Biodiversity
Sep.19, 2002, filed under Miscellany
The latest edition of Environment Action just landed on my desk, passed to me by the lovely Rachel. We’re going down to a sewerage exhibition at 12, so I won’t be able to post anything at lunchtime. Environment Action is the rather unimaginative name for the Environment Agency’s main news publication. It’s the external one, rather than Grassroots, the internal, regional newsletter that my picture appears in every month (or so it seems sometimes).
With Johannesburg recently over, there is a large section on the current state of our environment, particularly biodiversity, and I thought I’d pass on the following information:
- Over the last century around 150 species of plant and animal in the UK became extinct
- Between 10 and 20% of native species in the UK are still under threat, including water vole, skylark, turtle dove, great-crested newt, juniper and marsh earwort
- Farmland bird populations have nearly halved since 1977
- In some areas 20-30% of aquatic plant species have become extinct in the last 150 years
- Over 90% of saltmarshes and 83% of lowland heath have been lost in the past few centuries
- 50% of countryside ponds are "highly degraded"
- Fenland has shrunk from 3380 square kilometres in 1700 to just 10 square kilometres in 1984
Some species are showing signs of recovery, however, including otter (yay!), greater horseshoe bat (yay!), large blue butterfly (flappy!), field cricket (huge!) and fen orchid (pale and delicate, the way goths would like to be if only goths were more interesting). The biggest worry now, of course, is global warming. We may well end up with severe water resource issues, coastal flooding in places like the Severn Estuary, species migration and invasive species, currently kept in check by climate, pushing more and more indigenous species out.
All of this is, of course, one of the reasons why the garden chez Ravenfamily Devon is being redesigned and replanted with wildlife in mind. If you would like any more information on any of the above, check out the EA website.
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Singularity
~something that is singular as (a) a separate unit, or (b) unusual or distinctive manner or behavior; PECULIARITY;
~the quality or state of being singular;
~a point at which the derivative of a given function of a complex variable does not exist but every neighborhood of which contains points for which the derivative exists;
~a point or region of infinite mass density at which space and time are infinitely distorted by gravitational forces and which is held to be the final state of matter falling into a black hole. Sight
