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  1. Blackcaps typically visit Britain and Ireland during the spring and summer months to breed before migrating south to wintering areas in the Mediterranean. But, a study from Oxford University, the British Trust for Ornithology and the Max Planck Institute, has found the small warblers have expanded their wintering range northward across Europe and are now frequently found in Britain and Ireland in the winter months.

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  2. Most of the food areas of the Mediterranean and Atlantic seabirds are in the spaces of the Spanish Network of Marine Protected Areas (RAMPE), which gathers several protection figures for the conservation of the marine natural heritage. However, there are areas with no protection figures –such as the Gulf of Mazarrón, and the coasts of the Barcelona province area– which are determining for species such as the European storm petrel and the Balearic shearwater, respectively.

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  3. Since 1993, 15 species of bird and mammal are thought to have gone extinct, including China's Yangtze river dolphin and the Pernambuco pygmy owl from Brazil. But these recent examples are a tiny fraction of what scientists estimate could disappear in the lifetimes of people living today. One million species spanning the full diversity of life on Earth are at risk of extinction.

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  4. Avian brood parasites lay their eggs in the nests of other bird species, forcing the hosts to do the hard work of raising the unrelated young. A team of scientists wanted to simulate the task of piercing an egg—a tactic that only a minority of host birds use to help grasp and eject the foreign eggs. Their study offers insight into some of the physical challenges the discriminating host birds face.

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  5. Ensuring sustainability of crop and timber production would mitigate the greatest drivers of terrestrial wildlife decline, responsible for 40% of the overall extinction risk of amphibians, birds and mammals, according to a paper published today in Nature Ecology & Evolution. These results were generated using a new metric which, for the first time, allows business, governments and civil society to assess their potential contributions to stemming global species loss, and can be used to calculate national, regional, sector-based, or institution-specific targets. The work was led by the IUCN Species Survival Commission's Post-2020 Taskforce, hosted by Newcastle University (UK), in collaboration with scientists from 54 institutions in 21 countries around the world.

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  6. Researchers at the University of Konstanz and Max Planck Institute for Animal Behavior in Germany have found that birds are able to change their culture to become more efficient. Populations of great tits were able to switch from one behavior to a better alternative when their group members were slowly replaced with new birds. Published today as open access in the journal Current Biology, this research reveals immigration as a powerful driver of cultural change in animal groups that could help them to adapt to rapidly changing environments.

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  7. A growing body of evidence suggests that biodiversity loss increases our exposure to both new and established zoonotic pathogens. Restoring and protecting nature is essential to preventing future pandemics. So reports a new Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) paper that synthesizes current understanding about how biodiversity affects human health and provides recommendations for future research to guide management.

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  8. Piping plover breeding groups in the Northern Great Plains are notably connected through movements between habitats and show lower reproductive rates than previously thought, according to a new U.S. Geological Survey study. These new findings point to a need for further studies and suggest the species may show a higher extinction risk than currently presumed.

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  9. Contrary to popular belief, the number of Egyptian vultures dying in Eastern Europe and the Middle East is greater than in sub-Saharan Africa; and half of these disappear due to threats of human origin: electrocution, collision with energy infrastructures, direct persecution or poisoning. This is shown in an article published in the Journal of Animal Ecology with the participation of the Cavanilles Institute of the University of Valencia.

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  10. The higher the number of plant and bird species in a region, the healthier the people who live there. This was found by a new study published in Landscape and Urban Planning and led by the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre (SBiK-F) and the Christian Albrechts University (CAU) in Kiel. The researchers found that, in particular, mental health and higher species diversity are positively related, whereas a similar relationship between plant or bird species and physical health could not be proven.

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