Beaver activity in the Arctic linked to increased emission of methane greenhouse gas

by Rod Boyce, University of Alaska Fairbanks

The spatial distribution and abundance of AVIRIS-NG CH4 hotspots (enlarged as points for

 visibility) around example beaver ponds, compared to non-beaver waterbodies. 

(a) Stream network and analysis buffer (10–60 m) with extensive beaver pond complex 

of multiple dams and ponds, (b) headwater stream with small beaver pond in stream, and

 (c) examples of beaver and non-beaver lakes. Imagery is from NASA AVIRIS-NG, acquired

 on 2018-07-24 . 

Credit: Environmental Research Letters (2023). DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/acde8e

The climate-driven advance of beavers into the Arctic tundra is likely causing the release of more methane—a greenhouse gas—into the atmosphere.

Beavers, as everyone knows, like to make dams. Those dams cause flooding, which inundates vegetation and turns Arctic streams and creeks into a series of ponds. Those beaver ponds and surrounding inundated vegetation can be devoid of oxygen and rich with organic sediment, which releases methane as the material decays.

Methane is also released when organics-rich permafrost thaws as the result of heat carried by the spreading water.

A study linking Arctic beavers to an increase in the release of methane was published in July in Environmental Research Letters.

The lead author is Jason Clark, a former postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute. Research Professor Ken Tape, also of the Geophysical Institute, was Clark's adviser and is a co-author. Other co-authors include Benjamin Jones, a research assistant professor at the UAF Institute of Northern Engineering; and researchers from the National Park Service and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Tape has done extensive research about the northward migration of beavers and their resultant impact on the Arctic environment.

"What we found is that there are lots of methane hotspots right next to ponds and they start to diminish as you go away from the pond," he said.

The new study is the first to link large numbers of new beaver ponds to methane emissions at the landscape scale. It suggests that beaver engineering in the Arctic will at least initially increase methane release.

"We say 'initially' because that's the data we have," Tape said. "What the longer-term implications are, we don't know."

As a greenhouse gas, methane is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in Earth's atmosphere.

It accounts for about 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The agency says human activities have more than doubled atmospheric methane concentrations in the past two centuries.

The new research focused on 166 square miles of the lower Noatak River basin in Northwest Alaska. Data was obtained by airborne hyperspectral imaging through NASA's Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment program.

Hyperspectral cameras image an area in hundreds of wavelengths across the electromagnetic spectrum, including many not visible to the human eye. That differs from other cameras, which typically only image in the primary colors of red, green and blue.

The researchers compared the location of methane hot spots to the locations of 118 beaver ponds and to a number of nearby unaffected stream reaches and lakes. They analyzed the area up to approximately 200 feet from the perimeter of each water body and found a "significantly greater" number of methane hot spots around beaver ponds.

"We have these datasets that largely overlap, in space and mostly in time," Tape said. "It's kind of a simple design relying on a new tool."

Additional research about the relationship between beaver migration and Arctic methane release will occur next year.

More information: Jason A Clark et al, Do beaver ponds increase methane emissions along Arctic tundra streams?, Environmental Research Letters (2023). DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/acde8e

Journal information: Environmental Research Letters 

Provided by University of Alaska FairbanksResearch shows beavers are remaking microbial ecosystems in the Arctic

Canadian Natural expects Trans Mountain expansion project to be delayed -letter

September 07, 2023 

(Reuters) - Canadian Natural Resources Ltd, a major shipper on the Trans Mountain oil pipeline expansion (TMX), expects the project will be delayed until at least the second quarter of 2024, the company said in a letter to Canadian regulators on Thursday.

Trans Mountain Corp (TMC), the Canadian government-owned corporation building the long-delayed project, has said the expanded pipeline will start shipping oil late in the first quarter of next year.

Canadian Natural said it expected the pipeline's start date to be delayed because TMC is asking regulators for a route deviation on a 1.3-km (0.8 mile) section just south of Kamloops, British Columbia.

"Although Canadian Natural hopes for an earlier Commencement Date, unfortunately, it is probable that the Commencement Date will be delayed into Q2 or later in 2024," the letter to the Canada Energy Regulator (CER) said.

TMC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

TMX will treble the flow of oil sands crude from Alberta to Canada's Pacific Coast to 890,000 barrels per day, but the expansion has been dogged by years of regulatory delays and environmental opposition.

It was bought by the Canadian government in 2018 to ensure it got built, but has seen costs quadruple to C$30.9 billion. TMC is currently locked in a dispute with oil shippers over higher-than-expected tolls.

Canadian Natural's submission to the CER was one of a number of letters from TMX shippers, including Cenovus Energy and Suncor Energy, filed on Thursday.

The companies argued TMX's proposed interim tolls are excessive and called for a review of why the cost of the pipeline escalated so much during construction.

(Reporting by Nia Williams; editing by Jonathan Oatis)

By Nia Williams

Three Ex-Canadian Fighter Pilots Are Training Chinese Pilots in China

Sep 8, 2023

Eric Tegler

A PLA Hongdu JL-10, supersonic advanced jet trainer, performs during the Zhuhai Airshow in Zhuhai in ... [+]

FUTURE PUBLISHING VIA GETTY IMAGES

Last Fall’s news of British and American former military fighter pilots training Chinese pilots in China just got a refresh with a new Canadian probe into ex-RCAF pilots training the Chinese.

Canada’s The Globe And Mail newspaper reported that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) are investigating three former Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) fighter pilots who are training military and civilian pilots in China under the auspices of the Test Flying Academy of South Africa (TFASA).

The RCMP’s probe joins UK and American investigations of ex-military fighter pilots from their respective countries training Chinese military pilots in NATO and western tactics and fighter operations which arose last year.

According to The Globe, Canadian security officials attempted to contact the former RCAF pilots in late August. Canada’s Department of National Defence says it referred the matter to the RCMP which is looking at three individuals - Paul Umrysh, Craig Sharp and David Monk in connection with training Chinese pilots in China.

The flight school they work for, TFASA is headquartered at Oudtshoorn Airfield in Western Cape region of South Africa. Aviation Week & Space Technology reported that it was formed in 2003.

Its chairman is Jean Rossouw, a former test pilot with the South African Air Force (SAAF) and a director of the China-linked Avic-International Flight Training Academy. TFASA CEO, C. Jurie van Wyngaard, is also a SAAF pilot who previously held roles at Pilatus and Saab

TFASA has already been the subject of U.S. and UK scrutiny. In June, the U.S. government imposed export controls on TFASA and other firms it asserts are “providing training to Chinese military pilots using Western and NATO sources.”

The company reacted to the export controls in a statement explaining that they do not “affect TFASA’s day to day operations”. The statement asserted that it has operated “with the full knowledge of NATO defence and security agencies for over a decade”.

TFASA added that “over the past ten years almost 70% of Chinese pilot cadets who received training internationally do so in the United States; all Chinese pilot cadets trained by TFASA are drawn from, and return to, exactly the same talent pool as those trained in the United States.”

That may or may not be true but the training that TFASA references is commercial air transport pilot training, not the Operational Pilot & Specialist training it lists among its business sectors.

The Globe attempted to contact the Canadian pilots but instead got a response from TFASA’s spokesman who maintained that the flight training they are conducting only involves unclassified procedures and that training materials are derived either from open sources or from the clients themselves. “The training TFASA provides never includes information about NATO,” the spokesman affirmed.

What appears to be Western aircrew in front of a Chinese FTC-2000 jet trainer in an image from the ... [+]

TFASA

Is that credible? I spoke to a highly-placed background source in the contract adversary services (ADAIR) industry who opined that at a glance, TFASA’s expertise would appear to be more in the developmental test space but also noted that its Operational Pilot & Specialist training focus would simply not allow it to steer away from NATO tactics and procedures.

“If you’re teaching someone to develop a tactic, who are the bad guys? It’s not really pure for them to say, ‘We don’t ever mention NATO or talk about NATO tactics’. There always has to a Blue Air [i.e. China] and a Red Air [NATO/U.S.].”

The source emphasized that TFASA has “no play” in the legitimate Western ADAIR industry and is not even a recognized name. The mere exercise of placing a Chinese student pilot in one cockpit with a Canadian fighter pilot trained in NATO doctrine would inevitably produce Western training and tactical insights for the student the source agrees.

Open-source information of fighter tactics is widely available, even in the flight-simulation video games popular with two generations of gamers, simulations which can offer a baseline illustration of Western fighter tactics.

However, they have limits. Games won’t generally tell a player how to defeat a specific real-world missile but tactical fast-jet students would very much want to know the answer. Are they asking their TFASA instructors? What answers might they get?

Despite the apparent conflict with Western values illustrated by the RCAF pilots’ work with TFASA, their employment and the school’s contracts with Chinese students is not strictly illegal. TFASA stresses that it operates in compliance with South African law, as well as the laws of any other country it operates in, and that it has “systems” in place to ensure that Western-trained instructors don’t divulge classified information.

According to local South African media outlet news24, TFASA was specifically created with China in mind. It used South Africa's ties to China as well as its relationship with Western powers to position itself as an intermediary, scooping Chinese business with its ability to hire Western ex-military pilots as instructors.

But what kind of instructors are they? Would they be qualified and welcome to work with Western ADAIR firms? My source was adamant that only pilots with previous specific military adversary/aggressor experience (mostly U.S. military) are hired at most U.S. firms. At one in particular, pilot positions are filled by word of mouth, the firm does not advertise.

American firms now vet candidates for possible exposure to China-linked operations or Chinese instruction backgrounds. “I don’t think you’re going to find a connection between ADAIR in the U.S. and the kind of things that [you see] in this example,” the source asserts.

That contrasts with TFASA which an Australian pilot told Reuters actively targets Australian, British, Canadian, New Zealander and American pilots with pay packages worth more than £200,000 ($226,000) a year.

Another image formerly on TFASA's website appears to show Western pilots stepping from a Guizhou ... [+]

TEST FLYING ACADEMY OF SOUTH AFRICA

A final note worth passing on is that the Western pilots who have opted to work training Chinese pilots for firms like TFASA are not considered high level tactics experts by the commercial ADAIR industry.

“We know people who have gone elsewhere,” my source says. “We know people who go to the Middle East, to UAEUAE +0.4% for example. They’re not the people we work with.”

Highly trained aggressors or not, they can still offer useful insights to the Chinese, even if they strive to draw the line somewhere. The Globe asked one of the RCAF pilots under scrutiny to address speculation that the Canadians are training students on Chinese warplanes such as the Chengdu J-10 or J-11B multi-role fighters.

The pilot did not respond, and TFASA did not offer any comment.

 

How did plants first evolve into all different shapes and sizes? We mapped a billion years of plant history to find out

by Philip C J Donoghue, James Clark and Sandy Hetherington, The Conversation

From minuscule moss to colourful flowers and tall trees. Credit: Philip Donoghue / James Clark

Plants range from simple seaweeds and single-celled pond scum, through to mosses, ferns and huge trees. Paleontologists like us have long debated exactly how this diverse range of shapes and sizes emerged, and whether plants emerged from algae into multicellular and three-dimensional forms in a gradual flowering or one big bang.

To answer this question, scientists turned to the fossil record. From those best-preserved examples, like trilobites, ammonites and sea urchins, they have invariably concluded that a group's range of biological designs is achieved during the earliest periods in its evolutionary history.

In turn, this has led to hypotheses that evolutionary lineages have a higher capacity for innovation early on and, after this first phase of exuberance, they stick with what they know. This even applies to us: all the different placental mammals evolved from a common ancestor surprisingly quickly. Is the same true of the plant kingdom?

In our new study, we sought to answer this question by looking for certain traits in each major plant group. These traits ranged from the fundamental characteristics of plants—the presence of roots, leaves or flowers—to fine details that describe the variation and ornamentation of each pollen grain. In total, we collected data on 548 traits from more than 400 living and fossil plants, amounting to more than 130,000 individual observations.

We then analyzed all this data, grouping plants based on their overall similarities and differences, all plotted within what can be thought of as a "design space." Since we know the evolutionary relationships between the species, we can also predict the traits of their extinct shared ancestors and include these hypothetical ancestors within the design space, too.

For example, we will never find fossils of the ancestral flowering plant, but we know from its closest living descendants that it was bisexual, radially symmetric, with more than five spirally arranged carpels (the ovule-bearing female reproductive part of a flower). Together, data points from living species, fossils and predicted ancestors reveal how plant life has navigated design space through evolutionary history and over geological time.

We expected flowering plants to dominate the design space since they make up more than 80% of plant species, but they don't. In fact, the living bryophytes—mosses, liverworts and hornworts—achieve almost as much variety in their body forms.

This may not be entirely surprising since the three lineages of bryophytes have been doing their own thing for more than three times as long as flowering plants. And despite their diminutive nature, even the humble mosses are extraordinarily complex and diverse when viewed through a microscope.

The evolutionary relationships conveyed by the branching genealogy in the above plot show that there is, generally, a structure to the occupation of design space—as new groups have emerged, they have expanded into new regions. However, there is some evidence for convergence, too, with some groups like the living gymnosperms (conifers and allies) and flowering plants plotting closer together than they do to their common ancestor.

The two axes summarize the variation in anatomical design among plants. Colored dots represent living groups while the black dots represent extinct groups known only from fossils. The lines connecting these groupings represent the evolutionary relationships among living and fossil groups, plus their ancestors, inferred from evolutionary modelling. (The chlorophytes and charophytes are marine and freshwater plants while the remaining groups are land plants. Angiosperms are flowering plants). Credit: Philip Donoghue et al / Nature Plants

Nevertheless, some of the distinctiveness of the different groupings in design space is clearly the result of extinction. This is clear if we consider the distribution of the fossil species (black dots) that often occur between the clusters of living species (colored dots).

So how did plant body plan diversity evolve?

Overall, the broad pattern is one of progressive exploration of new designs as a result of innovations that are usually associated with reproduction, like the embryo, spore, seed and flower. These represent the evolutionary solutions to the environmental challenges faced by plants in their progressive occupation of increasingly dry and challenging niches on the land surface. For example, the innovation of seeds allowed the plants that bear them to reproduce even in the absence of water.

Over geological time, these expansions occur as episodic pulses, associated with the emergence of these reproductive innovations. The drivers of plant anatomical evolution appear to be a combination of genomic potential and environmental opportunity.

Plant disparity suggests that the big bang is a bust

None of this fits with the expectation that evolutionary lineages start out innovative before becoming exhausted. Instead, it seems fundamental forms of plants have emerged hierarchically through evolutionary history, elaborating on the anatomical chassis inherited from their ancestors. They have not lost their capacity for innovation over the billion or more years of their evolutionary longevity.

So does that make plants different from animals, studies of which are the basis for the expectation of early evolutionary innovation and exhaustion? Not at all. Comparable studies that we have done on animals and fungi show that, when you study these multicellular kingdoms in their entirety, they all exhibit a pattern of episodically increasing anatomically variety. Individual lineages may soon exhaust themselves but, overall, the kingdoms keep on innovating.

This suggests a general pattern for evolutionary innovation in multicellular kingdoms and also that animals, fungi and plants still have plenty of evolutionary juice in their tanks. Let's hope we're still around to see what innovation arises next.

More information: James W. Clark et al, Evolution of phenotypic disparity in the plant kingdom, Nature Plants (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41477-023-01513-x

Journal information: Nature Plants 

NEW BRUNSWICK

City of Saint John faces potential strike by inside workers

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Union local says it gave city until midnight Monday night to resume talks

Vanessa Moreau · CBC News · Posted: Sep 09, 2023 

The City of Saint John has received notice of a potential strike by members of CUPE Local 486, representing employees in largely administrative and support roles across various departments. (Julia Wright/CBC file photo)

The union local representing many of the administrative, support, IT and technical employees of the City of Saint John has given the city notice of its intention to strike.

According to Mike Davidson, CUPE's national servicing representative, Local 486 gave the city until Monday at midnight to return to bargaining in order to avoid a work stoppage.

He said 94 per cent of the membership voted in favour of a strike in a dispute that is largely over wages.

Local 486 represents just under 140 workers in various municipal departments that include emergency dispatch, court services, recreation, bylaw enforcement and financial services.

The City of Saint John and the Saint John Board of Police Commissioners have released a statement claiming their wage offer balances fairness and responsibility to employees and taxpayers.

They say their offer is in line with their wage escalation policy, which Local 486 representatives dispute.

Union representatives Bill Neil, Mike Davidson, Brittany Doyle, Monic MacVicar, Lisa Chiasson and Cheryl McConkey are shown at a press conference last week. (Submitted by Mike Davidson)

"This wage escalation policy was part of the sustainability plan for the City of Saint John," said Davidson. "And that wage escalation policy basically had a promise that when the finances of the City of Saint John improved, they would share that with the employees and unfortunately, now they're trying to renege on that promise."

But the statement from the city says its wage proposal "is fair and reasonable and fully compliant with Council's Wage Escalation Policy."

The wage escalation policy was a policy implemented by the city in 2019 to control the fact that its costs had been outpacing revenue growth.

The city says it has contingency plans in place, though the public may experience delays in police response to non-emergency situations. It says it remains optimistic an agreement can be reached, according to the statement.

Davidson said the union is hopeful that a strike can still be avoided, but said the city is more focused on contingency plans than negotiating an agreement.

The two sides have been deadlocked since mid-August 

Mike Davidson is a CUPE servicing representative and said the biggest sticking point between Local 486 and the City of Saint John is wages. (Submitted by Mike Davidson)

Monique LaGrange removed as Alberta Catholic School Trustees’ Association director

By Destiny Meilleur & Emily Mertz  Global News

Posted September 8, 2023 

LaGrange’s account that showed two images: one of a group of children holding Nazi flags with swastikas, the other: a group of children holding rainbow Pride flags.

Above the images were the words “brainwashing is brainwashing.”

View image in full screen

A recent story shared online from the account of Monique LaGrange included an old black and white photo of smiling children leaning out a window waving Nazi flags with the swastikas on them.A more modern photo directly beneath it shows young children in a classroom holding up homemade Pride rainbow flags.The caption reads: “Brainwashing is brainwashing.”. Supplied to Global News

“Our Catholic schools love all students as gifts from God made in His image, irrespective of their sexual orientation and gender expression,” Salm said in the statement.

The Alberta Catholic School Trustees’ Association added that “removing a representative from our board is not something we take lightly” but LaGrange’s post was “unbecoming of an (Alberta Catholic School Trustees’ Association) director.”

Global News has reached out to LaGrange for a statement and will update this article if/when we get a response.

Earlier this week, the Alberta Teachers’ Association called for LaGrange, a Red Deer Catholic school trustee, to resign or face sanctions over the post, which ATA president Jason Schilling called hate speech.

In a news release sent Wednesday afternoon, Red Deer Catholic Regional Schools (RDCRS) said it held a special board meeting on Tuesday to discuss LaGrange’s conduct.

The board said it was writing to the minister of education “as to the dismissal of Trustee (Monique) LaGrange.”

For its part, Alberta Education said the board has the ability to disqualify a trustee.

“This matter is currently in front of the board, who has full authority and autonomy to disqualify a sitting trustee, Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides said Wednesday in a statement to Global News.

“The board has indicated that they are seeking advice on the code of conduct, and then will proceed accordingly. The board has assured me that they will handle this in a quick and effective manner.”

1:45Alberta Teachers’ Association wants Red Deer trustee to resign after ‘hateful post’

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