Feature Channels: Environmental Science

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Living mulch functions like mulch on any farm or garden except — it’s alive. No, it’s not out of the latest horror movie; living mulch is a system farmers can use to benefit both profits and the soil. While the system has been around for a while, scientists at the University of Georgia are making it more efficient and sustainable.

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Sprawling mines caused roughly 10% of Amazon deforestation between 2005 and 2015 - much higher than previous estimates. Roughly 90% of this deforestation occurred outside the mining leases granted by Brazil’s government.

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Two professors with Northern Arizona University’s Center for Bioengineering Innovation (CBI) and Department of Biological Sciences—environmental physiologist Loren Buck and ecotoxicologist Frank von Hippel—are working on a long-term research project studying the link between the toxic chemicals polluting St. Lawrence Island, Alaska, and the health of the island’s population.

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What began as a Twitter joke between two researchers has turned into a four-year, $2.5 million National Science Foundation grant to take 3-D digital scans of 20,000 museum vertebrate specimens and make them available to everyone online.

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Blood samples taken by first responders showed that individuals exposed to small amounts of oil from the spill suffered from hemolytic anemia—a condition that occurs when toxins enter the blood stream and damage red blood cells that carry oxygen to tissues.

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The Argonne-led Multiscale Coupled Urban Systems project will create a computational framework for urban developers and planners to evaluate integrated models of city systems and processes.

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Polysaccharides, commonly used in food products, may be used to absorb nitrates and phosphorus—and put the nutrients back in the field.

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As so often happens in science, UAH doctoral student Aaron Kaulfus was looking for something else when he realized his forest fire smoke research might be significant.

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Soil organisms are diverse, with characteristics that can astound. The Soil Science Society of America (SSSA) October 15 Soils Matter blog post explains which soil critters glow—and why.

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Surprisingly low concentrations of toxic chemicals – from fungicides to antidepressants – can change the way some aquatic creatures swim and feed, according to new research. In addition, depending on the cocktail of toxins they can produce unexpected results.

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A web-based tool recently developed by UC San Diego researchers under an NSF grant to perform data-driven predictive modeling and real-time tracking of fires has already been viewed about one million times and generated more than 115,000 unique visitors since the outbreak of numerous wildfires across Northern California late last weekend.

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(13 October 2017 — Adelaide) Former President of the Republic of Kiribati and Conservation International (CI) Distinguished Fellow Anote Tong will officially launch the Centre for Applied Conservation Science at the University of Adelaide today.

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Carbon dioxide measured by a NASA satellite pinpoints sources of the gas from human and volcanic activities, which may help monitor greenhouse gases responsible for climate change.

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In a paper forthcoming in the November issue of the journal Theriogenology, a team of researchers from UNC Charlotte and the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute (SCBI), announced the first successful drying and rehydration of domestic cat spermatozoa using a rapid microwave dehydration method.

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Financial losses could increase by more than 70 percent by 2100 if oceans warm at the worst-case-scenario rate predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, according to a new study. The study used hurricane modeling and information in FEMA's HAZUS database to reach its conclusions.

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A new class of plant-specific genes required for flowering control in temperate grasses is found.

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A team of researchers discovered persistent dry and warm biases in the central U.S. that was caused by poor modeling of atmospheric convective systems Their findings call for better calculations with global climate models.

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Most manure just sits around. Anaerobic digesters take those piles and place them in large covered tanks and convert waste into an energy source. Chemical engineers from Michigan Tech examined the carbon footprint of anaerobic digestion.

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With over 26 inches of rain and high winds in a 24-hour-span, engineering and facility management staff faced the biggest challenge of their career--keeping Hurricane Harvey at bay to protect the operations of Harris Health System's Ben Taub Hospital. They did in remarkable fashion.

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Viruses exist amidst all bacteria, usually in a 10-fold excess and include virophages which live in giant viruses and use their machinery to replicate and spread. In Nature Communications, a team including DOE JGI researchers reports effectively doubling the number of known virophages.

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Horses in less temperate zones may get some extra grazing. A new study shows warm-season annual grasses have good potential for use in horse pastures.

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The genetic material of Porphyra umbilicalis reveals the mechanisms by which it thrives in the stressful intertidal zone at the edge of the ocean.

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Kansas State University researchers are involved in a study that found climate change may reduce the growth and stature of big bluestem — a dominant prairie grass and a major forage grass for cattle.

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St. Mary’s College of Maryland students led by the Student Government Association collected nearly $14,000 in monetary donations and 9,816 non-perishable items currently being distributed by the Pasadena Independent School District in southeastern Texas.

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Energy from the sun and a block of wood smaller than an adult’s hand are the only components needed to heat water to its steaming point in these purifying devices.

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Different head shapes and different body sizes of hammerhead sharks should result in differences in their swimming performance right? Researchers from FAU have conducted the first study to examine the whole body shape and swimming kinematics of two closely related yet very different hammerhead sharks, with some unexpected results.

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.Hurricanes may have taken a big bite out of the U.S. pecan crop this year, but that’s not likely to stop the annual fall flurry of pies, candies, cheeses and other delicacies made with the popular native nut, officials said.

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A study of 300,000 children in 35 nations says kids whose watersheds have greater tree cover are less likely to experience diarrheal disease, the second leading cause of death for children under the age of five.

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University of Utah scientists have mapped the near-surface geology around Old Faithful, revealing the reservoir of heated water that feeds the geyser’s surface vent and how the ground shaking behaves in between eruptions. The map was made possible by a dense network of portable seismographs and by new seismic analysis techniques.

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The Conservation Finance Alliance (CFA) announced today that the French Facility for Global Environment / Fonds Français pour l'Environnement Mondial (FFEM) and the MAVA Foundation have jointly awarded 701,114 Euros (822,315 USD) to support CFA.

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New evidence suggests that the Trump Administration’s proposal to rescind the 2015 Waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule that would limit the scope of the Clean Water Act inappropriately overlooks wetlands-related values.

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An international team including DOE Joint Genome Institute researchers analyzed the genome sequence of the common liverwort (Marchantia polymorpha) to identify genes and gene families deemed crucial to plant evolution and have been conserved over millions of years and across plant lineages.

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The 2017 hurricane season has highlighted the critical need to communicate a storm's impact path and intensity accurately, but new research from the University of Utah shows significant misunderstandings of the two most commonly used storm forecast visualization methods. The study, published in Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, looked at summary displays and ensemble displays for communicating information about a hurricane.

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When a normally cold stream in Iceland was warmed, the make-up of life inside changed as larger organisms thrived while smaller ones struggled. The findings carry implications for life in a warming climate.

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During the four-year study, University of Notre Dame researchers will work to develop improved storm surge models that incorporate fine-scale data to increase the accuracy of forecasts, while also maintaining reduced computer time and reasonable computational costs.

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In Nature Methods, a team including DOE JGI researchers described the results of the Critical Assessment of Metagenome Interpretation (CAMI) Challenge, the first-ever, community-organized benchmarking assessment of computational tools for metagenomes.

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As China struggles to find ways to remedy the noxious haze that lingers over Beijing and other cities in the winter, researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology have cast serious doubt on one proposed cause: high levels of ammonia in the air.

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The Gulf of Mexico Alliance works across the region addressing issues of human, economic, and ecological resilience. Here, we share success stories from our partners. In no way do we want to diminish the long recovery ahead following Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria. But, however small they may be, we want to highlight things that worked.

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Global climate trend since Nov. 16, 1978: +0.13 C per decade