Listening for a Safe Neighborhood

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Restored wetlands rarely equal condition of original wetlands

ScienceDaily (Jan. 24, 2012) ? Wetland restoration is a billion-dollar-a-year industry in the United States that aims to create ecosystems similar to those that disappeared over the past century. But a new analysis of restoration projects shows that restored wetlands seldom reach the quality of a natural wetland.

"Once you degrade a wetland, it doesn't recover its normal assemblage of plants or its rich stores of organic soil carbon, which both affect natural cycles of water and nutrients, for many years," said David Moreno-Mateos, a University of California, Berkeley, postdoctoral fellow. "Even after 100 years, the restored wetland is still different from what was there before, and it may never recover."

Moreno-Mateos's analysis calls into question a common mitigation strategy exploited by land developers: create a new wetland to replace a wetland that will be destroyed and the land put to other uses. At a time of accelerated climate change caused by increased carbon entering the atmosphere, carbon storage in wetlands is increasingly important, he said.

"Wetlands accumulate a lot of carbon, so when you dry up a wetland for agricultural use or to build houses, you are just pouring this carbon into the atmosphere," he said. "If we keep degrading or destroying wetlands, for example through the use of mitigation banks, it is going to take centuries to recover the carbon we are losing."

The study showed that wetlands tend to recover most slowly if they are in cold regions, if they are small -- less than 100 contiguous hectares, or 250 acres, in area -- or if they are disconnected from the ebb and flood of tides or river flows.

"These context dependencies aren't necessarily surprising, but this paper quantifies them in ways that could guide decisions about restoration, or about whether to damage wetlands in the first place," said coauthor Mary Power, UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology.

Moreno-Mateos, Power and their colleagues will publish their analysis in the Jan. 24 issue of PLoS (Public Library of Science) Biology.

Wetlands provide many societal benefits, Moreno-Mateos noted, such as biodiversity conservation, fish production, water purification, erosion control and carbon storage.

He found, however, that restored wetlands contained about 23 percent less carbon than untouched wetlands, while the variety of native plants was 26 percent lower, on average, after 50 to 100 years of restoration. While restored wetlands may look superficially similar -- and the animal and insect populations may be similar, too -- the plants take much longer to return to normal and establish the carbon resources in the soil that make for a healthy ecosystem.

Moreno-Mateos noted that numerous studies have shown that specific wetlands recover slowly, but his meta-analysis "might be a proof that this is happening in most wetlands."

"To prevent this, preserve the wetland, don't degrade the wetland," he said.

Moreno-Mateos, who obtained his Ph.D. while studying wetland restoration in Spain, conducted a meta-analysis of 124 wetland studies monitoring work at 621 wetlands around the world and comparing them with natural wetlands. Nearly 80 percent were in the United States and some were restored more than 100 years ago, reflecting of a long-standing American interest in restoration and a common belief that it's possible to essentially recreate destroyed wetlands. Half of all wetlands in North America, Europe, China and Australia were lost during the 20th century, he said. S

Though Moreno-Mateos found that, on average, restored wetlands are 25 percent less productive than natural wetlands, there was much variation. For example, wetlands in boreal and cold temperate forests tend to recover more slowly than do warm wetlands. One review of wetland restoration projects in New York state, for example, found that "after 55 years, barely 50 percent of the organic matter had accumulated on average in all these wetlands" compared to what was there before, he said.

"Current thinking holds that many ecosystems just reach an alternative state that is different, and you never will recover the original," he said.

In future studies, he will explore whether the slower carbon accumulation is due to a slow recovery of the native plant community or invasion by non-native plants.

Coauthors with Moreno-Mateos and Power are Francisco A. Comin of the Department of Conservation of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Restoration at the Pyrenean Institute of Ecology in Zaragoza, Spain; and Roxana Yockteng of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, France. Moreno-Mateos recently accepted a position as the restoration fellow at Stanford University's Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve.

The work was supported by the Spanish Ministry for Innovation and Science, the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology and the National Center for Earth Surface Dynamics of the U.S. National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center.

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of California - Berkeley.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Journal Reference:

1. David Moreno-Mateos, Mary E. Power, Francisco A. Com?n, Roxana Yockteng. Structural and Functional Loss in Restored Wetland Ecosystems. PLoS Biology, 2012; 10 (1): e1001247 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1001247

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120124184157.htm

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Rapper Fat Joe?s Wife Filing For Divorce After 17 Years!

Rapper Fat Joe’s Wife Filing For Divorce After 17 Years!

Rapper Fat Joe and his wife of 17 years, Lorena, have split after he cheated on her! The hip-hop star, who lost over 100 pounds [...]

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South Sudan to shut oil production over thefts (AP)

JUBA, South Sudan ? A South Sudan official says the country is shutting down its oil production because Sudan is stealing its oil.

South Sudan Minister of Information Barnaba Marial Benjamin said Monday that oil companies operating in the country were instructed to begin shutting down operations in the country's oil fields as of Sunday.

Benjamin said oil production cannot be easily stopped, so companies have been given two weeks to carry out the order.

South Sudan's oil flows through pipelines in Sudan. South Sudan has accused Sudan of stealing its oil.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/africa/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120123/ap_on_bi_ge/af_south_sudan_oil

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Brain scans spot early signs of dyslexia (Reuters)

CHICAGO (Reuters) ? Instead of waiting for a child to experience reading delays, scientists now say they can identify the reading problem even before children start school, long before they become labeled as poor students and begin to lose confidence in themselves.

Although typically diagnosed during the second or third grade of school - around age 7 or 8 - a team from Children's Hospital Boston said they could see signs of the disease on brain scans in children as early as 4 and 5, a time when studies show children are best able to respond to interventions.

"We call it the dyslexia paradox," said Nadine Gaab of the Laboratories of Cognitive Neuroscience at Children's, whose study was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Gaab said most children are not diagnosed until third grade, but interventions work best in younger children, hopefully before they begin to learn to read.

"Often, by the time they get a diagnosis, they usually have experienced three years of peers telling them they are stupid, parents telling them they are lazy. We know they have reduced self esteem. They are really struggling," Gaab said in a telephone interview.

Her study builds on an emerging understanding of dyslexia as a problem with recognizing and manipulating the individual sounds that form language, which is known as phonological processing.

In order to read, children must map the sounds of spoken language onto specific letters that make up words. Children with dyslexia struggle with this mapping process.

"The beauty is spoken language can present before written language so people can look for symptoms," said Dr. Sally Shaywitz, a director of the Center for Dyslexia and Creativity at Yale University.

Signs of early dyslexia might include difficulty with rhyming, mispronouncing words or confusing similar-sounding words.

"Those are all very early symptoms," Shaywitz said.

Dyslexia affects roughly 5 percent to 17 percent of all children and up to 1 in 2 children with a family history of the disorder will struggle with reading, have poor spelling and experience difficulty decoding words.

In her study, Gaab and colleagues scanned the brains of 36 preschool children while they did a number of tasks, such as trying to decide if two words start with the same sound.

They found that during these tasks, children who had a family history of dyslexia had less brain activity in certain regions of the brain than did children of similar ages, intelligence and socioeconomic status.

Older children and adults with dyslexia have dysfunction in these same areas of the brain, which include the junctions between the occipital and temporal lobes and the temporal and parietal lobes in the back of the brain.

Gaab said the study shows that when children predisposed to dyslexia did these tasks, their brains did not use the area typically used for processing this information. This problem occurred even before the children started learning to read.

"The important point of this paper is it shows the need to look for signs of dyslexia earlier," said April Benasich, director of the Carter Center for Neurocognitive Research at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, who was not part of the study.

Benasich studies language processing in even younger children - babies who have a family history of learning disorders.

"There is evidence to suggest that what is thought to be reading failure is there before the kids fail," she said.

Gaab said her study is too small to form the basis of any test for dyslexia but her team has just won a grant from the National Institutes of Health to do a larger study.

Ultimately, she hopes parents will be able to go to their pediatrician and ask for their child to be assessed.

"Families often know that their child has dyslexia as early as kindergarten, but they can't get interventions at their schools," she said in a statement.

"If we can show that we can identify these kids early, schools may be encouraged to develop programs," she said.

(Editing by Bill Trott)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/health/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20120124/hl_nm/us_usa_dyslexia

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2 dead, 100 hurt in Ala. as storms pound South (AP)

CLAY, Ala. ? Violent weather including possible tornadoes roared across the heart of Alabama on Monday, injuring more than 100 people and killing at least two, including a man who lived in an area devastated by a deadly twister outbreak in the spring.

The storms flattened homes and peeled off roofs in the middle of the night in the rural community of Oak Grove near Birmingham. As dawn broke, residents surveyed the damage and began cleaning up across parts of central Alabama, an area that has a history of tornadoes going back decades.

In a sign Alabama has become all too familiar with severe weather, officials had to reschedule a meeting Monday to receive a report on their response to the spring twisters. Alabama's governor declared a state of emergency for the entire state.

Oak Grove was hit hard in April when tornadoes killed about 240 people statewide, though officials said none of the same neighborhoods was struck again.

Amber Butler and her family hid in her sister's brick home as the storm approached about 3:30 a.m. Butler's own home was destroyed.

"I just so speechless now, I don't know what to do," she said. "God Bless our friends and neighbors who have come to help. We've lost everything we had."

Butler lived near 83-year-old Bobby Frank Sims, who was killed when his home was leveled by a tree.

In Clay, northeast of Birmingham, 16-year-old Christina Nicole Heichelbech died, the Jefferson County coroner's office said. Rescue workers said her parents were injured.

"Some roads are impassable, there are a number of county roads where you have either debris down, trees down, damage from homes," said Yasamie Richardson, a spokeswoman for the Alabama Emergency Management Agency.

The storm system stretched from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, producing hail, strong winds and rain. Possible tornadoes were reported in Arkansas on Sunday night.

In Alabama, searchers went door-to-door calling out to residents, many of whom were trapped by trees that crisscrossed their driveways.

Stevie Sanders woke up around 3:30 a.m. and realized bad weather was on the way. She, her parents and sister hid in the laundry room of their brick home in Clay as the wind howled and trees started cracking outside.

"You could feel the walls shaking and you could hear a loud crash. After that it got quiet, and the tree had fallen through my sister's roof," said Sanders.

The family was OK, and her father, Greg Sanders, spent the next hours raking his roof and pulling away pieces of broken lumber.

"It could have been so much worse," he said. "It's like they say, we were just blessed."

Jefferson County, where Oak Grove and Clay are located, suffered the most damage, followed by Chilton County, with most of the damage around Maplesville.

Oak Grove, a sprawling unincorporated area in the western part of the county was nearly wiped out on April 8, 1998, by a powerful tornado that killed 34 people and left about 260 people injured. It spread a wide path of destruction that left much of the previously heavily wooded western section of the county looking barren. The tornado destroyed Oak Grove High School, which has been rebuilt.

This general section of Jefferson County has been infamous for destructive tornadoes dating back to the 1930s.

State Climatologist John Christy said there seems to be a general path from central Mississippi going into north Alabama that gets attention for a large number of tornadoes ? and their intensity. One theory has to do with the distance from the Gulf of Mexico, just far enough to be effected by cold air coming from the north.

"It's the frequency and intensity of the storms that tend to align on this corridor," said Christy, a professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville

The mayor of Maplesville, about 45 miles south of Birmingham, said a storm came through about 5 a.m., downing many trees and causing major damage to about five buildings.

More than 50 people were in the town's storm shelter next door to the fire department when the winds blew the top of a sweet gum tree, about one-foot in diameter, on to the steel building, but no damage was done and no one was injured.

"The shelter did what it was supposed to do," Mayor Aubrey Latham said.

The town built the dome-shaped shelter about five years ago with a FEMA grant because of past tornadoes that had hit the area.

___

Associated Press writers Dave Martin in Oak Grove, and Phillip Rawls and Bob Johnson in Montgomery contributed to this report.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/topstories/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120123/ap_on_re_us/us_severe_weather

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James' passion, great range remembered (AP)

NEW YORK ? On her last album "The Dreamer," released just three months before her death, Etta James sings a mix of covers, from the R&B classic "Misty Blue" to the Ray Charles song "In the Evening." But perhaps the most curious tune included on the disc may be the Guns N' Roses staple "Welcome to the Jungle."

That a 73-year-old icon of R&B would tackle the frenetic rock song ? albeit in a pace more fitting her blues roots ? might seem odd. But the song may be the best representation of James as both a singer and a person ? rambunctious in spirit, with the ability to sing whatever was thrown at her, whether it was jazz, blues, pining R&B or a song from one of the rowdiest bands in rock.

"She was able to dig so deep in kind of such a raw and unguarded place when she sang, and that's the power of gospel and blues and rhythm and blues. She brought that to all those beautiful standards and rocks songs that she did. All the number of vast albums she recorded, she covered such a wide variety of material that brought such unique phrasing and emotional depth," said Bonnie Raitt, a close friend, in an interview on Friday afternoon after James' death.

"I think that's what appealed to people, aside from the fact that her personality on and off the stage was so huge and irrepressible. She was ribald and raunchy and dignified, classy and strong and vulnerable all at the same time, which is what us as women really relate to."

James, whose signature song was the sweeping, jazz-tinged torch song "At Last," died in Riverside, Calif., from complications of leukemia. Her death came after she struggled with dementia and other health problems, health issues that kept her from performing for the last two or so years of her life.

It was a life full of struggles. Her mother was immersed in a criminal life and left her to be raised by friends, she never knew her true father (though she believed it was billiards great Minnesota Fats), and she had her own troubles, which included a decades-long addiction to drugs, turbulent relationships, brushes with the law, and other tribulations.

One might think all of those problems would have weighted down James' spirit, and her voice, layering it with sadness, or despair. While she certainly could channel depression, anger, and sorrow in song, her voice was defined by its fiery passion: Far from beaten down, James embodied the fight of a woman who managed to claw her way back from the brink, again and again.

It's an attitude that influenced her look as well. Despite the conservative era, she dyed her hair platinum blonde, sending out the signal that she was far from demure, and owning a brassy, sassy attitude. She relished her role as saucy singer, a persona that she celebrated in her private life as well.

"In terms of 1950s rhythm and blues stars, she had kind of a gutsy attitude and she went out there and did what she did, and she was kind of bold ... and it had a huge influence," said David Ritz, the co-author of her autobiography "Rage to Survive: The Etta James Story." "I think her gutsiness and her lack of fear and just her courage (made her special). ... I believe that made her important and memorable."

Beyonce, who played James in the movie "Cadillac Records" about Chess Records, also spoke about her influence on other singers.

"I feel like Etta James, first of all, was the first black woman I saw with platinum, blonde hair. She wore her leopard and she wore her sexy silhouette and she didn't care. She was strong and confident and always Etta James," said Beyonce in a 2008 interview.

James could often be irascible. Ritz remembers when he was working with her on her autobiography, touring with her around the country, that one time he approached her with his tape recorder and she barked: "If see that tape recorder again I'm going to cram it up your (expletive)."

But at other times, she'd be effusive and warm and anxious to talk.

"Once she did talk, she was always candid and unguarded. She was a free spirit," Ritz said.

While Ritz put her in the category of other greats like Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and Marvin Gaye, she never enjoyed their mainstream success. Though "At Last" has become an enduring classic, there were times when James had to scrounge for work, and while she won Grammys and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, she did not have the riches, the multitude of platinum records or the hits that some of her peers enjoyed.

"She at least enjoyed a great resurgence like John Lee Hooker did and B.B. King, (and) has had some great decades of appreciation from new generations around the world," said Raitt. "There's no one like her. No one will ever replace Etta."

And Ritz said the lack of commercial success does nothing to diminish her greatness, or her legacy.

"Marvin certain knew it and Ray knew it ... the people who know that she was in that category," he said. "Whatever the marketplace did or didn't do or whether her lack of career management didn't do, it has nothing to do with her talent."

And on Friday, the Queen of Soul was among those who paid tribute to James greatness, calling her "one of the great soul singers of our generation. An American original!

"I loved `Pushover,' `At Last' and almost any and everything she recorded! When Etta SUNG, you heard it!"

___

AP Entertainment Writer Chris Talbott and AP Writer Mesfin Fekadu contributed to this report.

___

Nekesa Mumbi Moody is the AP's music editor. Follow her at http://www.twitter.com/nekesamumbi

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/music/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120121/ap_en_mu/us_etta_james_appreciation

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