„Almost everyone returning to the Tatras for the first time after the windstorm has the same queasy reaction. The scale of destruction is difficult to describe; almost 13,000 hectares of forest were knocked down, about one-third of the total forest area in the mountains, with the belt of fallen trees stretching 60 kilometres long by [...]
The arrival of 2 alien intruders in the 1950s – the chainsaw and the caterpillar tractor – have perhaps made more impact than any other introduced species. Since then, the opening up of new roads has been a key factor changing Borneo. Roads not only provide access to commercially valuable trees, they also allow immigrant [...]
“Invasive alien species (IAS) are the second most significant threat to biodiversity after habitat loss. They are also capable of causing significant damage to human health and to the economy. The cost of controlling invasive alien species and repairing the harm they do in the EU is estimated at €12 billion annually. International Union for [...]
"If the bees disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man." Albert Einstein Biodiversity, including cultural plants, should be considered one of the most important natural resources for humankind. Biosphere [...]
The brown bear is the largest European beast, the king of our forests, most commonly found in the High and Low Tatras, the Little and the Great Fatra and the Muráň Plain. According to the census of 2015, there are 1240 bears in Slovakia, which is too much according to the hunters and not so [...]
Corals belong to the most famous cnidarian marine invertebrates around the world. They form compact colonies, which consist of many individual polyps sometimes secreting calcium carbonate skeleton (stony or hard corals) to protect fragile bodies. As sessile organisms with no medusa stage within their life cycle the hard coral colonies are anchored to a substrate and cannot [...]
In the district of Liptovský Mikuláš, in early May 2017, an extraordinary situation was declared because of the floods. This situation is repeated every year, only the affected localities differ. Often, however, the affected areas have one common feature: a major degradation of the landscape. The occurrence of floods is affected by a number of [...]
"Nobody knows how many trees have been logged in Slovakia over the last 20 years, but I'm probably right when I say that it was over 100 million. A lot of wood is exported abroad, burned because of subsidies for energy from biomass, huge areas were extracted because of subsidized new roads. So it is [...]
In many countries, including in the Czech Republic, the rivers are revitalized to their natural form. In Slovakia, we are still concretizing the rivers. At the beginning of 2017, the Office of the Public Defender of Rights examined the permitting procedure for construction of small hydropower plants (SHP). Ombudsman Jana Dubovcová found that authorities are [...]
The Black Book of Bioenergy presents that combustion of biomass generates greenhouse gas emissions and leads to a massive decline in biodiversity and destruction of ecosystems. The case study from Slovakia shows that wood energy production has increased by 72% in the last nine years. "In the middle of the 1990s, logging in Slovakia was [...]
