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Cary's head of education Alan Berkowitz explains why undergraduate research programs are so valuable-both for the students, who gain research experience, and the scientists, whose scientific thinking can benefit from the mentoring experience.

This frigid, snowy winter may be keeping many people indoors, but is likely doing little to kill slumbering hordes of ticks that can carry Lyme disease.

In the northeastern United States, warmer spring temperatures are leading to shifts in the emergence of the blacklegged ticks that carry Lyme disease and other tick-borne pathogens. At the same time, milder weather is allowing ticks to spread into new geographic regions.

Although western Lake Erie has become an international poster child for noxious algae, a new study suggests that many of the world’s much smaller, cleaner, and calmer bodies of water are likewise in trouble if greater efforts are not undertaken to keep farm fertilizers and other nutrients out of them.

Familiar to the snowy landscape are salt trucks slowly crawling up and down the interstates and city streets sprinkling salt (which is only effective in temperatures above 15 degrees), or salt-brine over the roads.

Officials across the country are scrambling to get enough road salt this year, after last winter’s brutal weather largely cleaned out stockpiles.

Find out what you can do as a homeowner to ensure you are not overusing road salt which can damage metal and concrete, contaminate drinking water, and harm aquatic plants and animals.

Coastlines make up less than ten percent of the land in the continental U.S., yet they house nearly forty percent of our population. 

In the U.S. alone, some 15 million tons of salt is applied to our roadways each year. While its use has real benefits, in terms of safety and navigation, there have been cumulative costs to the environment.

The Asian tiger mosquito is yet another invasive species that has taken hold in the United States. It arrived here in 1985 in a shipment of tires imported from Asia.  This little mosquito is an aggressive human biter capable of transmitting diseases.

It’s time to add another tongue-tying illness to the list of maladies carried by ticks. Lyme disease is the most common tick-borne illness in the U. S., with more than 30,000 people infected annually.

When I speak to public audiences about climate change, people often ask: Isn't there a way to capture and remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere?

My colleague Emma Rosi is an aquatic ecologist at the Cary Institute. One of her research projects involves an endangered fish called the humpback chub. She and her team spend a lot of time counting insects in the Colorado River downstream of the Glen Canyon Dam. You might think her time would be better spent counting the actual fish, but her approach will provide us with a lot more information.

We hear a lot about how climate change will affect forests. Some projections show wholesale loss of species in the western U.S., due to fire and pests.

Cary Institute is spearheading the Catskill Science Collaborative (CSC), an effort to connect scientific research with natural resource management in the Catskill region and educate residents about local science that could affect their lives and livelihoods.

Dr. McPhearson's research examines cities as ecosystems to study social, ecological, and technical interactions to understand urban system dynamics. He utilizes both empirical (e.g. Big Data, field experiments) and theoretical approaches (social-ecological systems and resilience theory) with a focus on the role of urban green infrastructure for advancing equity, climate change resilience, and urban sustainability.

Nearly everyone likes trees—for various reasons, not the least of which is that trees remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, potentially mitigating global warming.

If you are like most people, you have probably never heard of carbonyl sulfide, even though it is the most abundant sulfur gas in Earth’s atmosphere

By many accounts, humans have dramatically reduced the number of fish in the sea. About 15 years ago, Myers and Worm estimated that global fish stocks of the most desirable predatory fishes, like red snapper and swordfish, were now at only 10% of the levels of the preindustrial era.

 Insect repellents used to deter mosquitoes could actually lead to an increase in their numbers - and the diseases they carry.