CONSERVATION NEWS

CONSERVATION NEWS The latest national and international news from the conservation world, compiled by Tim Clabon

IRISH NEWS

Ireland’s first dedicated

wildlife hospital

Ireland’s first dedicated wildlife hospital has been set up by Wildlife Rehabilitation Ireland (WRI) on a large site behind the Tara na Rí pub at Garlow Cross in Navan, Co Meath. Doors opened for their first casualties on Friday 19th February and according to Dan Donoher, Animal Manager, their first casualties were three young swans, a buzzard, an otter and a fox.

The first patient seen was a vixen from Tipperary who had been hit by a car. She had an injury to her front right leg. She was seen by the vet, bandaged and stayed for three weeks to recuperate. I'm delighted to say she was a great patient and returned to freedom just yesterday.

“The most common injuries are from road traffic accidents, collisions with overhead wires and fencing, attacks from cats and dogs and unfortunately, incidents of crimes against wildlife are still all too common. The new WRI Wildlife Hospital will initially cater for around five hundred patients a month and will cost approximately €140,000 per annum to run,” says Mr. Donoher.

Aoife McPartlin of WRI said: “We believe that the rehabilitation of our native wildlife is crucial to protecting our environment. By removing an animal from its habitat the delicate natural balance changes, thus impacting not only on the surrounding environment, but all the way up to ourselves. This is what makes our work so important.”

Aoife went on to say there is another important element to what WRI are doing at the hospital and that is in relation to positive mental health. People who have experienced job loss during the pandemic and as a result, depression, have offered their services and have described being able to help on such a positive project as benefiting them greatly. WRI has also recently teamed up with Praxis Care who supports young adults with mental ill health, autism and learning difficulties.

The overall aim is to build a Teaching & Rehabilitation Hospital where WRI can teach not only vets how to care for and treat native wildlife, but also members of the public on how to recognise and help these animals. It will also include a visitor and education centre with shop, café, playground and exhibition area.

The hospital can take all species of native wildlife, from anywhere in Ireland, thanks to a nationwide team of volunteers. As they are not funded, WRI relies heavily on donations to run the hospital to the highest possible standard. You can donate to Ireland’s only Wildlife Hospital through its Go Fund Me page, via its website www.wri.ie, on its Facebook page, through Paypal and of course in all the other traditional ways.

INTERNATIONAL NEWS

Current Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation weakest in last millennium

Researchers from Ireland, Britain and Germany have found that the Gulf Stream System (also known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, AMOC) is at its weakest in over a millennium, demonstrating a link with human-caused climate change.

Researchers, including those based at ICARUS Climate Research Centre at Maynooth University in Co. Kildare, compiled data taken from archived ocean sediments or ice cores reaching back hundreds of years to reconstruct the flow history of the Gulf Stream System.

They found consistent evidence that its slowdown in the 20th century is unprecedented in the last millennium and probably linked to humancaused climate change. The Gulf Stream System is different from the more familiar Gulf Stream, with which it overlaps. It works like an oceanic conveyor belt moving warm surface water up north from the equator and sending deeper, lower salinity cold water from the north back down south. This system is important as it contributes to the mild winter climate typical in Western Europe

Up to now a robust picture about its long-term development was missing. Lead author of the study, Dr Levke Caesar from Maynooth University, said: “Instead of relying just on one data set, we used a combination of several different and largely independent proxy indicators to reconstruct the evolution of the AMOC over the past 1600 years.” The data showed that until the late 19th century, the AMOC was relatively stable. After the Little Ice Age around 1850 ocean currents began to decline, followed by a second more drastic decline since the mid-20th century. “We used a combination of “We used a combination of three different types of data to obtain information about the ocean currents: temperature patterns in the Atlantic Ocean, subsurface water mass properties and deep-sea sediment grain sizes, dating back from 100 to dating back from 100 to c. 1,600 years. While the c. 1,600 years. While the individual proxy data is imperfect in representing the AMOC evolution, the combination of them revealed a robust picture of the overturning circulation,” says Dr Caesar.

The slowdown of AMOC has long been predicted as a response to global warming, according to a number of studies. This is likely the reason for the observed weakening of AMOC. The process driving the Atlantic overturning is what scientists call deep water formation, triggered by the differences in the density of the ocean water: warm, salty water moves from the south to the north where it cools down and gets denser. When it is heavy enough, the water sinks to the deeper ocean layers and flows back south.

Due to global warming, freshwater from sea ice reduction, Greenland Ice Sheet runoff and increased precipitation as well as enhanced buoyancy from local surface warming are diluting the waters of the northern Atlantic by making the surface ocean warmer and fresher, which means it is less dense. This prevents the deepwater formation and weakens the flow of the AMOC. The weakening has also been linked to a unique substantial cooling of the subpolar North Atlantic over the past hundred years. This so-called ‘cold blob’ was predicted by climate models as a result of a weakening AMOC, which transports less heat into this region. In Europe, a further slowdown of the AMOC could imply more extreme weather events like a change of the winter storm track coming off the Atlantic, possibly intensifying them. Other studies found possible consequences being extreme heat waves or a decrease in summer rainfall. Exactly what the further consequences are is the subject of current research.

Dr Caesar explains: “As the current weakens, less heat is being transported into this region. Of course, the yearly variations of the sea temperatures are also influenced by the atmosphere, but the weaker Gulf Stream System sets kind of a long-term cooling trend for this region (which is even more pronounced when we compare it to the general global warming trend).”

“If we continue to drive global warming, the Gulf Stream System will weaken further - by 34 to 45% by 2100 according to the latest generation of climate models,” concludes Prof Stefan Rahmstorf from Potsdam University, Germany. “This could bring us dangerously close to the tipping point at which the flow becomes unstable.”

Shown are the linear trend of sea surface temperatures (SST) divided by the global mean SST trend (to assess which regions warm faster and slower than the global mean, respectively). The trends in the sea surface temperatures show one outstanding region of below-average warming (normalised trend <1) and even cooling (<0) in the subpolar North Atlantic. Another striking feature is an above-average warming in the vicinity of the Gulf Stream, which in some regions is enhanced by a factor of four to five over the global mean warming (which is also linked to the weaker Gulf Stream System).