Feature Channels: Environmental Science

• share
• favorite_border

A team of Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC) scientists created maps of habitat corridors connecting protected areas in the tropics to incorporate biodiversity co-benefits into climate change mitigation strategies. Drs. Patrick Jantz, Scott Goetz, and Nadine Laporte describe their findings in an article entitled, “Carbon stock corridors to mitigate climate change and promote biodiversity in the tropics,” available online in the journal Nature Climate Change on January 26.

• share
• favorite_border

• share
• favorite_border

• share
• favorite_border

Researchers from UT and the University of Arizona, Tucson, studied how forces such as volatile market conditions and technological substitutes affect the value of pest control services provided by Mexican free-tailed bats on cotton production in the U.S. They found the services are impacted by the forces to the tune of millions of dollars.

• share
• favorite_border

A new comprehensive modeling assessment of contamination in the Athabasca Oil Sands Region indicates that officially reported emissions of certain highly hazardous air pollutants have been greatly underestimated.

• share
• favorite_border

One of the biggest threats to critically endangered leatherback turtles is bycatch from industrial fishing in the open oceans. Now, a team of researchers has satellite-tracked 135 leatherbacks with transmitters to determine the turtles’ patterns of movement in the Pacific Ocean. Combined with fisheries data, the researchers entered the information into a computer model to predict bycatch hotspots in the Pacific.

• share
• favorite_border

Dialing in the accuracy of satellite weather forecasting is the goal behind basic research into raindrop size and shape being done at The University of Alabama in Huntsville by a UAH doctoral student who is also an atmospheric scientist in the NASA Pathways Intern Employment Program.

• share
• favorite_border

A research team led by Wayne State University, in collaboration with Michigan State University, has identified a single gene in honeybees that separates the queens from the workers. The scientists unraveled the gene’s inner workings and published the results in the current issue of Biology Letters. The gene, which is responsible for leg and wing development, plays a crucial role in the evolution of bees’ ability to carry pollen.

• share
• favorite_border

Honeybee health continues to be a serious concern for beekeepers, fruit and vegetable growers, almond producers, and researchers. As the debate about pesticide use continues, Mississippi farmers and beekeepers, along with other stakeholders, have developed a voluntary program of cooperative standards called the Mississippi Honey Bee Stewardship Program.

• share
• favorite_border

A team of researchers at the University of Delaware has developed a highly selective catalyst capable of electrochemically converting carbon dioxide — a greenhouse gas — to carbon monoxide with 92 percent efficiency. The carbon monoxide then can be used to develop useful chemicals. The researchers recently reported their findings in Nature Communications.

• share
• favorite_border

Mollusk researchers at Virginia Tech in the United States and at the Freshwater Fisheries Research Center in Wuxi, China, are promoting freshwater mussel conservation and develop more robust and productive pearl-producing Chinese mussels.

• share
• favorite_border

A group of researchers focused on sustainable practices, geography and earth sciences found something unexpected during their work in Central America: the effects of drug trafficking are leaving deep scars on a sensitive landscape.

• share
• favorite_border

Add yet another threat to the list of problems facing the rapidly disappearing rainforests of Central America: drug trafficking.

• share
• favorite_border

A “one-size-fits-all” model to predict the effects of climate change on savanna vegetation isn’t as effective as examining individual savannas by continent, according to research published in Science this week.

• share
• favorite_border

• share
• favorite_border

An international research team has determined the distribution of species of vegetation over nearly half the world’s land area could be affected by predicted global warming.

• share
• favorite_border

A small, secretive creature with unlikely qualifications for defying gravity may hold the answer to an entirely new way of getting off the ground. Analysis of high-speed film reveals how salamanders—or at least several species of the Plethodontidae family—achieve vertical lift.

• share
• favorite_border

UofL has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by more than one-fourth in seven years, report shows

• share
• favorite_border

• share
• favorite_border

Some coral reefs in the Pacific Ocean can not only survive but thrive in waters that have high levels of acidification, according to a Texas A&M University researcher.

• share
• favorite_border

After the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, invertebrates like shrimp, oysters and crabs were the subject of the majority of testing by federal and state agencies. One UAB expert analyzed fish caught a year after the spill to determine safety.

• share
• favorite_border

The Wildlife Conservation Society announced today the arrest of a wildlife trader in Indonesia who specialized in smuggling live animals including baby primates and komodo dragons.

• share
• favorite_border

Captive breeding and release program does not help save the federally endangered Key Largo woodrat, a new UF/IFAS study shows.

• share
• favorite_border

• share
• favorite_border

The gradual warming of the North and Tropical Atlantic Ocean is contributing to climate change in Antarctica, a team of New York University scientists has concluded. The findings, which rely on more than three decades of atmospheric data, show new ways in which distant regional conditions are contributing to Antarctic climate change.

• share
• favorite_border

Spraying fungicide to kill coffee rust disease, which has ravaged Latin American plantations since late 2012, is an approach that is "doomed to failure," according to University of Michigan ecologists.

• share
• favorite_border

• share
• favorite_border

WCS expresses its alarm at the new findings released yesterday by IUCN indicating the heightened threatened status of the world’s sharks, rays, skates and chimeras, the cartilaginous fishes.

• share
• favorite_border

Extreme air pollution in Asia is affecting the world’s weather and climate patterns, according to a study by Texas A&M University and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory researchers.

• share
• favorite_border

The recent Arctic blast that gripped much of the nation will likely contribute to a healthy rise in Great Lakes water levels in 2014, new research shows. But the processes responsible for that welcome outcome are not as simple and straightforward as you might think.

• share
• favorite_border

A new paper details a collaboration between the National Park Service (NPS) and outside experts, including Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) scientists, in developing recommendations to conserve aerial, marine, and terrestrial populations of migrating wildlife that move in and out of U.S. national parks, often coming from distant regions of the globe.

• share
• favorite_border

ANDRILL team discovers new species while using camera-equipped robot to explore the waters beneath 250-meter thick Ross Ice Shelf.

• share
• favorite_border

Scientists studying grasslands in Oklahoma have discovered that an increase of 2 degrees Celsius in the air temperature above the soil creates significant changes to the microbial ecosystem underground. Compared to a control group with no warming, plants in the warmer plots grew faster and higher, which put more carbon into the soil as the plants senesce. The microbial ecosystem responded by altering its DNA to enhance the ability to handle the excess carbon.

• share
• favorite_border

Prehistoric shell mounds found on some of Florida’s most pristine beaches are at risk of washing away as the sea level rises, wiping away thousands of years of archaeological evidence.

• share
• favorite_border

• share
• favorite_border

University of Washington environmental engineers are launching a new study to try to understand how climate change will affect streamflow patterns in the Columbia River Basin. The team will look at the impact of glaciers on the river system, the range of possible streamflow changes and how much water will flow in the river at hundreds of locations in future years.

• share
• favorite_border

The European Parliament took powerful action against illegal elephant killing through the passage of a groundbreaking resolution on wildlife trafficking that calls for moratoria on ivory trade and other measures against wildlife crime.

• share
• favorite_border

A study of marine life in the temperate coastal waters of the northeast Pacific Ocean shows a reversal of competitive dominance among species of algae, suggesting that increased ocean acidification caused by global climate change is altering biodiversity.

• share
• favorite_border

Some Heinrich events – massive iceberg surges into the North Atlantic that were thought to have weakened the global ocean conveyor belt circulation and sent Earth’s climate into a deep freeze – may have been caused by changes in atmospheric circulation patterns, say a team of researchers that includes two Texas A&M University professors.

• share
• favorite_border

FDA-approved beta-agonists in cattle feed are widely used to help feedlot cattle efficiently produce more lean muscle, but one beta-agonist, Zilmax, was voluntarily suspended by its manufacturer due to animal welfare concerns. K-State researchers are looking into how heat stress and other environmental factors might play a role in this issue and affect cattle mobility and feed intake.

• share
• favorite_border

FDA-approved beta-agonists in cattle feed are widely used to help feedlot cattle efficiently produce more lean muscle, but one beta-agonist, Zilmax, was voluntarily suspended by its manufacturer due to animal welfare concerns. K-State researchers are looking into how heat stress and other environmental factors might play a role in this issue and affect cattle mobility and feed intake.

• share
• favorite_border

While subsoil compaction is easy to ignore because it’s hard to see, it definitely deserves more study.

• share
• favorite_border

A new master's program created by Wake Forest’s Center for Energy, the Environment & Sustainability (CEES) will give students and early career professionals the diverse skillset they need to carve out a place in the burgeoning global sustainable business market.

• share
• favorite_border

Climate-change studies by Boston University biologists show leaf-out times of trees and shrubs at Walden Pond are an average of 18 days earlier than when Henry David Thoreau made his observations there in the 1850s.

• share
• favorite_border

Scientists studying the atmosphere above Barrow, Alaska, have discovered unprecedented levels of molecular chlorine in the air, a new study reports.

• share
• favorite_border

A fascinating paper released today from a team of leading scientists, including Dr. Joel Berger of the Wildlife Conservation Society and University of Montana, reports on the current status of large carnivores and the ecological roles they play in regulating ecosystems worldwide, and finds that a world without these species is certainly scarier than a world with them.

• share
• favorite_border

Researchers have discovered that vultures, rather than aggregating where animals are most abundant as previously thought, instead focus on areas and conditions where animals are most likely to die.

• share
• favorite_border

A new study published in the January 8 issue of PLOS One by Christopher Gobler, Professor in the School of Marine & Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University and colleagues, has found that low pH levels within these regions represent an additional, previously unappreciated, threat to ocean animals.

• share
• favorite_border

A newly published study on the clymene dolphin, a small and sleek marine mammal living in the Atlantic Ocean, shows that this species arose through natural hybridization between two closely related dolphins species, according to authors from the Wildlife Conservation Society, the American Museum of Natural History’s Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics, the University of Lisbon, and other contributing groups.

• share
• favorite_border

Global tourism has increased fourfold over the last 30 years, resulting in human-induced seashell loss that may harm natural habitats worldwide, according to a University of Florida scientist.