'Hotspots' of human impact on coastal areas ranked.Byline: ANI Washington, July 10 (ANI): A new study has ranked 'hotspots' among coastal marine ecosystems that are at risk worldwide as a result of human activities. The study, by scientists at UC (University of California The University of California has a combined student body of more than 191,000 students, over 1,340,000 living alumni, and a combined systemwide and campus endowment of just over $7.3 billion (8th largest in the United States). ) Santa Barbara, US, is the first integrated analysis of all coastal areas of the world. "Resource management and conservation in coastal waters must address a litany of impacts from human activities, from the land, such as urban runoff and other types of pollution, and from the sea," said Benjamin S. Halpern, the study's first author, who is based at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis The National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis is a research center for the science of ecology, located in Santa Barbara, California, USA. Better known by its acronym NCEAS (pronounced N-seece), it opened in May, 1995, funded by the US National Science Foundation, the (NCEAS NCEAS National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis ) at UCSB UCSB University of California at Santa Barbara UCSB University of Casual Sex and Beer . "One of the great challenges is to decide where and how much to allocate limited resources to tackling these problems," he said. "Our results identify where it is absolutely imperative that land-based threats are addressed-so-called hotspots of land-based impact-and where these land-based sources of impact are minimal or can be ignored," he added. The hottest hotspot is at the mouth of the Mississippi River, explained Halpern, with the other top 10 in Asia and the Mediterranean. "These are areas where conservation efforts will almost certainly fail if they don't directly address what people are doing on land upstream from these locations," he said. Nutrient runoff from upstream farms has caused a persistent "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico Noun 1. Gulf of Mexico - an arm of the Atlantic to the south of the United States and to the east of Mexico Golfo de Mexico Atlantic, Atlantic Ocean - the 2nd largest ocean; separates North and South America on the west from Europe and Africa on the east , where the Mississippi runs into this body of water. The dead zone is caused by an overgrowth overgrowth Rapid growth in the sales of a mutual fund's shares to the extent that the fund has difficulty finding promising new investments or it must take such large positions in individual investments that its trading flexibility is reduced. of algae algae (ăl`jē) [plural of Lat. alga=seaweed], a large and diverse group of primarily aquatic plantlike organisms. These organisms were previously classified as a primitive subkingdom of the plant kingdom, the thallophytes (plants that that feeds on the nutrients and takes up most of the oxygen in the water. The researchers state that they have provided the first integrated analysis for all coastal areas of the world. They surveyed four key land-based drivers of ecological change, namely, nutrient input from agriculture in urban settings, organic pollutants derived from pesticides, inorganic pollutants from urban runoff, and direct impact of human populations on coastal marine habitats. Halpern explained that a large portion of the world's coastlines experience very little effect of what happens on land-nearly half of the coastline and more than 90 percent of all coastal waters. "This is because a vast majority of the planet's landscape drains into relatively few very large rivers, that in turn affect a small amount of coastal area," said Halpern. In these places with little impact from human activities on land, marine conservation can and needs to focus primarily on what is happening in the ocean," he added. (ANI) Copyright 2009 Asian News International The Asian News International (ANI) agency provides multimedia news to China and 50 bureaus in India. It covers virtually all of South Asia since its foundation and presently claims, on its official website, to be the leading South Asia-wide news agency. (ANI) - All Rights Reserved. Provided by Syndigate.info an Albawaba.com company |
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