This can become one of the most interesting projects for people who are interested in nature, biodiversity and, of course, the impact climate change on our environment. A team of researchers from Yale and the University Colorado at Boulder have an unbelievable idea. Their plan is to map the distribution of all plant and animal life on earth. This May they have started a demo-version of their Web-based “Map of Life“.

The google maps based tool will be growing constantly, the researchers say. Right now it presents over 25,000 different species of terrestrial vertebrates and North American freshwater fish. But even in this state of being the idea comes crystal clear where this map is going to be within the next months. “Map of Life” uses data from field guides, museums, citizen scientists and groups like the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and the World Wildlife Fund.

Right now it’s possible for the users to search by species, viewing a map of all known distributions, or to view a list of all species records in a specific range of any spot on the map.

The developers also provide a blog to inform about the newest developments on the map.

The plant started working a few days ago after a six-month trial period and build-up. It’s based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’s capital and largest city. The facility is almost five football pitches (36.000 m²) big and doubles the size of the former chart-topper in Denmark. With the new solar power plant, it’s now possible to produce enough energy to heat water for 40.000 students at the Princess Noura bint AbdulRahman University, the largest women-only university in the world. The campus consits of 15 academic faculty buildings, various labs and a 700-bed hospital. The $14m plant was manufactured by Austrian research institute GREENoneTEC company and constructed by Jordanian engineering company Millennium Energy Industries. The plant operates via 36,305m2 of solar panels. And based on the lifespan of these panels, the facility could save about 52 million liters of heating oil and 125 million kilograms of CO2.

Can you imagine how big 550 hectares are? That’s 5,500,000 square meters – in other words the size of about 770 soccer fields. You have to admit, that’s a whole lot of space. And it’s that same amount of space that one man, Jadav Payeng, filled with trees in Brahmaputra, India, over a span of 30 years.
It all started way back in 1979, according to the Times of India . That year, a huge flood washed a lot of snakes ashore on a sandbar. 16-year-old Payeng went there, the day the waters had receded. He found the snakes dead, and that experience changed his live. “The snakes died in the heat, without any tree cover,” he said to the newspaper. When he tried to ask the forest department to plant trees there, he made little headway. Nothing would grow there, the department answered. He should try growing bamboo on the sandbank instead, they told him. So that’s what he did.
Forestry officials in the region first learned of this new forest in 2008. Since then, they’ve come to recognize Payeng’s efforts as truly remarkable. “We’re amazed at Payeng,” says Assistant Conservator of Forests, Gunin Saikia. “Had he been in any other country, he would have been made a hero.”

 

Volet végétal from Nicolas Barreau on Vimeo.

If you live in a big city or even a megacity, in high apartement buildings, you are certainly aware, that these cities never have enough public green spaces. But there is help. If you need a green view to lift up your mood, or you just want to grow some tomatoes, than you will find the idea in the video above interesting. The Paris based designers Barre & Charbonnet have build a small garden-like construction, that you could use either way, inside or outside the rooms. The idea is to create a “micro-habitat” and to “reinterprete the hanging gardens”, the designers say on their homepage.  Besides: You will have always a green horizon.

Are forests back on the rise? The latest study from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) shows the rate of forest loss is actually slowing down, surprisingly enough. That's mainly thanks to a push to plant–rather than cut down–forests in Asia.

 

According to the State of the World"s Forests 2011 report, the rate at which the planet's forests are being cut down decreased from 8.3 million hectares a year between 1999-2000 to just 5.2 million over the last decade. And, the UN says the world's forest regions could even start expanding in the near future!

 

China has focused on a big reforestation project, which includes increasing the country's forested land area from 120 million to 200 million hectares. There's just one small problem, according to the FAO: a lot of that new growth will likely be "junk" forestation because it won't have the same carbon storage value as existing forests. Plus, a lot of valuable forest land is still being razed at a very high rate in South America and Africa.

 

What about in your region? Is your home country planting or cutting down–and have you noticed any changes?