PALM SPRINGS, Calif. – A moderate earthquake shook a mountainous area near Bakersfield Thursday morning, just hours after a quake some 230 miles to the southeast.
The 4.4-magnitude quake struck at 1:11 a.m. and was centered 12 miles from the resort town of Lake Isabella and 35 miles from Bakersfield, the U.S. Geological Survey said.
There were no reports of injuries or damage.
NEW YORK – The New York Botanical Garden may be best known for its orchid shows and colorful blossoms, but its researchers are about to lead a global effort to capture DNA from thousands of tree species from around the world.
The Bronx garden is hosting a meeting this week where participants from various countries will lay the groundwork for how the two-year undertaking to catalog some of the Earth’s vast biodiversity will proceed.
The project is known as TreeBOL, or tree barcode of life. As in a similar project under way focusing on the world’s fish species, participants would gather genetic material from trees around the world.
A section of the DNA would be used as a barcode, similar to way a product at the grocery store is scanned to bring up its price. But with plants and animals, the scanners look at the specific order of the four basic building blocks of DNA to identify the species.
The resulting database will help identify many of the world’s existing plant species, where they are located and whether they are endangered. The results are crucial for conservation and protecting the environment as population and development increases, said Damon Little, assistant curator of bioinformatics at the Botanical Garden and coordinator of the project.
“If you don’t know what you’re potentially destroying, how can you know if it’s important or not?” he said. “We know so little about the natural world, when it comes down to it, even though we’ve been working on it for hundreds of years.”
The undertaking is massive. Trees make up 25 percent of all plants, and Little estimates there could be as many as 100,000 species. The participants hail from countries such as South Africa, India, and, of course, the United States.
In order for the database to be useful, the same section of DNA must be used in all the samples so comparisons can be made across species. Part of the work at this week’s meeting is to figure out which section to use, as well as other logistical issues among the more than 40 participating organizations.
The garden received a grant of nearly $600,000 to coordinate the project. While the genetic database won’t be completed for two years, Little anticipates making headway in some specific areas — such as the flora of the Northeastern U.S. and parts of Malaysia, India and South Africa, as well as endangered tree species — in the meantime.
While the garden is a city cultural institution, researchers say visitors shouldn’t be fooled by the pretty flowers — serious science goes on here.
“I think your average visitor comes here and sees the conservatory and the orchid show and goes home thinking it’s a beautiful place, but doesn’t realize this is home to one of the most active research programs in plant sciences in the world,” said James Miller, the garden’s dean and vice president for science.
The garden was started with a science mission, since founder Nathaniel Britton and his wife, Elizabeth, were dedicated to researching the plant world, Miller said. They had a research interest in the botany of the Caribbean, which remains a focus at the garden.
These days, the research has expanded. The garden has projects in South America, is helping the government in Micronesia with habitat preservation and has an emerging program in Southeast Asia.
And back at home in the Bronx, state-of-the-art labs allow researchers to examine plant DNA to figure out how genes influence plant development and to examine the relationships between plant species. The garden is also home to a collection of more than 7 million dried plant specimens, Miller said.
“It is some of the best and brightest botanical science done anywhere in the world,” said Thomas Lovejoy, president of the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment in Washington and a member of the garden’s board.
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On the Net:
New York Botanical Garden: http://www.nybg.org
Impoverished farmers in South Asia and southern Africa could face growing food shortages due to climate change within just 20 years, a new study says.
Increasing levels of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, are heating up the planet, with droughts and shifting rainfall patterns predicted for many parts of the world.
See an interactive map of the effects of global warming.)
“The majority of the world’s one billion poor depend on agriculture for their livelihoods,” said the lead author of the new study, David Lobell of Stanford University.
“Unfortunately, agriculture is also the human enterprise most vulnerable to changes in climate.”
Climate change will affect some places more than others, so Lobell and colleagues focused on 12 regions where most of the world’s impoverished live and the crops that the poor tend to grow and eat in those places.
They identified two hot spots—South Asia and southern Africa—where higher temperatures and drops in rainfall could cut yields of the main crops people grow there.
“We were surprised by how much, and how soon, these regions could suffer if we don’t adapt,” said study co-author Marshall Burke, also at Stanford.
Corn, Wheat at Risk
The researchers used computer models to predict changes in temperature and rainfall as the planet warms.
Most of the 12 regions were predicted to warm up about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) by 2030—about the same amount of warming that Earth as a whole experienced over the 20th century.
“To identify which crops in which regions are most under threat by 2030, we combined projections of climate change with data on what poor people eat, as well as past relationships between crop harvests and climate variability,” Lobell said.
The predictions from the various climate models often didn’t agree on rainfall changes, he noted. But the overall analysis did suggest that southern Africa and South Asia were two spots where hotter temperatures and lack of water are most likely to stress crops.
The U.S. Geological Survey recently collected new data to help identify fault lines and the potential location of undiscovered water, oil and gas, and non-fuel mineral resources in Afghanistan. Afghanistan’s geologic setting indicates significant natural resource potential, and though important mineral deposits and petroleum resources have been identified, much of the country’s potential remains unknown. These new data, acquired from an airborne geophysical and photographic survey of the country, provide valuable new information to policymakers and potential private investors and will enable scientists to better define areas for future exploration and development.
To assist in the reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan and to complement the resource assessments coordinated by the U.S. Agency for International Development, the USGS was commissioned by the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan to conduct this survey.
You are invited to attend an event hosted by The Embassy of Afghanistan where the USGS will unveil data collected during the airborne geophysical and photographic survey of Afghanistan.
Who: Said T. Jawad, Ambassador of Afghanistan to the United States
James Devine, Senior Advisor for Science Applications, USGS
Where: The Embassy of Afghanistan 2341 Wyoming Ave., NW
Washington, D.C. 20008
When: Wednesday, April 30, 2008
2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.
Registration is Required: Due to limited space, members of the media must pre-register by contacting Jessica Robertson at jrobertson@usgs.gov or (703) 648-6624.
Source : http://www.usgs.gov/
