Japan will go ahead with its annual whale hunt in Antarctica while boosting security to guard against possible harassment by environmental protesters, the agriculture and fisheries minister said Tuesday.

"Japan will conduct the research whaling while strengthening measures against acts of sabotage, including dispatching Fisheries Agency escort ships," said Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Minister Michihiko Kano.

In February, Japan for the first time cut short its Antarctic fleet mission for the 2010-2011 season by one month, when it had taken only one fifth of its planned catch, citing interference from Sea Shepherd's vessels.

The weather in Pennsylvania this year won't soon be forgotten -- one of the wettest springs ever, followed by a record-breaking dry heat wave in July, followed by the remnants of a hurricane and tropical storm in August and September that caused historic flooding.

But it turns out the extreme weather conditions may not cause a less brilliant foliage display this autumn, according to a forest expert in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences. Ironically, the climate extremes may not be so much to blame as what is happening now, explained Marc Abrams, professor of forest ecology and physiology.

The Obama administration is taking steps to extend new federal protections to a list of imperiled animals and plants that reads like a manifest for Noah's Ark - from the melodic golden-winged warbler and slow-moving gopher tortoise, to the slimy American eel and tiny Texas kangaroo rat.

Compelled by a pair of recent legal settlements, the effort in part targets species that have been mired in bureaucratic limbo even as they inch toward potential extinction.

Species' ability to overcome adversity goes beyond Darwin's survival of the fittest. Climate change has made sure of that. In a new study based on simulations examining species and their projected range, researchers at Brown University argue that whether an animal can make it to a final, climate-friendly destination isn't a simple matter of being able to travel a long way. It's the extent to which the creatures can withstand rapid fluctuations in climate along the way that will determine whether they complete the journey.

A paper by researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS), James Cook University and Mongabay.com, which was published in Trends in Ecology & Evolution in early August, showed that although large-scale biodiversity declines are ongoing, certain conservation actions have made a positive difference.

This paper was led by the late Professor Navjot Sodhi of NUS, a renowned conservation ecologist who, more than anyone, understood the dismal outlook of conservation, having focused much of his career highlighting the biodiversity crisis.

The two most important recreational fisheries off Southern California have collapsed, according to a new study led by a researcher from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

Scripps postdoctoral researcher Brad Erisman and his colleagues examined the health of regional populations of barred sand bass and kelp bass-staple catches of Southern California's recreational fishing fleet-by combining information from fishing records and other data on regional fish populations. Stocks of both species have collapsed due to a combination of overfishing of their breeding areas and changes in oceanographic conditions, the researchers found.

Researchers have found that a species invasion that starts at the upstream edge of its range may have a major advantage over downstream competitors, at least in environments with a strong prevailing direction of water or wind currents.

Scientists from the University of Georgia, University of New Hampshire, Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and University of Vermont studied populations of European green crab, Carcinus maenas. The species was introduced to the East Coast of North America twice, at both the upper and lower edges of its range.

The temperate forests of Canada or Northern Europe may have much more in common with the tropical rainforests of Southeast Asia or South America than commonly believed, according to a research group led by a University of British Columbia ecologist.

The assertion, published today in the journal Science, is focused on the concept of “beta-diversity” – a measure of the change in species composition between two sites, such as neighboring patches of forest. High beta-diversity means that two given sites have few species in common.

For decades, ecologists have toiled to nail down principles explaining why some habitats have many more plant and animal species than others.

Much of this debate is focused on the idea that the number of species is determined by the productivity of the habitat.Shouldn't a patch of prairie contain a different number of species than an arid steppe or an alpine tundra?

Maybe not, says an international team of scientists that pooled its resources to re-evaluate the relationship between species numbers and habitat productivity.

Kenyan rangers Thursday began relocating 50 rampaging elephants back to the renowned Maasai Mara game reserve to stem rising human deaths and property destruction in outlying villages.

The first four of the elephants due to be relocated over the next 10 days were shot with tranquilizer darts from a helicopter near Narok town, some 150 kilometres (90 miles) south of Nairobi, a notorious zone for human-wildlife conflict.

Once the giant animals fell asleep, conservationists carefully winched them up by crane onto trucks for the journey to the Maasai Mara, from where they had been cut off by widening settlement, increasing farming and deforestation.