A year of big numbers startled the world into talking about nature
Some big numbers from nature made news in 2019. They were enough of a shock to get people talking about the dwindling diversity of plants, animals and other life on Earth, and what to do about it. 82019 Top 10See full list Some of that dramatic news came from the Amazon, where satellites picked up signs of a very active start to the annual fire season. The risk of a record-breaking season renewed worries about one of the richest reservoirs of biodiversity on Earth. In August alone, satellite-based imaging instruments called MODIS logged 11,516 detections of fire in the large, northwestern Brazilian state of Amazonas. The number isn’t individual fires, but the number of pixels, each measuring at least a square kilometer, containing fire activity, explains Louis Giglio of the University of Maryland in College Park, a specialist in detecting fires with remote instruments. (Higher numbers reported by some news outlets tallied detections from an instrument with smaller pixels.) As the fire season drew...