Feature Channels: Nature

• share
• favorite_border

Seaside residents and holidaymakers have felt it for centuries, but scientists have only recently started to investigate possible health benefits of the coast. Using data from 15 countries, new research led by Sandra Geiger from the Environmental Psychology Group at the University of Vienna confirms public intuition: Living near, but especially visiting, the seaside is associated with better health regardless of country or personal income.

• share
• favorite_border

A new greenhouse gas budget shows coastal ecosystems globally are a net greenhouse gas sink for carbon dioxide (CO2) but emissions of methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) counteract some of the CO2 uptake, according to international researchers led by Australia’s Southern Cross University.

• share
• favorite_border

Every second, the planet loses a stretch of forest equivalent to a football field due to logging, fires, insect infestation, disease, wind, drought, and other factors.

• share
• favorite_border

Biologists from Washington University in St. Louis collaborated with a large number of butterfly and plant specialists to reconstruct the origin and global spread of butterflies. Working with researchers from dozens of countries, Michael Landis and Mariana P. Braga in Arts & Sciences helped create the world’s largest butterfly tree of life, assembled with DNA from more than 2,000 species representing all butterfly families.

• share
• favorite_border

Walking along a steep ridge, under large hemlock trees, ten miles outside of Burlington, Vermont—Bill Keeton is worrying about Europe’s remaining old forests. He’s so concerned, in fact, that he and some colleagues wrote a letter to the journal Science—published on May 5, 2023—calling for rapid action to protect them.

• share
• favorite_border

New research shows that smartphone activity actually increases during visits outdoors to city parks—a finding that contradicts popular notions. Thanks to two years of unparalleled access to 700 study participants' smartphone data, the study is the first to show that young adults now spend far more time on their smartphone screens than in nature. The study finds that people who visit forests or nature preserves experience significant declines in screen time, compared to visits to urban locations for the same duration.

• share
• favorite_border

Eric Bredahl, PhD, and his team of undergraduate research assistants are trusting that Nature, if asked nicely, or at least insistently, will yield another of her secrets.

• share
• favorite_border

Spread across 106 acres in southcentral Utah, the Pando aspen grove resembles a forest but is actually a single organism with more than 47,000 genetically identical aspen stems connected at the root. As an artist-in-residence for the nonprofit group Friends of Pando, Jeff Rice used a variety of microphones to record Pando’s leaves, birds, and weather. As part of the 184th ASA Meeting, Rice and Lance Oditt will describe their work to reveal a unique acoustic portrait of this botanical wonder.

• share
• favorite_border

Birds across the Americas are getting smaller and longer-winged as the world warms, and the smallest-bodied species are changing the fastest.

• share
• favorite_border

An international group of researchers re-examined the evidence for and against the so-called mother-tree hypothesis in a new study.

• share
• favorite_border

For millions of Americans that suffer from seasonal allergies (pollen and mold), climate change is exacerbating an earlier, longer, and overall worse allergy season.

• share
• favorite_border

With a view towards predicting the consequences of human-made climate change for Mediterranean ecosystems, Earth scientists from Heidelberg University have studied natural climate and vegetation fluctuations of the past 500,000 years.

• share
• favorite_border

Researchers at The Ohio State University have developed a framework for quantifying how well countries around the world are doing at providing adequate food, energy and water to their citizens without exceeding nature’s capacity to meet those needs.

• share
• favorite_border

Gambling addiction, also called “pathological gambling” and “gambling disorder (GD),” is known to have severe economic, social, mental, and physical consequences on those affected. One of the major factors contributing to the development and relapse of this disorder is stress.

• share
• favorite_border

An international team of researchers led by Prof. MA Keping from the Institute of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IBCAS) has shown that forests with higher tree species richness tend to have greater arthropod diversity.

• share
• favorite_border

The previously hidden and diverse underwater acoustic world in British ponds has been uncovered by a team of researchers at the University of Bristol.

• share
• favorite_border

Researcher will discuss the study which involved a sleeping aid known as suvorexant that is already approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for insomnia, hints at the potential of sleep medications to slow or stop the progression of Alzheimer’s disease.

• share
• favorite_border

A single species invades an ecosystem causing its collapse. A cyberattack on the power system causes a major breakdown. These type of events are always on our mind, yet they rarely result in such significant consequences. So how is it that these systems are so stable and resilient that they can withstand such external disruptions? Indeed, these systems lack a central design or blueprint, and still, they exhibit exceptionally reliable functionality.

• share
• favorite_border

In tropical regions of the planet, savannas and forests often coexist in the same area and are exposed to the same climate.

• share
• favorite_border

The Virginia Tech media relations office has the following experts available for interviews surrounding the environment, energy, and sustainability. To schedule an interview, please contact  Rising seas threatens U.S. coastlines and cities A recently released report from the U.N. on climate change found that rising sea levels are "unavoidable for centuries to millennia due to continuing deep ocean warming and ice sheet melt, and sea levels will remain elevated for thousands of years.

• share
• favorite_border

Argonne, The Morton Arboretum, the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign received a grant from NOAA to assess drought resilience in the urban tree canopy.

• share
• favorite_border

A new study demonstrates that birds can partially compensate for these changes by delaying the start of spring migration and completing the journey faster. But the strategy comes with a cost—a decline in overall survival.

• share
• favorite_border

Semislugs, or ‘snugs’ as they are affectionately known among mollusc researchers, are like the squatters of the snail world: they do carry a home on their back but it is too small to live in. Still, it offers a sort of protection, while not getting in the way of the worm-like physique of the slug.

• share
• favorite_border

The key to insect success may be their wings. That’s what West Virginia University researcher Terry Gullion, professor of chemistry in the WVU Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, has learned by studying the chemical composition of insect wings — something that has not been examined in detail until now.

• share
• favorite_border

Current methods to monitor red tide are limited. Using AUTOHOLO, a new autonomous, submersible, 3D holographic microscope and imaging system, a study is the first to characterize red tide in the field and breaks new ground for monitoring harmful algal blooms.

• share
• favorite_border

A new study reveals that the mass loss of lake-terminating glaciers in the greater Himalaya has been significantly underestimated, due to the inability of satellites to see glacier changes occurring underwater, with critical implications for the region's future projections of glacier disappearance and water resources.

• share
• favorite_border

Global breakthrough: for the first time in the world, researchers at Tel Aviv University recorded and analyzed sounds distinctly emitted by plants. The click-like sounds, similar to the popping of popcorn, are emitted at a volume similar to human speech, but at high frequencies, beyond the hearing range of the human ear.

• share
• favorite_border

Plans to reintroduce the lynx in Scotland provoke a complex range of opinions, new research shows.

• share
• favorite_border

For wild animals, false alarms are the most widespread form of misinformation. Deploying camera observatories in a coral reef in French Polynesia, researchers have shown that even in the absence of predators, escape events occur frequently in natural groups of foraging fish but rarely spread to more than a few individuals. These animals form dynamic information exchange networks and adjust their responsiveness to visual cues based on the recent history of sensory inputs from neighbors.

• share
• favorite_border

Why does the world need so many types of mushrooms, or spiders, or birds, or any other species? The answer is wrapped up in the term biological diversity. Every species on Earth plays an integral part in the health of our planet. When an organism becomes extinct, a wide web of other organisms suffers, and we all suffer in the long run. The study of mushrooms has helped scientists understand the intricate connectedness all species have to the earth and to each other.

• share
• favorite_border

Author and field biologist Jeff Fair has followed loons, bears, and other wild spirits across the North from Maine to Alaska for more than 40 years, studying and writing about what his pursuit of them has allowed him to find.

• share
• favorite_border

In a sparsely furnished office in Kajiado, Kenya, large sheets of white paper cover nearly an entire wall. Quick illustrations, mind maps, color-coded charts, and task lists cram the pages with plans and strategies for grazing management orchestrated by the newly formed Kajiado Rangeland Carbon Project team. In the language of the local Maasai tribe, Kajiado means The Long River; the region is located south of Nairobi and bordering Tanzania. Staff on this project understand what is at stake and are eager to embark on an adventure that will help enhance their local economy while conserving wildlife and precious habitat.

• share
• favorite_border

As primary schools continue to invest in purpose-built nature play spaces, experts are encouraging teachers to deliver more of the curriculum in outdoor areas, to boost students’ wellbeing and development and to maximise the use of play spaces.

• share
• favorite_border

A study has found that infrastructure worldwide is widespread in sites that have been identified as internationally important for biodiversity, and its prevalence is likely to increase.

• share
• favorite_border

The global scientific evidence of the multiple types of benefits that forests, trees and green spaces have on human health has now been assessed by an international and interdisciplinary team of scientists.

• share
• favorite_border

Montane forests, known as biodiversity hotspots, are among the ecosystems facing threats from climate change.

• share
• favorite_border

The growing period of hardwood forests in eastern North America has increased by an average of one month over the past century as temperatures have steadily risen, a new study has found.

• share
• favorite_border

A WCS-coauthored study reveals that global mountain forests – critically important to wildlife – are vanishing at an accelerating rate with an area twice the size of Norway lost between 2001-2018.

• share
• favorite_border

Spring has arrived officially and brings with it another season of the NestWatch citizen-science project from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, building its ever more valuable database on nesting birds. NestWatch participants say watching birds raise their young is incredibly rewarding.

• share
• favorite_border

If the animals disappear or are replaced by completely new species, the seeds will not spread in the same way as before. And that's a big problem, according to a new study from the University of Copenhagen.

• share
• favorite_border

A pioneering global study has found deforestation and forests lost or damaged due to human and environmental change, such as fire and logging, are fast outstripping current rates of forest regrowth.

• share
• favorite_border

One of the biggest potential single sources of carbon emissions from wooded parts of Norway has four legs, weighs as much as 400-550 kg and has antlers.

• share
• favorite_border

Ants play a key role in forest regeneration, according to a new paper from Binghamton University, State University of New York.