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In Rescuing the Planet, Tony Hiss sets out on a journey to take stock of the “superorganism” that is the earth: its land, its elements, its plants and animals, its greatest threats – and what we can do to keep it, and ourselves, alive.

Forests are globally important for their role in cycles of carbon, water, and nutrients. However, knowledge of forest structure and function has been limited by the availability of historical measurements and data.

A legacy of land (mis)management has transformed California forests, grasslands, and fire regimes. These ecosystems are also under intense climate pressure. At the same time, state climate policy is pushing extensive new forest management approaches to simultaneously foster ecological resilience, disaster mitigation, and carbon sequestration.

The ability of tropical forests to grow and store carbon is limited, in part, by herbivory. Insects and other animals prefer to feed on nitrogen-fixing trees, reducing the success of fixers and the nitrogen they provide. So reports a paper in the journal Nature, which recommends accounting for herbivory constraints on nitrogen-fixing trees in climate models and projections of the tropical forest carbon sink.

Forest research and its application are rapidly evolving due to unprecedented availability of data provided by emerging technologies such as high-resolution digital imagery and GPS.

Numerous studies link per capita energy consumption to the greater health and well-being of people in various nations worldwide.  Question is: does this correlation extend continuously from impoverished nations to well-developed nations?

One must expect that with rising human population new (virgin) sources of ore will be mined to satisfy the demand for more products. There is also new demand for some materials, such as lithium, cobalt, and rare earth elements, to supply the electronics and battery industries.

America is the land of the big—Big Houses, Big Cars, Big Macs, and Big Dreams. The average new house in the U.S. has 1000 square feet (93 m2) per occupant.  Other world citizens get along with a range of 161 to 430 square feet.

Some environmental datasets are so integral to our understanding of the world around us and our place in it that leaving their continuation to the vagaries of fate or government funding cycles is illogical and irresponsible.

So when we were thinking about a new museum devoted to one of the most beautiful and interesting things on our planet – ice – we had to think hard about how best to display and preserve this delicate substance.

A study by researchers at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York, has shown that when rising temperatures combine with antibiotic residues expelled by livestock, it degrades soil microbe efficiency, soil resilience to future stress, and its ability to trap carbon.

More than 80% of terrestrial ecosystems have been modified to some degree by human activities, resulting in the loss of natural ecosystems and an increasingly warmer planet through global environmental change processes.

It is with great sadness we share that Gary M. Lovett, forest ecologist and Senior Scientist Emeritus at Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, died on December 17, while skiing with friends in the Catskills.

Motivated by a similar comparison in the Washington Post, here are my choices for what’s out and what’s in (mostly environmental) during the coming year.

Humans extract minerals from the Earth’s crust to enhance the availability of these materials in our economy and often in the environment. For many metals, the mobilization from mining greatly exceeds the natural release of the elements from the weathering and breakdown of rocks.

The world’s population was estimated to have passed 8 billion folks, each with the desire to be a consumer at the level of Western economies.

Michael Clark and his colleagues have now estimated the environmental impact and nutritional value of 57,000 such processed foods from supermarkets in Great Britain, using the proportional content of raw ingredients and nutritional measures of salt, sugar, and saturated fats (= bad) and protein, fiber, and vegetable oils (= good).

About 200 species of mosquitoes are found in the United States. Twelve are known as vectors, meaning they transmit disease among humans.

Around the United States, scientists are increasingly worried about rising levels of salt in freshwater wetlands, rivers, and lakes, even in much larger bodies like the Great Lakes.