Anthropogenic activities are fundamentally altering the chemistry of the world’s oceans. Many of these modifications could have a significant impact on the health of marine organisms. Yet, despite being proposed as one of the most significant threats that marine ecosystems face, to date very little is known about the impact of anthropogenic climate change, and ocean acidification in particular,...

Human impact plays an increasing role on vegetation change even on the Tibetan Plateau, an area that is commonly regarded as an ideal place to study climate change. We evaluate the nature and extent of human impact on vegetation dynamics by the comparison of two areas: the relative highly populated Lhasa area and a nearby less populated Lhari County. Our results indicate that human impact has m...

We previously reported that band-pass filtered noise (BFN, bandwidth 20 kHz) affected the echolocation behavior of horseshoe bats in different ways depending on which frequencies within the bats' hearing range BFN was centered. We found that call amplitudes only increased when BFN was centered on the dominant frequency of the bats' calls. In contrast, call frequencies were shifted for all BFN s...

Non-human primates face major environmental changes due to increased human impacts all over the world. Although some species are able to survive in certain landscapes with anthropogenic impact, their long-term viability and fitness may be decreased due to chronic stress. Here we assessed long-term stress levels through cortisol analysis in chimpanzee hair obtained from sleeping nests in northwe...

Increasing anthropogenic pollution from urban centers and fossil fuel combustion can impact the carbon and nitrogen cycles in forests. To assess the impact of twentieth century anthropogenic pollution on forested system carbon and nitrogen cycles, variations in the carbon and nitrogen isotopic compositions of tree-rings were measured. Individual annual growth rings in trees from six sites acros...

Vegetation is one of the most important components of the terrestrial ecosystem and, thus, monitoring the spatial and temporal dynamics of vegetation has become the key to exploring the basic process of the terrestrial ecosystem. Vegetation change studies have focused on the relationship between climatic factors and vegetation dynamics. However, correlations among the climatic factors always di...

Characterized by expensive housing, high socioeconomic status, and topographic relief, Upper Sonoran Lifestyle communities are found primarily along the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) in the Phoenix, Arizona metro area. Communities like these sprawl into the wildlands in the United States Southwest, creating a distinct urban fringe. This article, through locational comparison, introduces and ev...

Anthropogenic noise can have important physiological and behavioral effects on wild animals. For example, urban noise could lead to a state of chronic stress and could alter the development of the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. Supporting this hypothesis, several studies have found that human disturbance is associated with increased circulating corticosterone (CORT) levels. However,...

Global population growth has caused extensive human-induced environmental change, including a near-ubiquitous transformation of the acoustical environment due to the propagation of anthropogenic noise. Because the acoustical environment is a critical ecological dimension for countless species to obtain, interpret and respond to environmental cues, highly novel environmental acoustics have the p...