environmental science research for everyone
Echoing Charles Darwin’s study of Galapagos finches, biologists in Great Britain have found that the size of birds’ beaks is adapted to help them eat certain types of food. But unlike Darwin’s finches, the British food sources influencing bird evolution aren’t natural features of the environment. They’re backyard bird feeders.
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Swimmers, boaters, and fishing enthusiasts care about keeping our lakes healthy. As climate and patterns of land development change, scientists are diving into the challenge of understanding how these interacting forces impact water quality. In a recently published paper, researchers assembled a database of thousands of lakes across the northeastern United States to address this question. They found that water quality has remained surprisingly stable over the past twenty years.
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Excess nutrients from pet waste and lawn fertilizer contribute to degraded water quality in cities. Due to the widely dispersed nature of these pollutants in residential areas, decisions made at the household level can go a long way towards solving—or exacerbating—water quality problems.
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