Search Results

In recent months, there has been a lot of attention devoted to methane emission as a contribution to the gases in the atmosphere that cause global warming. Methane concentrations were relatively constant in the atmosphere until the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

Disasters such as hurricanes, wildfires, floods, tornadoes, and droughts are not only increasing in intensity and frequency, they are also striking the same place multiple times. Yet, to date, disaster research largely focuses on individual events, and fails to account for legacy effects that leave people vulnerable in the wake of repeated disasters.

Learn how ecologists, urban planners, and landscape architects can use research insights to improve urban justice now and in the future.

Climate change has the potential to massively disrupt terrestrial ecosystem productivity, impacting biodiversity and ecosystem services, and driving Earth’s forests to release carbon into the atmosphere, which would further exacerbate climate change.

The combination of melting snow, saturated soils, and rain falling on frozen ground means that the most frequent and most severe floods typically occur in March here in Michigan.

No doubt, biofuels have had huge economic benefits to the agricultural sector, but they are associated with increased emissions of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, lower water quality, and lower biodiversity.

Learn to recognize common Northeast trees by their shape, bark patterns, twigs, fruits, and seeds. Attention is also given to invasive forest pests that threaten our trees.

Dams have harmed fish populations all over the world by preventing these migratory animals from reaching their spawning and nursery grounds. Highly migratory species like salmon, eels, sturgeons, and shads have been hurt most badly. But every kind of migratory fish, and there are many, is affected.

Invertebrates play diverse ecological roles in both green and brown food webs, yet, their full importance in soil ecosystem processes remains unresolved. In this seminar, Wickings discusses ongoing research in his program examining the impacts that soil invertebrates have on microbial activity and organic matter cycling in residential lawns and other managed grasses.

Phosphorus is mined from local deposits of certain rocks that contain high concentrations of a phosphorus-rich mineral known as apatite, largely laid down in sediments in ancient oceans.  In the United States, the major deposits of phosphate rock are found in North Carolina and Florida.

Deforestation, largely in the tropics, is thought to contribute about 15% of the total carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere each year.

In its native range, the hemlock woolly adelgid lifecycle includes winged males and females that fly off hemlocks to spruce trees to mate and reproduce. We lack a suitable spruce species in North America, so sexual reproduction is unsuccessful. (Winged individuals fly off and die.) The wingless females reproduce asexually on hemlock trees, making hundreds of genetically identical copies of themselves. The males have become totally irrelevant.

The Arctic region is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the planet, releasing terrestrially-stored carbon and nutrients that were previously frozen in permafrost soils.

‘Starry sky beetle’ is the common name for the Asian longhorned beetle (Anaplophora glabripennis) in its home region – and what a good name it is. Deep black, dotted with white spots that look like stars in the night sky, this large (3/4-1½ inches) beetle with long ‘horns’ (actually antennae) may be handsome for an invertebrate, but it poses a big threat to forests of North America.

Bats are the most important mammal pollinators, contributing to ecosystem health, crop production, and food security by pollinating ecologically and economically important plants through the tropics. However, little is known about the potential consequences of declining pollinating bat populations on plants and ecosystems.

Machine learning is known for its ability to spot fraudulent credit charges or recognize faces. Now researchers are siccing the technology on viruses.

Warming springtime temperatures bring another season of melting to the icepack on Greenland.  Containing roughly 2,850,000 km³ of ice, in some places more than 3000 m thick, Greenland harbors the second largest ice mass on Earth—the largest being Antarctica.