Feature Channels: Environmental Science

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A new study published in Nature Climate Change pinpoints the temperature increases caused by CO¬2 emissions in different regions around the world.

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The cost burden of Quebec’s carbon-pricing policy, is likely to be modest across income groups and industries, according to a McGill University research team.

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Researchers at Berkeley Lab and Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research develop and apply new method to determine whether specific climate impacts can be traced to human-caused emissions.

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UMD-led study indicates “biomass burning” may play larger role in climate change than previously realized.

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In one of the first tests of its kind, researchers use networks of camera traps to chart wildlife population changes, and find species faring well.

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Whether the vast Arctic will retain its icy past or might instead become a dry landscape could hinge on something of an obscure nature – permafrost – according to a new study that includes a Texas A&M University researcher.

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A new scientific journal article reports that carbon dioxide can emerge from the deep ocean in a surprising way — a new piece of the global carbon “puzzle” that researchers must solve to fully understand major issues like climate change.

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Around 720-640 million years ago, much of the Earth’s surface was covered in ice during a glaciation that lasted millions of years. Explosive underwater volcanoes were a major feature of this ‘Snowball Earth’, according to new research led by the University of Southampton.

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Coccolithophores—tiny calcifying plants that are part of the foundation of the marine food web—have been increasing in relative abundance in the North Atlantic over the last 45 years, as carbon input into ocean waters has increased. Their relative abundance has increased 10 times, or by an order of magnitude, during this sampling period.

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Study bolsters view that sustainable, productive ecosystems depend on maintaining biodiversity

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The low pressure area known as System 90L developed rapidly since Jan. 13 and became Hurricane Alex on Jan. 14. Several satellites and instruments captured data on this out-of-season storm. NASA's RapidScat instrument observed sustained winds shift and intensify in the system and NASA's Aqua satellite saw the storm develop from a low pressure area into a sub-tropical storm. NOAA's GOES-East satellite data was made into an animation that showed the development of the unusual storm.

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A new model developed by an international team including a University of Guelph researcher will help better understand and manage threatened ecosystems.

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A recently released study from WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society) details a new method using “detection dogs,” genetic analysis, and scientific models to assess habitat suitability for bears in an area linking the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) to the northern U.S. Rockies.

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A new study by WCS and other groups offers a glimmer of hope for some amphibian populations decimated by the deadly chytrid fungus.

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New insights into how phosphorus leaches into groundwater could help reduce its potential impact on water and the environment, a UF/IFAS scientist says. In a newly published study in the Vadoze Zone Journal, Gurpal Toor examined phosphorus that percolated into soils in Maryland and Delaware.

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A new University of Washington study finds that urban crops in Seattle could only feed between 1 and 4 percent of the city's population, even if all viable backyard and public green spaces were converted to growing produce.

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Results can help provide warning of red tide conditions in Florida’s coastal regions.

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University of Utah lab experiments found that when temperatures get warmer, woodrats suffer a reduced ability to live on their normal diet of toxic creosote – suggesting that global warming may hurt plant-eating animals.

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The Greenland Ice Sheet is the second largest ice sheet in the world and it’s melting rapidly, likely driving almost a third of global sea level rise. A new study shows clouds are playing a larger role in that process than scientists previously believed.

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More people in Europe are dying than are being born, according to a new report co-authored by a Texas A&M University demographer. In contrast, births exceed deaths, by significant margins, in Texas and elsewhere in the U.S., with few exceptions.

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Using web samples from black widow spiders fed with crickets, researchers at the University of Notre Dame have successfully used DNA samples to identify both the spider and the species of its prey. Such noninvasive sampling to obtain genetic information could have practical implications in several fields including conservation research and pest management.

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A team of University of Oregon scientists is home after a month-long cruise in the eastern Mediterranean, but this was no vacation. The focus was the plumbing system of magma underneath the island of Santorini, formed by the largest supervolcanic eruption in the past 10,000 years.

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A UC Davis scientist flying in a pollution-detecting airplane provided the first, and so far only, estimates of methane emissions spewing from the Aliso Canyon Natural Gas Storage Facility in Southern California since the leak began on Oct. 23, 2015.

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Extreme rain events fueled by the current strong El Nino have started to affect California. NASA estimated rainfall over a period of 7 days while NASA/NOAA's GOES Project created a satellite animation showing the storms affecting the region over the past three days.

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The Paris climate summit ended last year with landmark national commitments for greenhouse gas reductions, but much of the hard work of reducing emissions will fall on cities to change their residents’ behavior.

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While Dungeness crab captured headlines, record levels of the neurotoxin domoic acid were found in a range of species, and the toxin showed up in new places.

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The Galápagos Islands have long offered researchers a natural laboratory in which to study unique volcanic features and a diverse population of native plants and animals.

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This semester, 14 University of Virginia architecture and landscape architecture undergraduate and graduate students spent 10 days on Norwegian Arctic islands 800 miles north of the Arctic Circle, learning how to design for a harsh, dynamic environment that many see as the next great frontier of development.

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As delegates from 195 nations meet in Paris to debate mankind’s response to global climate change, scientists from the University of Kansas and Rothamsted Research in England today issue a study of a major crop pest that underlines how “climate is changing in more ways than just warming.”

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Advocates of huge hydroelectric dam projects on the Amazon, Congo, and Mekong rivers often overestimate economic benefits and underestimate far-reaching effects on biodiversity, according to an article in the Jan. 8 issue of Science.

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University of Delaware researchers have used underwater robotics to better understand foraging competition between Adelie and Gentoo penguins.

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Global Temperature Report: December 2015

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Outdated land management practices, a dearth of local decision-making bodies with real powers, a lack of long-term planning, along with long-standing educational and financial disempowerment and marginalization are among the hurdles the prevent Arctic communities from adapting to climate change, says a McGill-led research team. But Arctic communities inherently have the capacity to adapt to significant climate change.

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Some corals may cope with climate change by changing markings on their DNA to modify what the DNA produces.

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Since 2014, the Urban Canid Project has heavily emphasized outreach and public engagement in the study of Madison’s foxes and coyotes. Its goal is to understand more about these city-dwelling relatives of dogs and help us all peacefully coexist. So far, its efforts have met success.

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The first national study to map U.S. wild bees suggests they’re disappearing in many of the country’s most-important farmlands.

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In an analysis of more than 1,000 chemicals in fluids used in and created by hydraulic fracturing (fracking), Yale School of Public Health researchers found that many of the substances have been linked to reproductive and developmental health problems, and the majority had undetermined toxicity due to insufficient information.

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Scientists hoping to help stem the rate of unsustainable hunting in West and Central Africa have developed two monitoring indicators based in part on methods used to track populations trends of organisms in an entirely different ecosystem: the sea.

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Scientists from the Mechanobiology Institute, Singapore at the National University of Singapore have discovered the universal building blocks that cells use to form initial connections with the surrounding environment. These early adhesions have a consistent size of 100 nanometres, are made up of a cluster of around 50 integrin proteins and are the same even when the surrounding surface is hard or soft. Deciphering the universal nature of adhesion formation may reveal how tumour cells sense and migrate on surfaces of different rigidity, which is a hallmark of metastasis, the devastating ability of cancer to spread throughout the body.

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Scientists and veterinarians working for WCS’s New York Aquarium have discovered something noteworthy in the near shore waters of Long Island’s Great South Bay: a nursery ground for the sand tiger shark, a fearsome-looking but non-aggressive fish.

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An NCAR-led team of scientists is launching a series of research flights this month over the remote Southern Ocean in an effort to better understand just how much carbon dioxide the icy waters are able to lock away.

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A National University of Singapore study identified the rapid expansion of rice agriculture in Myanmar, as well as sustained conversion of mangroves to oil palm plantations in Malaysia and Indonesia, as increasing and under-recognised threats to mangrove ecosystems in Southeast Asia. This is the first study to systematically quantify the conversion of mangroves to different land use types in the region and identify the key drivers of mangrove deforestation over the last decade.

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New research has found the Greenland ice sheet is rapidly losing the ability to buffer its contribution to rising sea levels.

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University of Delaware researchers Danielle Dixson and Rohan Brooker have found that butterflyfish avoid coral that has come in contact with seaweed. It is the first study to evaluate how coral-seaweed interactions affect coral associated reef fishes, a key component of coral reef resilience.

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Precise reconstruction of regional climate changes in the past.

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Potting soils not “soils at all” explains soil scientist