Soil Quality Under Pressure
Industrial agriculture could be putting the soil in a pinch.
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Environmental Science
Seaweeds Against Climate Change: How Algae Provide Us with Ecosystem Services
If you’ve ever been near the ocean, chances are you’ve had an involuntary encounter with seaweed. It’s slimy. It’s smelly. It’s just overall not pleasant—but that doesn’t mean it isn’t useful for both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. Here we’ll review some of the ecosystem services they provide so we can start looking past the inconvenience they represent and start appreciating them as the valuable organisms they are.
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What can Hawaiian Lava Tubes Teach Us about Life on Mars?
What do Hawaii and Mars have in common? They both might have suitable habitats for microbes that can survive the extreme conditions in space. Read on to learn about how scientists are using lava tubes from Hawaiian volcanoes to learn about how life might survive on Mars.
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Commuting to… pollinate? How bees are choosing fragmented sites to forage
Like social bees, solitary bees are important pollinators. How do they choose where to forage when their habitat is broken up?
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When Pests Infest – A new tool for identifying at-risk forests
Forests globally are facing threats from insect and pathogen outbreaks. In this battle, drought and unsustainable logging have weakened forests, making them more vulnerable to attacks by insects and pathogens. Luckily, scientists joined the fight and have developed a tool to help identify forests that are at risk. Still, the world’s forests are not out of the woods yet.
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Not All Forestry Is Equal: How High Retention Logging Might Protect the Understory
Retention logging is the practice of harvesting trees while leaving some fraction of the forest in place. Studies have shown that this type of logging speeds forest recovery and maintains forest habitat for animals. But studies mostly watched forests recover for only a few years, while forests can take decades to recover from deforestation. Does retention logging really help forest ecosystems in the long run?
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Treating Old Forests with New Tricks
Research directs how we can protect the recovery of the few remaining old-growth forests from the ground up.
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White, Woolly, and Worrisome: Detecting the Hemlock Woolly Adelgid with eDNA
Original article: Kirtane, A., Dietschler, N.J., Bittner, T.D., Lefebvre, M.B., Celis, S., O’Connor, K., Havill, N. and Whitmore, M.C., 2022.
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Citizen-Scientists Share Sky-High Shark Scenes
Drone footage of wildlife promotes collaboration between researchers and hobbyists
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“Remembering” Past Climates May Help Trees Survive in a Changing World
Tree growth rate can depend on both past and present environmental conditions. With increasingly frequent and intense droughts, the importance of this environmental “memory” for growth may be changing in two-needle piñon trees.
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