Stoke Park is a natural haven in a busy British town. Centered in Guildford, Surrey, its rolling fields pop with wildflowers in the spring; birds sing and ducks paddle serenely in a pond beside ornamental gardens; and the sun casts dappled shade on the grass from oak, spruce and beech trees, scattered across 52 hectares (130 acres) of green. Yet as residents and visitors stroll, jog and lounge across Stoke Park’s green reaches, it’s doing even more for them than they realize: According to two recently-published studies, its green areas reduce heat, pollution and noise — and have benefits that extend beyond the park’s borders. Parks have a well-documented benefit to urban areas, particularly given the rising heat of climate change: Many previous studies have established that parks are much cooler than the surrounding area, and that they also tend to reduce air pollution and noise. These previous studies also found that air and surface temperatures were lower for tens or even several hundred meters around green spaces, depending on the park. However, “most of the work in this field has been focused around one benefit — so either you see just health benefits, or how they affect air pollution, or overheating,” Prashant Kumar, professor at the University of Surrey, co-director of the university’s Institute for Sustainability and director of its Global Centre for Clean Air Research, said in a Zoom interview with Mongabay. “You hardly see studies which look holistically at the multiple benefits of the plants [or] the…This article was originally published on Mongabay

GAYE TOWN, Liberia – Deep in the Liberian bush, there’s a dispute about what to do with a big swath of rainforest. The conservation group Wild Chimpanzee Foundation (WCF) and Liberia’s Forestry Development Authority (FDA), backed by the EU, are looking to establish a new 172,000-hectare (425,000-acre) national park. However, advocacy NGOs say they’re bypassing the land rights of nearby communities. It’s an argument with potentially serious repercussions for biodiversity in Liberia. The proposed Kwa National Park would be one of just a handful of strictly protected habitats for chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis) and pygmy hippos (Choeropsis liberiensis). The land it would protect is under real threat — commercial cocoa farming is destroying forests in the region at an accelerating pace. Some people from the surrounding villages have sent migrant workers inside Kwa’s proposed boundaries to build new cocoa farms. They now want the Liberian government to excise these areas from the park. “We want the [Forestry Development Authority] to push the boundary line back small,” said Tommy Yarkpawolo, an elder from the tree-ringed village of Gaye Town. He has a 600-hectare (1,482-acre) farm with 30 workers inside Kwa that just earned him more than $400 — enough to start building a new mud-brick house, he said. Cacao saplings underneath burned trees in the proposed Kwa National Park. Photo by Ashoka Mukpo / Mongabay. Many of his neighbors oppose the idea of moving the boundary back. They told Mongabay the negotiations with WCF and the FDA were…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Low-lying tropical atoll islands appear remarkably vulnerable to climate change. But when shrouded with native forests and with abundant seabird populations, these islands may keep up with rising sea levels, a new study finds. Seabirds act as biological pumps, moving nutrients from feeding areas in the open ocean to roosting and nesting areas on land and, eventually, back into the ocean. The recent Science Advances study traces how energy from nutrient-dense seabird guano trickles through terrestrial and marine ecosystems on atoll islands. The findings show that these nutrients, along with native vegetation, boost processes that build and maintain the island’s reef and underlying structure, even in the face of rising seas. Rewilding atoll islands — many of which no longer support seabirds and have seen native forests replaced by coconut palms — builds climate resilience, as well as benefiting biodiversity, Nicholas Graham, distinguished professor at Lancaster University, England, and the study’s first author, told Mongabay in a video call. “It’s really telling us something about the islands themselves,” Graham said. “Seabirds and native vegetation actually support the resilience of the islands themselves to sea level rise, which I think is fascinating and really quite positive.” Atoll islands of Tetiaroa Atoll, French Polynesia. Seabirds and native vegetation make low-lying atoll islands more resilient to sea level rise due to climate change, according to a recent study. Image by Yadvinder Malhi. Graham and colleagues first began looking into the connection between seabirds, islands and reefs nearly a decade ago. At the time,…This article was originally published on Mongabay

When an ice shelf blocks a polar fjord, it sparks the creation of an ecosystem like no other: the epishelf lake. Meltwater pools up behind the ice shelf, floating above the denser seawater, with both freshwater and marine species found in distinct layers within the same water column. But Canada’s last known epishelf lake, at Milne Fjord on Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, is gone. The lake drained out to sea after the Milne Ice Shelf calved in 2020, and it won’t return, according to a recent study published in Scientific Reports. Ellesmere Island lies within the Last Ice Area, a region of the Arctic that scientists have long thought would retain its sea ice longer than elsewhere as the planet warms. The changes at Milne Fjord are a signal of accelerating climate change, with implications for the entire planet. “What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic,” study co-author Derek Mueller, a professor at Carleton University in Ontario, told Mongabay in a video call. Meltwater lakes form in the depressions of Milne Ice Shelf every summer. Image by Jérémie Bonneau. In the past, ice shelves dammed Ellesmere’s many fjords, with an estimated 10 to 17 epishelf lakes perched along its north coast as recently as the 20th century. But over the past several decades, dramatic warming, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, has transformed this region. One by one, giant ice shelves have split and calved, allowing the epishelf lakes to drain away. When the massive 65-meter-deep…This article was originally published on Mongabay

BIAŁOWIEŻA, Poland — Michal Żmihorski, deputy director of the Institute of Environmental Protection, will never forget the morning of Aug. 1, 2023. Two Belarusian helicopters entered Polish airspace, hovering above the village of Białowieża in eastern Poland, three kilometers (1.9 miles) from the Polish-Belarusian border. The panic was palpable. “We didn’t know if the invasion had begun, if they were going to start dropping bombs,” he says during a conversation at the Białowieża-based Mammal Research Institute. The incident galvanized Żmihorski’s conviction that the borderlands should be impenetrable to enemy forces. “So that bandits on motorbikes can’t get through and start murdering people, because this is a real threat in this area,” says the longtime researcher of the UNESCO-protected Białowieża Forest straddling the Polish-Belarusian frontier. Poland shares a 420-km (261-mi) border with Belarus, 55 km (34 mi) of which runs through the Białowieża Forest, Europe’s last ancient woodland. This sprawling forest, covering an area equivalent to 200,000 football pitches, is among the continent’s top biodiversity hotspots. Consisting of impressive evergreens and broad-leaved trees, the Polish side alone is home to 900 European bison (Bison bonasus) — a species reintroduced to the forest — as well as lynx, wolves and up to 4,000 fungi species. While the specter of a military escalation by Belarus, a country that supports Russia, feels very real to some in this part of Eastern Europe, Poles throughout the country have been impacted by the war ever since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. To strengthen national security and…This article was originally published on Mongabay