Hannah Hoag

Tag: nature

  • This is your brain on trees — why is urban nature so good for the mind?

    This is your brain on trees — why is urban nature so good for the mind?

    worms eyeview of green trees
    (Felix Mittermeier/Pexels)

    Green space helps people feel less depressed and fatigued, and science is still exploring all the other ways it lifts our spirits. In a global crisis, we could all use more time in nature

    THE GLOBE AND MAIL

    As temperatures warmed last spring, Montrealers flocked to Mount Royal Park. Trapped inside – first by winter, then by lockdowns – the city’s residents were desperate for nature. The winding trails, lush forests and steep escarpments of Mount Royal offered an ideal remedy for their cabin fever. And as the pandemic has dragged on, the 700-acre green space has become such a popular destination that the city has repeatedly closed its parking lots to limit access during peak periods.

    “The mountain has been intensely used during the pandemic,” says Juan Torres, a professor in the school of urban planning and landscape architecture at the University of Montreal, which is set on the north slope of the mountain. Unable to travel to Mexico to visit his mother and go to the sea, Prof. Torres and his family have spent much of the past year exploring the mountain and the island’s riverside green spaces. “It has been a great stress reliever,” he says.

    Humans, it turns out, often seek out nature more earnestly in times of crisis. War, pandemics and natural disasters have led to the launch of community gardens for veterans and widows, and compelled people to tend to trees that survived bombings. That phenomenon, called “urgent biophilia,” may bring emotional balance to people overwhelmed by a crisis.

    Urban nature is important for mental health over all – city dwellers who live near green spaces are less depressed and anxious than those who don’t.

    More people are grasping nature’s benefits as the pandemic has put people out of work, forced families to juggle jobs and school from the kitchen table and curbed social interactions.

    In a national survey from the not-for-profit group Park People, 82 per cent of Canadians said parks had become more important to their mental health during the pandemic, and 55 per cent of cities said park use had increased.

    “Many people may think that urban nature is nice to have, that it’s pretty or a bonus. But actually, it’s absolutely essential to our mental and physical health,” says Carly Ziter, an urban landscape ecologist at Concordia University.

    Nature in cities provides people with a place to exercise. Parks also gives people places to socialize with friends and family, which makes people happier. During the pandemic, urban green spaces have become rare hubs of acceptable social activity when public-health authorities have urged people to stay one caribou (Yukon), two lobster traps (Halifax) or three racoons (Toronto) apart.

    But research suggests there’s something about how our brains interact with nature that yields psychological benefits. A visit to a natural area delivers sights, sounds and smells – the varied greens of a spring forest; the trill of a redwing blackbird; the whiff of petrichor, the earthy odour produced after rain falls on dry soil – that can improve our mental health by resetting our mood, focus and creativity.

    With more than 80 per cent of Canadians now living in urban and suburban environments, understanding the links between nature and mental health could go a long way to improving our well-being. City dwellers tend to be healthier over all than their rural neighbours, except when it comes to mental health. They are 20 per cent more likely to have anxiety and 40 per cent more likely to develop depression.

    .::. Read more at the Globe and Mail.

  • Canada’s renowned freshwater research site to close

    Canada’s renowned freshwater research site to close

    [media-credit name=”USGS” align=”alignright” width=”199″][/media-credit]
    The Experimental Lakes Area near Kenora, Ontario has been used to study the effects of detergents, heavy metals and acid rain on lakes and their watersheds.
    Budget fall-out hits environmental research stations

    The Canadian government has cancelled its funding for the Experimental Lakes Area (ELA), a research site in northwestern Ontario that has led to the re-shaping of international policies. It is the latest target in a string of research programmes to have been scaled back, shut down or left in limbo in the wake of massive cuts to this year’s federal budget.

    Fisheries and Oceans Canada — the government department that runs the site —  told its staff on 17 May that the ELA, a collection of 58 remote lakes and a laboratory complex, would be shut down in March 2013. “It is completely shocking,” says Jim Elser, an aquatic ecologist at Arizona State University in Tempe, who ran experiments at the site in the 1990s. “It is sort of like the US government shutting down Los Alamos — its most important nuclear-physics site — or taking the world’s best telescope and turning it off.”

    The ELA has attracted scientists from around the world to its shores since field research started there in 1968. It is possibly the only place where aquatic scientists can use lakes and their ecosystems as test tubes as well as having access to long-term environmental data and a decent place to sleep and eat.

    Many scientists say that the government is making a mistake. “If you try to base policy on small-scale experiments you miss some key ecosystem process, and that can have huge implications,” says David Schindler, a freshwater scientist at the University of Alberta, who founded the ELA and ran it until 1989.

    Scientists have manipulated the area’s lakes to show how acid rain destroys lake ecosystems1, how the ingredients found in birth-control pills can cause the collapse of fish populations2 and how wetland flooding for hydroelectric dams leads to increased production in methyl mercury and greenhouse gases3, while unmanipulated lakes have provided long-term comparative data. Studies done there have influenced policy, most notably the creation of an air quality agreement between the United States and Canada in 1991, which led to reductions in acid rain.

    More in Nature.
  • Canadian biofuel plans derailed

    Canadian biofuel plans derailed

    Iogen cancels a pioneering facility to turn crop waste into ethanol.

    A leading biofuels company whose products have powered Formula 1 racing cars has hit a major bump in the road.

    Canadian company Iogen Energy in Ottawa announced on 30 April that it has shelved plans to build a large-scale facility in Manitoba to produce fuel ethanol from cellulose, the long molecular chain of sugars that forms the fibrous material in plants.

    Instead, the company will “refocus its strategy and activities”, leading to a smaller development programme and the loss of 150 jobs, its joint owners Royal Dutch Shell and Iogen Corporation said in a statement. Iogen Corporation would not comment further on the story and Shell did not respond to Nature‘s questions.

    In the past decade, growing concerns about climate change, rising energy consumption and dependence on foreign oil  have prompted countries and companies to invest in biofuel production.

    Most fuel ethanol is made by fermenting the sugars in grains or sugar cane, but cellulosic ethanol can be made from municipal waste, wood chips, grass, and the stalks, leaves and stems of food crops. It is seen as a more sustainable biofuel because it does not divert food from dinner tables to biorefineries. But cracking apart the tough cellulose molecules is a lot harder than brewing up simple sugars.

    Cracking stuff

    Iogen opened the world’s first demonstration plant for producing cellulosic ethanol in Ottawa in 2004. Its process uses enzymes to break down the cellulose in wheat, oat and barley straw to glucose, which is then converted to ethanol.

    Although the plant’s production capacity is nearly 2 million litres per year, its output peaked at just 581,042 litres in 2009. In 2008, Iogen suspended plans to build a commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol facility in Iowa, and in 2011 it decided not to set up a plant in central Saskatchewan.

    “This shouldn’t be seen as a black mark on the industry,” says Scott Thurlow, president of the Canadian Renewable Fuels Association. “There is still lots of opportunity in Canada.”

    Keep reading this story in Nature.

    Image from jayneandd on Flickr

  • Scientists call for no-fishing zone in Arctic

    Scientists call for no-fishing zone in Arctic

    Nature

    Thousands of scientists from 67 countries have called for an international agreement to close the Arctic high seas to commercial fishing until research reveals more about the freshly exposed waters.

    Recent Arctic sea-ice retreat during the summer months has opened up some of the waters that fall outside of the exclusive economic zones of the nations that circle the polar ocean. In all, more than 2.8 million square kilometres make up these international waters, which some scientists say could be ice free during summer months within 10–15 years. Although industrial fishing hasn’t yet occurred in the northernmost part of the Arctic, the lack of regulation may make it an appealing target for international commercial-fishing vessels.

    “The science community currently does not have sufficient biological information to understand the presence, abundance, structure, movements, and health of fish stocks and the role they play in the broader ecosystem of the central Arctic Ocean,” says the letter, which was released by the Pew Environment Group on Sunday on the eve of the opening of the International Polar Year 2012 scientific conference in Montreal, Canada. More than 2,000 scientists, including 1,328 from Arctic coastal countries, signed the letter.

    The letter calls for the Arctic countries to put a moratorium on commercial fishing in the region until the impacts of fisheries on the central Arctic ecosystem, including seals, whales and polar bears, and those who live in the Arctic, can be evaluated.

    In 2009, the United States adopted a precautionary approach by banning commercial fishing in the waters north of the Bering Strait, including the Chukchi and the Beaufort Seas. The Arctic Fishery Management Plan closes nearly 400,000 square kilometres to commercial fishing. Canada is drafting its own fisheries policy for the adjacent Beaufort Sea. In 2011, a memorandum of understanding between the Canadian federal government and the Inuvialuit people of the western Arctic prohibited the issuing of new commercial fishing licences in the area until a management plan was created and put into practice.

    “Our knowledge of Canadian marine biodiversity is next to nil. We know nothing about trends over time for a single marine fish in the Arctic,” says Jeffrey Hutchings, a biologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Hutchings says that scientists have pushed for such measures before, adding that it is up to the Arctic nations to implement such measures through the Arctic Council. “The Canadian government seems unwilling to take a stand similar to that of the US.”

    This story originally appeared on the Nature News blog.

    Photo: Jessica K. Robertson/ US Geological Survey

  • Regime Change: Q&A with John Smol

    Nature

    A freshwater ecologist at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, Smol studies lake sediments to understand climatic and environmental change. Nature Outlook asks him to share his experience.

    What can we learn from lake sediments?
    One of the biggest challenges in environmental science is the lack of long-term data, so we have to use indirect proxies. All over the planet, lakes act as passive samplers of the environment, recording information 24 hours a day. They contain biological, chemical and physical information. The deeper you go in the sediment, the older it gets. Typically, in North America you can go back 12,000 years to the last Ice Age. In ponds near the Arctic Ocean, it’s closer to 5,000 years, because before that those areas were below sea level. We focus on the changes that have occurred in the past few hundred years and compare them with the long-term record. So we can ask: is there anything peculiar going on now, or is this just part of a long-term cycle?

    What have these remote ponds told us about climate change?

    We chose shallow ponds because they would be the most sensitive. They’re the bellwethers. The palaeo-data show that some very striking ecological changes started happening since the 1800s. The most plausible interpretation is that it was climate change and that it was human related. This conclusion was very controversial when we published it in 1994 (ref.1).

    We started going to these ponds on Cape Herschel in far northern Canada in 1983. We were going up every two or three years, and we could see they were getting shallower. We thought they could eventually disappear, but none of us thought it could happen in our lifetime. By 2006, many of the ponds had gone dry. It was stunning. We wondered if it was a one-off event, but we checked the 2005 data from the probes that we had left in some of the ponds in 2004 and saw that they were dry even then. We could tell that the ponds were evaporating, not draining, because the water’s conductivity — which is proportional to the concentration of dissolved ions — had steadily been increasing. Nothing like this had ever happened before, although the drying trend has occurred since. We called it crossing the final ecological threshold.

    Keep reading this article in Nature.