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Taylor Maavara is part of a project that is among the first to investigate the ecology of rivers fed by melting Himalayan glaciers. Last fall, she and several teammates trekked around Mount Everest for 16 days, collecting samples and data. Here, she shares some of the trips challenges and highlights, as well as some preliminary findings. 
 

Award-winning writer Paul Greenberg discusses how large-scale commercial fishing, extensive fish farming, and questionable environmental standards have distressed aquatic ecosystems, pushing many wild fish populations to the brink of extinction.

In 2024 and 2025, thousands of wildfires burned in novel settings across the East, including unprecedented fires in populated regions like Long Island, New York, Massachusetts, and the Carolinas. While fires in the East have been considered rare, intensifying drought combined with limited preparedness could portend significant vulnerabilities in the future.

Scientists don’t know much about canopy soil. But with funding from the US National Science Foundation, a new project is poised to reveal more about what it’s made of, what microbes are living in it, and what role it plays in the carbon cycle. The international team is co-led by Jane Lucas and Evan Gora of Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies.

Leading fisheries scientist and marine biologist Ray Hilborn shares his controversial insights about the future of our fisheries.

Cities around the globe are increasingly experiencing dangerous heat as urban concrete and asphalt amplify rising temperatures. Tree-planting programs are a popular, nature-based way to cool cities, but these initiatives have been largely based on guesswork and extrapolation. A study published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences offers a new tool for urban planners and decision makers to set more specific and science-based city-wide greening goals. 

When we close the door to begin the journey, we are encapsulated in a mix of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), carbon dioxide, various body odors, a few local air pollutants that are entrained from outside, and a smidgeon of the refrigerants that can leak from the car’s air conditioning system.

Bringing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere down to preindustrial levels will be a daunting task, including reducing current emissions and removing the CO2 that has accumulated from past emissions. The costs of rapid climate change demand that we do so.

This summer, hordes of invasive spongy moth caterpillars stripped the leaves off of Cary Institute’s hardwood forest in Millbrook, NY. Our tick monitoring team quickly realized the sudden increase in light and temperature on the forest floor might have serious implications for ticks and the diseases they spread to humans. 

Now, with a $179,544 RAPID grant award from the National Science Foundation, the team is assessing how spongy moth defoliation shapes the survival of blacklegged ticks, the main vectors of the pathogens that cause Lyme disease, babesiosis, and anaplasmosis. The findings will help the team to more accurately forecast local risk of these diseases. 
 

Most drinking waters contain only a small amount of fluorine (<0.5 milligrams per liter or mg/l). When it was discovered in the 1930s that adding a small amount of fluorine to drinking water made teeth more resistant to decay, the practice caught on widely across America, especially following World War II. Tooth decay rates in children dropped dramatically, and the process was widely regarded as a milestone in the improvement of human health.  Although some recent studies have questioned the link between fluoride and better dental health, the advent of fluoridated water would seem to be a good example of better living through biogeochemistry.

This fall, the US experienced an outbreak of fires nationwide, stretching from New Jersey to California. Fires in the Northeast were fueled by the driest autumn in nearly 50 years. Could fire and drought become a new normal for the Northeastern US, as it has for the West?

This talk will give a sense of how a diverse ecological career actually hangs together conceptually. At the same time, Pickett’s research has taken him across a wide variety of habitats globally, and this has stimulated a discovery of conceptual commonalities and contexts that frame and organize the differences across this diversity of sites and interests. 

Should drinking water be accessible as a human right or is it a commodity?

Rodents play a central role in many food webs, providing prey for higher trophic levels while consuming plants and invertebrates. While rodents are the most biodiverse group of mammals on Earth, many rodent communities have been simplified due to habitat loss, climate change, and invasive species.

Seasonality is a fundamental natural phenomenon that drives annual cycles of ecosystem production as a function of distance from Earth’s equator. Despite its familiarity, exploring the consequences of seasonality for ecosystem function at appropriate spatial scales is complicated.

Plant-mycorrhizal fungal interactions are the most ubiquitous symbiosis on the planet, responsible for the majority of plant nutrient uptake. Yet, we know little about how these interactions may decouple with global change. 

On the small Australian island-state of Tasmania, the progressive spread of a transmissible and highly lethal cancer is threatening Tasmanian devils (Sarcophilus harrisii) with extinction.

Dr. Crystal Raymond is the Deputy Director of Policy and Management for the Western Fire and Forest Resilience Collaborative. Since completing her graduate studies, she has spent 15 years working at the boundary of science and management holding positions in local government, federal government, and most recently as a Climate Adaptation Specialist with the Climate Impacts Group at University of Washington.