Gleanings of the Week Ending December 30, 2023
/The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.
Fevered Planet: How a shifting climate is catalyzing infectious disease – The geography of disease is also changing as novel pathogens affecting plants, animals and humans increase their range. New beetles are heading north and devastating Siberian forests, Alaskan mammals are struggling as new ticks arrive and human habitations in northern Norway are infested by new insects.
‘Green Roads’ Are Plowing Ahead, Buffering Drought and Floods - Designing roads to capture water through strategic channels, culverts, and ponds and divert it for agricultural use. Nearly 20 countries have either implemented Green Roads for Water or plan to begin soon, and thousands of kilometers of roads, worldwide, have already received Green Roads interventions.
Photos of the year (2023) from the Prairie Ecologist (part 1 and part 2) – Lots of great nature photos.
How Fire-Prone Communities Can Reduce Their Risk - Playbook for the Pyrocene, which offers 20 community planning and design strategies that can be applied by landscape architects, planners, homeowners, and developers. “The questions we are trying to answer here are not so much where to build, but rather how to build better within the context of wildfire broadly.”
Giant Goldfish Are Bad News for the Great Lakes - In the Great Lakes, abandoned goldfish and their kin are known to root up plants, contribute to harmful algal blooms and consume native vegetation.
Nine breakthroughs for climate and nature in 2023 you may have missed – Yes – I missed some of these!
Parts of China’s Great Wall Are Protected by a ‘Living Cover’ of Biocrusts – Lichen, moss, and cyanobacteria!
Fresh water from thin air - Atmospheric water harvesting (AWH). The need for more affordable options has spurred interest in ‘passive’ AWH systems that use moisture-hungry sorbent compounds to collect water. The small amounts of power that such systems require could, ideally, be supplied by the Sun. Typically, these sorbents are exposed to the air overnight, when temperatures are cooler and moisture is more abundant. They collect the airborne moisture as liquid in a process known as adsorption. When day breaks, the sorbents are transferred to a device that uses solar energy to drive the release of water. This water is then condensed and collected. And there are abundant opportunities beyond simply producing drinking water. For example, a harvesting system that piggybacks on existing photovoltaic solar panels, using the waste heat and energy from these panels to power water production9; the resulting water helps to cool the panels and therefore improves their efficiency
Archaeologists Discover Brutal ‘Bakery-Prison’ at Pompeii - The cramped space provided minimal light, as windows to the outside were small, high and barred.
