Pecologix Political Ecology Blotter

Chemical reducing agents (sodium dithionite) or bioglycerol (as H and e−-donor under irradiation in the presence of ZnS-A as photocatalyst) are able to back-convert NADP+ into NADPH, which is used as e−-donor in the enzymatic reduction of CO2 into CH3OH. In doing so, the molar ratio CH3OH/CO2 has been increased (without recycling of NADP+) using [...]

An important source of uncertainty in anticipating the effects of climate change on agriculture is limited understanding of crop responses to extremely high temperatures1, 2. This uncertainty partly reflects the relative lack of observations of crop behaviour in farmers’ fields under extreme heat. We used nine years of satellite measurements of wheat growth in northern [...]

The efficacy of no-till agriculture for increasing C in soils has been questioned in recent studies. This is a serious issue after many publications and reports during the last two decades have recommended no-till as a practice to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions through soil C sequestration. Our objective was to investigate the possibility that the [...]

Cyanobacteria are the Earth’s oldest (∼3.5 bya) oxygen evolving organisms, and they have had major impacts on shaping our modern-day biosphere. Conversely, biospheric environmental perturbations, including nutrient enrichment and climatic changes (e.g. global warming, hydrologic changes, increased frequencies and intensities of tropical cyclones, more intense and persistent droughts), strongly affect cyanobacterial growth and bloom potentials in [...]

The first plants to colonize land didn’t merely supply a dash of green to a drab landscape. They dramatically accelerated the natural breakdown of exposed rocks, according to a new study, drawing so much planet-warming carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere that they sent Earth’s climate spiraling into a major ice age. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1390

Ocean acidification (OA) is a reduction in oceanic pH due to increased absorption of anthropogenically produced CO2. This change alters the seawater concentrations of inorganic carbon species that are utilized by macroalgae for photosynthesis and calcification: CO2 and HCO3− increase; CO32− decreases. Two common methods of experimentally reducing seawater pH differentially alter other aspects of [...]

Many studies in recent years have investigated the effects of climate change on the future of biodiversity. In this review, we first examine the different possible effects of climate change that can operate at individual, population, species, community, ecosystem and biome scales, notably showing that species can respond to climate change challenges by shifting their [...]