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Discover the fascinating world of forest amphibians, their life histories and role in forest ecosystems, and opportunities to get involved in conservation of vernal pool-breeding amphibians.

Writer Donovan Hohn’s talk explores the fate of thousands of rubber ducks that were accidentally spilled into the Pacific Ocean. His global adventures highlight the plight of our oceans and the pressures that society places on the natural world.

Jane Lucas studies microbial communities, which exist in nearly every environment and play a key role in nutrient cycling. These tiny and abundant microorganisms help fertilize plants and recycle organic debris, with important implications for agriculture and ecosystem health.

Burn severity is key to understanding the environmental impacts of wildfires. The Western Fire & Forest Resilience Collaborative’s Co-Principal Investigator, Dr. Brian Harvey of the University of Washington, and his lab group are developing an atlas of multiple on-the-ground burn severity metrics across forests of the western United States.

Best-selling author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, Robin Wall Kimmerer weaves together Indigenous knowledge and Western science, offering an integrative approach to understanding the natural world. 

In this series, Cary Research Technician Samuel Mateo Jr. shares insights into urban biodiversity observed by the Defining Urban Biodiversity team.

Most people pay attention to climate change in the summer, when faced with heat waves, hurricanes, and severe thunderstorms. In the northeast, climate warming is actually more marked in the winter, and the loss of snow cover can have a ripple effect on tree growth and groundwater recharge.

Tick-borne diseases are on the rise in the northeastern US, with many ticks carrying more than one pathogen. Most commonly found together were Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterium that causes Lyme disease, and Babesia microti, a parasite that causes a malaria-like disease known as babesiosis.

The Amazon rainforest is famous for storing massive amounts of carbon in its trees and soils, helping regulate the global climate. Yet a paper published today in New Phytologist shows that one of South America’s largest carbon-storing ecosystems exists in an often-overlooked grassy savanna: the Cerrado in Brazil. The study was led by Larissa Verona, a technician working with senior scientist Amy Zanne at Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies. 

Ticks capable of carrying and transmitting more than one potentially fatal disease at the same time are becoming increasingly common in the northeastern U.S., according to a new long-term analysis that raises fresh public health concerns for the region.

In the summer of 2025, I had the great opportunity to participate in a fellowship project through the Catskill Science Collaborative. In our project, we examined how shifts in forest phenology (i.e., the timing of tree life cycles) and extreme weather (e.g., droughts and heavy rainfall) influence stream water quality. In particular, we investigated how these factors influence stream nitrate levels of watersheds in the Catskill Mountains that millions of people depend on for drinking water. 

Simon Winchester, the author of the bestselling Krakatoa, leads an armchair expedition around the shores and the islands of the Atlantic Ocean.

A perspective published in Nature Water in February underscores how adaptation and mitigation measures to address urban flooding often exacerbate environmental injustices for society’s most vulnerable groups — not just in the US, but around the world. Led by Rebecca Hale of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and co-authored by urban ecologist Elizabeth Cook of Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, the piece offers strategies for governments, organizations, and individuals involved in climate adaptation to break the cycle. 

An evaluation of how the seasonality of coccidioidomycosis (Valley fever) in California may shift in response to future temperature and precipitation patterns.

Perennial plants are primary components of both natural and agricultural ecosystems. This presentation highlights ongoing work to dissect the genetic and environmental determinants of perennial plant phenotypes in two distinct types of perennial plants: woody vines and perennial herbaceous species.

This talk aims to outline the next steps in improving our applications of aquatic ecosystem models (AEMs) and make them sounder and more robust, with the eventual goal to enhance our understanding of ecological processes.

Box models are the standard approach to modeling and predicting the decay of soil carbon into CO2. In this paradigm, models are made more expressive by adding boxes (e.g., another type of soil carbon) or catalysts (e.g. microbes). Yet such model changes always add fitting parameters and sometimes increase the intrinsic complexity of the model by making it nonlinear.

Dr. Kelly Aho presents on processes controlling production and emission of greenhouse gases from these freshwater ecosystems, including how streams and rivers route terrestrially derived solutes to the atmosphere and how direct measurements of greenhouse gases can provide novel insights into existing ecological theory.