The recent nasty fires in California (and elsewhere – see this interactive fire map) have given rise to interest in fire science, fire ecology, and related careers and research. The Berkely Fire Research Lab has compiled a series of wide-ranging videos and resources on fire and fire science:

After exploring our website or seeing one of the hundreds of news articles on wildfires, you might ask how you can learn more? What fire science or fire protection engineering is? And is there a career in it? Well, here we would like to give you a little introduction into the basics of Fire Protection Engineering and Fire Science. These resources have been compiled to answer common questions and are intended to give you an insight into the field from the basics to advanced topics. But if you are curious about more feel free to reach out to us on twitter (@gollnerfire or @FranzHRichter).

Source: Berkely Fire Research Lab

In a world-first, the extent of human development in oceans has been mapped. An area totalling approximately 30,000 square kilometres—the equivalent of 0.008 percent of the ocean—has been modified by human construction.

The extent of oceanmodified by human construction is, proportion-wise, comparable to the extent of urbanised land, and greater than the global area of some natural marine habitats, such as mangrove forests and seagrass beds.

Source: Phys.org News

Something as simple as black paint could be the key to reducing the number of birds that are killed each year by wind turbines. According to a study conducted at a wind farm on the Norwegian archipelago of Smøla, changing the color of a single blade on a turbine from white to black resulted in a 70-percent drop in the number of bird deaths.

..in 2013, each of the four turbines in the test group had a single blade painted black. In the three years that followed, only six birds were found dead due to striking their turbine blades. By comparison, 18 bird deaths were recorded by the four control wind turbines—a 71.9-percent reduction in the annual fatality rate.

Source: ArsTechnica

The National Science Foundation is awarding Ohio Wesleyan University a one-year, $86,735 grant to oversee the creation of online teaching tools that advance field ecology and data science.

Laurel J. Anderson, Ph.D., OWU’s Morris Family Professor of Natural Sciences, is the principal investigator on the federal grant. She also is president of the Board of Directors for the Ecological Research as Education Network (EREN), a consortium of colleges and universities that will work together to create the new teaching tools. Dr. Anderson will partner with Dr. Tim McCay from Colgate University to administer the project.

“The pandemic has created an urgent need to reimagine our teaching of field ecology, which is usually done with in-person field trips,” said Dr. Anderson, who helped to found EREN in 2010.

“However, field ecologists also use computer technology extensively to explore natural patterns at large scales,” she continued. “These projects allow us to meet our need to socially distance and have students collecting data wherever they happen to be. Then, we use online tools and datasets to see how their data fits into large-scale patterns.”

More: PRESS RELEASE: Advancing Science

In a world first, University of Hong Kong marine institute scientists lay clay tiles in marine park where coral was wiped out in twin ecological catastrophes

Seeded with living corals, the tiles quickly increased biodiversity. If found to work, they could transform reefs damaged by pollution, fishing and bleaching

Source: Tiles to restore corals, designed and 3D printed in Hong Kong, may be key to saving the world’s threatened reefs (South China Morning Post)

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Research Shows ‘Linking Climate Policy to Social and Economic Justice Makes It More Popular’

Source: Washington Post: Earth’s carbon dioxide levels hit record high, despite coronavirus-related emissions drop

There probably is more carbon dioxide in the air now than at anytime in 3 million years

The coronavirus pandemic’s economic downturn may have set off a sudden plunge in global greenhouse gas emissions, but another crucial metric for determining the severity of global warming — the amount of greenhouse gases actually in the air — just hit a record high.

According to readings from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the amount of CO2 in the air in May 2020 hit an average of slightly greater than 417 parts per million (ppm). This is the highest monthly average value ever recorded, and is up from 414.7 ppm in May of last year.

Source: Keeping Seeds In Our Hands: The Rise of Seed Activism (The Journal of Peasant Studies)

Every seed makes a political statement.

— Moudgil (2017)

Semantic innovations like seed commons, peasant seeds and seed sovereignty are a powerful expression of what may be termed as seed activism. In this opening paper of the JPS Special Forum on Seed Activism, we explore the surge of mobilizations the world over in response to processes of seed enclosures and loss of agrobiodiversity. A historical overview of the evolution of seed activism over the past three decades traces a paradigm shift from farmers’ rights to seed sovereignty. Some of the main threats to peasant seed systems – from seed and intellectual property laws to biopiracy, corporate concentration and new genome editing technologies – are analyzed along with strategies by peasants and other activists to counter these developments.

Search “Seed Activism” on Google

Guerrilla gardening is the act of gardening on land that the gardeners do not have the legal rights to cultivate, such as abandoned sites, areas that are not being cared for, or private property. (source)