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July is our warmest month, its steamy days and sticky nights giving us a little taste of the tropics. When we look for ways to beat July’s heat, we often end up in the water – sprinklers, backyard pools, or one of Michigan’s many lakes

The 1972 Clean Water Act, now in place for 50 years, shows that even an imperfect policy can improve the environment, and offers useful lessons for solving pressing problems like climate change.

 Invasives such as zebra mussels, water chestnuts, and grass carp are already changing the ecosystems of waterways like the Hudson River. But that doesn’t mean it’s too late to prevent them from getting into other bodies of water.

Lyme disease today, though less of a mystery, remains confounding, and it is spreading, sometimes to devastating effect.

Most of us have seen helium balloons gently float into the sky, whether by accident or intentional release. Watching a balloon disappear into the clouds can feel almost tranquil. But what goes up must come down, with serious impacts on the environment.

In April 2020, when hundreds of thousands of people worldwide had already succumbed to COVID-19, one infected individual—4-year-old Nadia—made global headlines. A Malayan tiger residing in New York’s Bronx Zoo, Nadia was among the first animals known to have contracted the virus from a human, likely a caretaker.

As anyone who lives in Michigan knows, March and April are the wet months, with puddles in lawns and fields and rivers overflowing their banks, while August, with corn wilting in the fields and lawns a crispy brown, is the driest.

Even a century ago, the arrival of pests and pathogens from Europe wreaked havoc on American elm and chestnut trees, leading to their near extinction in many areas of the eastern forests.  In the west, exotic annual grasses from Europe largely replaced native bunch grasses, altering the grazing and fire regime over large areas of landscape.

Today, the rate of species loss is about 100 to 1,000 times greater than the long-term historical record. Loss of habitat is likely to be the largest cause. Others include introduction of species from far-off lands that out-compete species at home; armed conflict, hunting, and poaching of some of the remaining big animals in Africa; and changes in climate.

Acid rain went from being a pollution disaster to an environmental success story. How did scientists manage to prove that acid rain existed, and find a way to stop it?

With $3 million in federal grant funding, a new five-year research project will bring together artificial intelligence, virology, and ecology to better understand how SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) behaves in natural ecosystems, to better identify strains with the potential to spread widely between people and animals. 

Warming temperatures in Interior Alaska decrease the intervals between fires, shifting forest composition from conifer to deciduous. Herbivores like moose and hare prefer deciduous species but it’s not clear how herbivores may interact with increasing fire frequency to shape forest community or forest carbon, particularly in carbon-rich boreal ecosystems.

NYU student researchers have been using Cary's grounds as a field station for their studies of Lyme and other tick-borne diseases for the last decade. This year's field trip, where student researchers collected ticks during the fall peak of activity, is covered in this episode.

Explore the ecology of Lyme disease with Rick Ostfeld, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute. For more than twenty years, Ostfeld and his research team have been investigating how environmental conditions influence the spread of tick-borne illness.

Joy Damon is a past fellow of the Catskill Science Collaborative, where she studied perceptions of trail risk and difficulty in hiking areas within the Catskill Forest Preserve.

The Millbrook, New York institute first opened in 1977 but was well ahead of its time. In 2020, architecture firm Becker + Becker was tasked with its renovation.

A couple of years ago, being a weather-hobbyist, I added a particle sensor (Purple Air PA-II) to our rooftop weather station to measure the ambient concentration of particles that are less than 2.5 microns (um) in diameter.

Ammonia has serious effects of human health by forming PM2.5 particulate air pollution and polluting waters where it is deposited inadvertently. 

Award-winning photographer Robin Moore chronicled the search for frog, toad, and salamander species not seen in over a decade. In a visually stunning presentation, he shares the science behind what frogs disappearing around the globe means for our planet.