Ambitious European project hopes to navigate uncertain funding future.

The sea squirt could become a top model organism at Europe’s new marine biology centre.

Sometimes good ideas take a while to be picked up. In 1872, Anton Dohrn, a pioneering German biologist, wrote a commentary in Nature proposing the foundation of “a net of scientific stations” along European coasts, focusing on marine biology (A. Dohrn Nature 5, 277–280; 1872 ). Almost 140 years later, an institute that bears Dohrn’s name is leading a twenty-first-century realization of his idea.

The European Marine Biological Resource Centre (EMBRC) will launch this week at a meeting in Naples, Italy, with the Anton Dohrn Zoological Station in Naples (SZN) taking the lead. Linking 15 existing research centres in 8 countries (see ‘Marine network’), the project will create an overarching organization for European research on marine biology, and provide model organisms for studying fundamental molecular biology and for screening drug candidates, for example. But the project has yet to secure the ambitious budget needed to realize its full potential. Read more

A dearth of data on water resources is holding up improved management practices.

Colin Chartres. International Water Management Institute

If current trends continue, global annual water usage is set to increase by more than 2 trillion cubic metres by 2030, rising to 6.9 trillion cubic metres: 40% more than can be provided by available water supplies.

Without immediate action to improve the monitoring and management of existing water resources, and in particular to reform water use in agriculture, the world will face a water crisis.

But researchers at the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) in Battaramulla, Sri Lanka, have come up with plan for averting disaster1. Nature asked Colin Chartres, director of the IWMI and a co-author of the plan, how to avoid running out of water. Read more

Study warns of threats to water security and biodiversity in the world’s rivers.

Only isolated parts of the Amazon have low levels of threat to water security and biodiversity.

Nearly 80% of the world’s population — 4.8 billion people as calculated in 2000 — live in areas experiencing a high level of threats to human water security or biodiversity.

Water-management strategies aimed at improving human water security, such as building dams to provide access to water-starved regions, often detrimentally affects wildlife that also depends on freshwater resources, such as migrating fish.

But a study published in Nature today is the first to consider factors affecting both human water security and biodiversity in its analysis of threats to global freshwater resources, such as pollution and the density of dams1.

“If you analyse water-security issues from both a human and biodiversity perspective, you find that the threats are shared and pandemic. Even rich countries, which you would expect to be good stewards of water, have some of the most stressed and threatened areas,” says Charles Vörösmarty, a civil engineer at the City University of New York, one of the lead investigators of the analysis. Read more

Spinosaurs’ semi-aquatic habits helped them coexist with tyrannosaurs.

Spinosaurs may have spent much of their lives in water. Marc Simonetti

Researchers have found evidence of dinosaurs that spent much of their time in water. The discovery, made by analysing oxygen isotopes found in the fossils of a spinosaur that fed on fish, shows how the dinosaur might have coexisted with other large predators such as tyrannosaurs.

The results, published in Geology by Romain Amiot at the University of Lyon in France and a team of colleagues, show that dinosaurs were not in fact restricted to land as had been previously thought1. Water-dwelling animals such as Plesiosaurus and Ichthyosaurus, which although dinosaur-like in appearance, are not part of the dinosaurian lineage.

Baryonyx walkeri, from the spinosaur family, had a long, crocodile-like skull littered with iconic cone-shaped teeth. When it was found, theories swirled that with piercing teeth, rather than the serrated teeth so often found in closely related meat eaters such as Tyrannosaurus rex, and a long snout, the dinosaur was a fish feeder. Read more

Mysterious changes in the stratosphere may have offset greenhouse effect.

A loss of water vapour from the Earth’s stratosphere may have been behind the last decade being cooler than expected.NASA

A puzzling drop in the amount of water vapour high in the Earth’s atmosphere is now on the list of possible culprits causing average global temperatures to flatten out over the past decade, despite ever-increasing greenhouse-gas emissions.

Although the decade spanning 2000 to 2009 ranks as the warmest on record, average temperatures largely levelled off following two decades of rapid increases. Researchers have previously eyed everything from the Sun and oceans to random variability in order to explain the pause, which sceptics have claimed shows that climate models are unreliable.

Now a team led by researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Boulder, Colorado, report that a mysterious 10% drop in water vapour in the stratosphere — the atmospheric layer that sits 10–50 kilometres above Earth’s surface — since 2000 could have offset the expected warming due to greenhouse gases by roughly 25%. Just as intriguingly, their model suggests that an increase in stratospheric water vapour might have boosted earlier warming by about 30% in the 1980s and 1990s. Read more