Feature Article

The subject of the ‘mixed bag’, which proposes non-Bt-cotton seeds be mixed with Bt-cotton seeds in the same bag, has raised an interesting debate in this journal. It was flagged by Hanur, who recommended that the mixed bag should be allowed in India. He made this proposal pointing out that the extent of adoption of structured refuge in this country was unsatisfactory. Later, Muralimohan and Srinivasa conveyed their reservations against the recommendation.

Of the West Antarctic ice shelves, those in the Amundsen Sea sector have given the most cause for concern. Ocean modelling of the Weddell Sea region, together with a detailed survey of the ice bed morphology, indicates that this region, too, may change soon.

German pharmaceutical company Bayer AG has formally lodged a challenge against a landmark Indian ruling that allowed a domestic generic drug-maker to produce a low-cost version of an anti-cancer drug for the Indian market. The appeal was filed on Friday 4 May with India's Intellectual Property Appellate Board.

In the Neotropics the predominant pathway to intensify productivity is generally thought to be to convert grasslands to sown pastures, mostly in monoculture. This article examines how above-ground net primary productivity (ANPP) in semi-natural grasslands and sown pastures in Central America respond to rainfall by: (i) assessing the relationships between ANPP and accumulated rainfall and indices of rainfall distribution, (ii) evaluating the variability of ANPP between and within seasons, and (iii) estimating the temporal stability of ANPP.

The Supreme Court has stayed the Centre’s ambitious cheetah re-introduction project. The project initiated by the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests in 2010 aimed to bring the cheetah, which became extinct from India’s forests in 1952, back to the country.

Methane (CH4) uptake by steppe soils is affected by a range of specific factors and is a complex process. Increased stocking rate promotes steppe degradation, with unclear consequences for gas exchanges. To assess the effects of grazing management on CH4 uptake in desert steppes, we investigated soil-atmosphere CH4 exchange during the winter-spring transition period.

The Amazon is a globally important system, providing a host of ecosystem services from climate regulation to food sources. It is also home to a quarter of all global diversity. Large swathes of forest are removed each year, and many models have attempted to predict the spatial patterns of this forest loss. The spatial patterns of deforestation are determined largely by the patterns of roads that open access to frontier areas and expansion of the road network in the Amazon is largely determined by profit seeking logging activities.

Industrial agricultural plantations are a rapidly increasing yet largely unmeasured source of tropical land cover change. Here, we evaluate impacts of oil palm plantation development on land cover, carbon flux, and agrarian community lands in West Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo. With a spatially explicit land change/carbon bookkeeping model, parameterized using high-resolution satellite time series and informed by socioeconomic surveys, we assess previous and project future plantation expansion under five scenarios.