Conservation for the People

Notes:

• Animals are being endangered from drugs, such as vultures and wild dogs
• Preserving biodiversity for its own sake is not an effective conservation strategy
• We need to focus on protecting ecosystems, because it can be vital to human health
• Saving sites will preserve biodiversity
• Hot spots are very important to protect because they have high plant and animal diversity
• We need to identify threatened areas with high plant diversity and protect them -the usual tactics are establishing national parks or reserves
• It is key to protect communities and habitats-they typically house endangered species
• many different ecosystems, such as wetlands and mangroves, protects people from lethal storms and weathers
• some governments and the public are increasingly trying to create efforts to preserve biodiversity as elevating the needs of plants and animals
• The hot spot phrase is not succeeded in capturing the public imagination or interest
• A recent survey showed that only 30% of Americans have heard the term biodiversity
• Many of the world’s least diverse regions are proven to be important seasonal homes, migratory stops or nesting sites
• countries with harbor life raft ecosystems are conservation priorities  
• Ecosystem services are provisioning, regulating, cultural, and supporting
• Critical and endangered habitats need to be protected
• Conservation and human needs need to be aligned to help protect the environment and biodiversity
• Conservation needs principles to guide it
• humans are threatened when ecosystems and natural cycles break down
• our environment will consist mainly of human-influenced systems
• conservation and social issues don’t have many ties so it is hard to get public support to help
• we need to protect the natural water and also wildlife
• Poor farming and logging practices in the vicinity of the condor rejected area because of the new income it had serve and farm animals grazing too close to stream and river channels are the culprits.
• Because our environment will consist mainly of human-influenced systems, biodiversity protection must be pursued in the context of landscapes that include urban centers, intensive agriculture, and managed forests and rivers, not just nature preserves.
• Ironically, protected areas will most likely need to be intensely supervised to retain their “wildness.”
• “DUST from degraded grassland ecosystems in sub-Saharan Africa travels far afield in wind, harming coral reefs, tourism and fisheries in the Caribbean.
• Protecting important ecosystems in one part of the world can also help people an ocean away.
• Without a close connection between conservation and social issues, policies that protect biodiversity are unlikely to find much public support.
• areas with a higher rate of poverty are basically more dependent on natural systems and their ecosystem services are severely degrading

New words or terms:

1. harbor life raft
2. hot spot
3. endemic

Summary of the article:

The article was basically about the conservation of the bio-diversities.  The article talked about how scientists look at the conversation. The article discussed some of the different biodiversity and how we were trying to preserve them.  They talked about the different ecosystems and what was important about them, and how the country that they were located in, where trying to preserve them.

Chernobyl Health

Chernobyl Effects Linger On:

1. This article was published on 10 May, 2000.

2. Restrictions on some food will continue in the UK and the Soviet Union for the next 50 years because the environment isn’t cleaning itself as fast as they thought it would.

3. Levels of caesium were detected in fish in Norway and Cambria, and also in terrestrial vegetation.

4. The radioactive caesium’s concentration in food and water decreased in the first 5 years after Chernobyl.

5. The caesium is immobilized in the soil and can be re-released into the environment.

6. Diffusion happens because of a concentration gradient, which leads to a balance in the radioactivity.

7. The sheep will remain out of the food chain for 10-15 years.

8. In the Soviet Union, forest berries, fungi, and fish will remain out of the food chain for half a century.


Chernobyl Children Show DNA Changes:

1. These children were born to parents who cleaned the nuclear reactor.

2. Liquidators are cleanup team members who were sent into the reactor. They received the highest combination of radiation.

3. Scientists are studying the children looking for new fragments using multi-site DNA fingerprinting.

4. The siblings who were conceived before exposure served as control.

5. Scientists found multiple changes in the children’s DNA.

6. The DNA changes could have been caused in the children themselves, not the parents.


Nuclear Health Agency: Health Impact:

1.  At low doses the radiation cell death can be accommodated, the cells in DNA can repair the damage, and organs can heal themselves. Low doses do not produce acute early affects. High doses cause cells to die rapidly, the DNA cells can die also, and organs are more likely to contract cancer.

2. The acute affects in Chernobyl were burns, coronary thrombosis, and radiation sickness.

3. The late/chronic affects of the Chernobyl disaster were cancer, leukemia, and thyroid tumors.