environmental science research for everyone
Depending on where you live, springtime pollen allergies can be as reliable as April showers. Researchers at the University of Iowa have found that even though rain might decrease the pollen count, it can still exacerbate pollen allergies, due to an increase in grain rupture.
Read moreIn a recent study using crowd-sourced data, Harvard researchers found that National Park visitors may increasingly visit the parks at the wrong time and the small window when most of the wildflowers bloom. At Mount Rainier National Park, early snowmelt means the plants flower before the majority of tourists visit the park. With climate change, these timing mismatches will become more common, however small changes to human behavior may put the flowers and and the humans that admire them back in sync.
Read moreStudy finds more than 300 plant species growing out of the sidewalks of a single city.
Read more“The need for public education about bats, including their positive and negative impacts, is urgent and vital to their conservation.” (Zhao 2020)
Read moreScience predicts that climate change will disrupt many natural processes and cycles and there is ever increasing media coverage regarding expectations for Earth’s future under these pressures. Yet there is little popular discussion about how plant communities will be impacted by these changes despite the fact that they represent the first level of the food web, support entire ecosystems of species, and contain one of the only organisms that can capture free energy to produce life. Understanding the ways that these communities are changing and will change in the future is crucially important to seeing the full picture of how climate change will re-shape life as we know it.
Read moreGenetic diversity is an important, but overlooked, aspect of the conservation of endangered and threatened species. How is the genetic diversity of a tiny, threatened plant influenced by its basic biology?
Read moreFacing declining populations worldwide, bees may have found an unlikey refuge in urban gardens.
Read moreIn the age of the sixth extinction, we need to think carefully about how we use our land– especially when different land uses are at odds. As a way to advance conservation, researchers in Israel examined “land sharing” of rangelands: a way of using land to benefit agriculture and biodiversity alike.
Read moreSounds are everywhere in nature, and are important communication tools for many organisms. Plants may not be the first organisms you’d think of that would rely on sound to assess their environment, but new research shows that flowers can respond to the sound of a nearby buzzing bee by producing sweetened nectar, likely an adaptation that lets them avoid “wasting” resources on nectar production in the absence of hungry pollinators.
Read more“Monarch butterflies do really well on the exotic milkweed species that’s being widely sold and planted under current environmental conditions. But under warmer conditions, the exotic plant becomes too toxic and monarchs become less healthy.”
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