, and in Tornmal in Nandurbar district of the state.

The society would make recommendations to help save the species listed in Schedule 1 of the Wildlife Protection Act of India, 2002. Asad Rahmani, Director of the Bombay Natural History Society said the nesting sites and habitats of the forest owlets must be protected. “This species, of which very few birds are left, is only found in India. With this research, we will be able to understand their ecology better which will help in their conservation”. Rahmani, who has provided the society with guidance in trapping the bird, said individual identification of any species in the wild is always used for collecting information. 

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Hotels release sewage into Baga River

Although the Baga River attracts hordes of tourists at the point where it meets the Arabian Sea at Baga, many hotels and resorts in the area have contaminated by releasing sewage into the river, say local environmentalists.

With the Calangute panchayat now going ahead with a sewerage treatment plant (STP) on the south bank of the river, once all the hundreds of resorts, in Calangute are connected to the STP, all the sewerage generated in the tourist hot-spot will find its way into the river, after it is treated at the STP.

A new retaining wall is also being constructed alongside the river to prevent land erosion. While everybody welcomes the planned STP because it will reduce the problem of contamination of the ground water table in Calangute, not much thought has gone into the effect it will have on the Baga river which still teems with marine life.

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Commissioning of Munak Canal will ease Delhi’s water woes

Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit said the Delhi Government was eagerly waiting the commissioning of Munak Canal, which will result in saving 80 MGD raw water, to help the city meet its demand for drinking water. Moreover, three water treatment plants lying idle at Dwarka, Okhla and Bawana are expected to become functional soon with

the availability of more raw water.

Speaking at a function to lay the foundation stone for rehabilitation of sewers at Harsh Vihar in North-West Delhi, Ms Dikshit, who is also the Chairperson of Delhi Jal Board, said she has taken up the issue of early commissioning of the Munak Canal with Prime Minister’s Office and Union Water Resource Ministry.

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Shimla chosen for international project to lower greenhouse gases

The Queen of the Hills, as Shimla was fondly called by the British, has been short listed for a global project to lower greenhouse gas emissions on the pattern of European cities, a municipal official said. The Shimla Municipal Corporation is one of six Indian cities selected for implementing the "Promoting Low Emission Urban Development Strategies in the Emerging Economy Countries" project, said, Omesh Bharti, Municipal health officer.

He said the project, is to be executed by International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) South Asia, with supports from the European Commission, in collaboration with UN-Habitat. Besides India, the project is also being implemented in Brazil, Indonesia and South Africa. Bharti said the civic body would enter into a memorandum of understanding (MoU0) with ICLEI once it gets approval from the corporation’s elected members.

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Dams may dry up Ganga, warns ministerial group

Recognizing that the plethora of dams built and planned in the Ganga basin could almost empty the river of its waters in the winter season, an inter-ministerial group has recommended that the projects be reengineered to maintain 30-50 percent of water flow in the lean period of December- March.

The group headed by Planning Commission member BK Chaturvedi also recommended that electricity production in the existing and upcoming dams on the river’s tributaries in Uttarkhand be moderated marginally to ensure that water flow is maintained at 25 percent between April to October- the period when the river has average or high water levels.

While keeping the ecological flow in the river at these levels the government could permit the dams already working or in the pipeline to continue after re-designing to ensure the recommended flow of water in the river.

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Ancient Irish texts show volcanic link to cold weather

Researchers have been able to trace the impact of volcanic eruptions on the climate over a 1200-year period by assessing ancient Irish texts. The international team compared entries in these medieval annals with ice core data indicating volcanic eruptions. Of 38 volcanic events, 37 were associated with directly observed clod weather extremes recorded in the chronicles.

The report is published in the journal Environmental Research Letters. At monastic centres across the island, recorded significant events such as feast days, obituaries and description of extreme cold and heat. These chronicles are generally known as the Irish Annals and in this report, scientists and historians have looked at 40,000 entries in the texts dating from AD 431and 1649. The researchers also looked at the Greenland Ice Sheet Project ice-core data.  When volcanic erupt, they produce sulphate aerosol particles which down the centuries have been deposited on and frozen in ice sheets, leaving an extremely accurate temporal record of the event.

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11000 barrels of oil spill into the Amazon's Coca River

A landslide ruptured and oil pipeline in Eduardo Amazon, sending around 11000 barrels of oil into the Coca River. The oil pollution has since moved into the larger Napo River, which borders Yasuni National Park, and is currently heading downstream into Peru and Brazil. The spill has occurred in a region that is notorious for heavy oil production and decades of contamination, in addition to resistance and lawsuits by indigenous people.

The pipeline operator, Petrocador, has promised a swift cleanup and hired the US company Clean Caribbean& America to that end. In addition to possible environmental damage, the oil spill temporarily contaminated drinking water for the 80,000 residents of Puerto Francisco de Orellana, Ecuador, and an oil town on edge of the Napo River.

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Evidence grows of rainforest resilience to global warming

The world’s tropical forest are less likely to lose biomass, or plant material, this century due to the effects of global warming than previously thought, said scientists in a paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience. This adds to growing evidence that rainforests might be more resilient to the effects of climate change than feared.

In this study, scientists and tropical ecologists from Britain, the United States, Australia, and Brazil used computer simulations based on 22 climate models to study the response of tropical forest in America, Africa, and Asia to rising global temperatures. “While these new results suggest that tropical forests may be quite resilient to warming, it is important also to remember that other factor not included in this study, such as fire and deforestation, will also affect the carbon stored in tropical forests,” said co-author David Galbraith from the University of Leeds.

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Greenland adds nutrient to ocean as a side-effect of thawing

Greenland’s thaw, which is raising world sea levels, is also adding about 300,000 metric tonnes of iron a year to the North Atlantic, based on projections from the study from the muddy melt water of three glaciers in the southwest. That is similar to the amount of iron blown into the region as dust by winds. Scientists say that iron is a vital nutrient and that a lack of the element in parts of the oceans limits growth of everything from tiny plankton to fish and whales.

“We suggest that glacial runoff serves as a significant source of bio-available iron to surrounding coastal oceans,” the scientists, mainly at the US woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), wrote in the journal Nature Geoscience. “We would expect this glacial contribution of iron to the North Atlantic Ocean to continue to increase under future warming scenarios”, they added. The findings show that “as glaciers and ice sheets melt there may be other effects than just increased sea level,” said Maya Bhatia, who was leader of the study at WHOI and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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