Coastal Wetlands Save $1.8 Million per Year for Each Square Kilometer

Protect coastal wetlands in China to save endangered migratory birds.

Evaluating the significance of protected areas for biodiversity and ecosystem services is important for nature conservation. In a recent issue of PNAS, Xu et al. (1) present valuable information on provision of biodiversity and ecosystem services by China’s nature reserves. They conclude that reserves serve bird populations moderately well. However, the importance of coastal wetlands for migrat...

Science with the Square Kilometer Array

Kilometer-square Area Radio Synthesis Telescope KARST

In 1993, a large radio telescope (LT, now referred as the SKA) was proposed by astronomers from 10 countries at the 24 th General Assembly of URSI. The SKA would be a telescope array with a total (effective) collecting area of about one square kilometer. There are various concepts, worldwide, for realizing the SKA project. Extensive efforts have been made, e.g., by project teams in The Netherla...

The Square Kilometer Array: New Challenges for Cosmology

In the past three decades our view and understanding of the structure and evolution of the universe has grown in an almost revolutionary fashion. The discovery of the rich variety of patterns displayed by the galaxy distribution, the discovery of streaming motions in the local universe, the detection of tiny variations in the temperature of the microwave background radiation and the use of powe...

Sub-kilometer length scales in coastal waters

Patchiness or spatial variability is ubiquitous in marine systems. With increasing anthropogenic impacts to coastal resources and coastal systems being disproportionately large contributors to ocean productivity, identifying the spatial scales of this patchiness, particularly in coastal waters, is of critical importance to understand coastal ecosystem dynamics. The current work focuses on fine ...