Outreach video to ranchers in northern Mexico. Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory collaborates with private landowners there to support working ranches and improve grassland habitat for birds and other wildlife.
Watch More Videos on Bird Conservancy of the Rockies’s Youtube Channel
Author: Dr. Christine Jones
Wetlands, rivers, oceans, lakes, plants, decaying vegetation (especially in moist environments such as rain forests) – and a wide variety of creatures great and small – from termites to whales, have been producing methane for millions of years. The rumen, for example, evolved as an efficient way of digesting plant material around 90 million years ago.
Ruminants including buffalo, goats, wild sheep, camels, giraffes, reindeer, caribou, antelopes and bison existed in greater numbers prior to the Industrial Revolution than are present today. There would have been an overwhelming accumulation of methane in the atmosphere had not sources and sinks been able to cancel each other over past millennia.
Although most methane is inactivated by the hydroxyl (OH) free radical in the atmosphere,another source of inactivation is oxidization in biologically active soils. Aerobic soils are net sinks for methane, due to the presence of methanotrophic bacteria, which utilize methane as their sole energy source. Methanotrophs have the opposite function to methanogens, which bind free hydrogen atoms to carbon to reduce acidosis in the rumen. Recent research has found that biologically active soils can oxidize the methane emitted by cattle carried at low stocking rates. The highest methane oxidation rate recorded in soil to date has been 13.7mg/m2/day which, over one hectare, equates to the absorption of the methane produced by approximately one livestock unit (LSU).
In Australia, it has been widely promoted that livestock are a significant contributor to atmospheric methane and that global methane levels are rising. There is no evidence, however, to suggest that methane emissions from ruminant sources are increasing. Indeed, it would seem there has been no clear trend to changes in global methane levels, from any source, over recent decades.
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Author: Charlotte Parker
Home to leopards, zebras, hippos and elephants, Zambia’s Luangwa Valley is known for its sprawling wildlife sanctuaries. But it’s also where Dale Lewis, founder of Community Markets for Conservation (COMACO), helps transform hungry farmers — who poach on the side to supplement their income — into wildlife protectors. In exchange for honoring a “conservation pledge” to stop killing certain animals for money and use sustainable farming practices, the company’s 61,000 farmers, all of whom work on a small scale, receive up to 20 percent more than the standard market price for their corn, soy and honey, which are then used to create a line of food products that are flying off Zambian supermarket shelves.
As it turns out, COMACO is just one of a growing number of both nonprofit and for-profit enterprises that are taking a new look at the agricultural sector and finding that farmers can renew the land they use — and their livelihood that they draw from it. There’s Honey Care Africa, a for-profit franchise that works with farmers across East Africa to supplement their income through honey production while increasing crop yield with pollination help from their honey bees, as well as the Timbaktu Collective, which helps farmers in a drought-prone region of India sell products grown with traditional water conservation practices. Oh, and don’t forget Peepoo — yep, you read that right — a system that converts sanitation waste from poor urban neighborhoods, refugee camps and disaster relief sites around the globe into nutrient-rich fertilizer for farmers with poor soil quality.
These regenerative agricultural practices, as they’re known, have been developed in response to a growing list of problems plaguing farmers and rural workers around the world: land degradation, drought, crop disease and unpredictable market prices, to name a few. Of course, climate change isn’t helping on any of these fronts. But the trend is also being driven by the growth of B Corps — think of them as certified do-gooder businesses — and other companies that are under pressure to show responsibility for the planet, says Daniela Ibarra-Howell, co-founder and CEO of the Savory Institute, a nonprofit that promotes large-scale restoration of the world’s grasslands through a regenerative practice known as holistic management.
Author: Michael Pearce
Jeff Prendergast said life is pretty easy for a grown Kansas pheasant. With so many crop fields, food is seldom a problem. Even with reductions in Conservation Reserve Program fields there’s normally enough cover to protect a lot of the birds from predators and the elements. With nearly 8 million acres of wheat there’s no shortage of potential nesting cover. Still …
“Our main limiting factor is brood-rearing cover,” said Prendergast, Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks and Tourism pheasant biologist. “Wheat fields have been the nesting cover, and when they grew into weeds they were our brood-rearing cover. Then (when farmers began spraying harvested fields with herbicides) those fields became essentially deserts without any vegetation and insects for the chicks.”
But Prendergast sees the growing practice of planting freshly harvested fields to non-harvested plants as a positive for pheasant numbers in the future.
Kelly Griffeth, a farmer in Mitchell and Jewell counties, is a believer in such cover crops.
“We’re using cover crops about everywhere we farm,” Griffeth said. “It’s making us money by improving our soil, and we have tons of wildlife, too.”
Author: Pamela
This beautiful TED Talk by Allan Savory, biologist and ecologist, highlights the importance of rebuilding native soil, particularly in areas where desertification already has begun. The irony of the story is that holistic land management and animal husbandry provide the strategic cornerstone to rejuvenating the grasslands of the world.
The lesson for those in G3 is: Protect and nurture your O.W.L. (Oxygen, Water, and Life), because Living Soil is the KEY FACTOR in environmental health in general and specifically for the health of your landscape and the health of your waterways.
Recently our Managing Member, Pamela Berstler, spoke in a meeting of Water Conservation Managers noting the paramount importance of educating about soil health in water conservation and pollution prevention. Pamela argued that building a healthy, biologically active Soil Sponge was the MOST IMPORTANT ACTIVITY in healthy landscape building and that this truth applied to all manner of land use from agriculture to urban/suburban residential and commercial, parklands, and even “natural” watershed areas that we would consider wildlands. Pamela also reasoned that all soil is degraded (especially biologically speaking) and that intervention, remediation, and ACTION was required to rebuild our soils, particularly as it applies to garden-building, even when using plants that are considered native or have become perfectly adapted to the climate and place over thousands of years.
There was push-back from the audience. One attendee proposed that plant selection and placement was the most important factor for education and that selecting and planting native plants in native soil was THE simple and compelling solution for restoring watersheds and producing healthy, low resource gardens (including water conserving, of course). The reasoning was that native plants don’t need soils with organic matter in them, and so long as the microclimate conditions supported the plant selection, no soil amendment was necessary.
Author: Kasey Krifka
The Climate Trust, a mission-driven nonprofit that specializes in climate solutions, with a reduction of 1.9 million tons of greenhouse gases to its name, announced its second annual prediction list of 10 carbon market trends to watch in 2015.
The trends, which range from increased climate change adaptation measures at the state and city-level to new protocols for agriculture and forestry, were identified by The Climate Trust based on interactions with their diverse group of working partners—government, utilities, project developers and large businesses.
“We’re excited to once again look at the overall market with fresh eyes and identify areas of potential movement and growth,” said Dick Kempka, vice president of business development for The Climate Trust.
Author: Alexander Montoro
Experts have long linked deforestation and intensive farming to worsening erosion rates around the world. Although studied extensively, determining erosion rates due to human-induced activities has rarely been quantified by scientists. However, new research conducted by geologists finds that erosion rates in the southeastern United States increased one hundred times after the arrival of European colonists in the 1700s due to tree clearing and unsustainable agriculture practices.
One of the researchers, Paul Biermann, a geologist from the University of Vermont, told mongabay.com that he has been studying erosion rates and landscape change ever since he came to Vermont and saw the dramatic human imprint on the landscape.
Bierman explained that there are two primary types of human activities that are responsible for increased soil erosion rates in the southeastern United States: “the removal of the trees and thus their root systems which stabilize the soil on slopes and the advent of tillage agriculture which loosens the soil and makes it susceptible to water and wind erosion.”
In order to determine the impact of human activities on erosion rates, geologists had to first establish background (geologic) rates of erosion. They conducted research at ten large river basins (10,000-100,000 square kilometers) in the southern Appalachian piedmont region from Virginia to Alabama. These ten river basins sites all had a history of large-scale native forest clearing and intensive agriculture use starting in the 1700s and experienced maximum land use in the late 1800s and early 1900s.