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Teacher training can help infuse classrooms with current scientific thinking. When teachers are confident and engaged in new concepts, students benefit

In late summer, after a couple of rainy afternoons, I happened to see several huge mushrooms under a pine tree at the Cary Institute. Mushrooms can be a little deceptive because they appear so suddenly, often seemingly overnight

From Beijing to Beacon, air pollution alerts are rampant this summer. One of the primary causes for these alerts is high levels of "bad" ozone.

If you are living in the eastern United States, the environment around you is being harmed by air pollution.

A collaborative monitoring project called the Hudson River Environmental Conditions Observing System has been implemented to provide continuous real-time data about estuary conditions in the Hudson River such as temperature, salinity, and pollutant loads.

Muskrats have caused levee collapses in the past and will likely do so in the future.

Today's obsession with perfect, park-like lawns is not only a waste of time and money; it's bad for the environment. Embrace a natural yard, as our household has done on about half of our property.

In 1890, there were about 250,000 pairs of Atlantic puffins breeding on Grassholm, a 22-acre island a few miles off the southwest coast of Wales in the United Kingdom. By 1940, there were only 25 breeding pairs

This past summer, we unexpectedly found a very rare freshwater mussel in one of the small tributaries of the Housatonic River basin – a species that hadn’t been seen in the region since 1843.

This year, our maples and oaks put out new leaves, and our fruit trees started blooming about two weeks earlier than usual. Is this a symptom of climate change?

A fire in Minnewaska State Park, which burned more than 3,000 acres, is a reminder of how difficult it can be to control wildfires.

My backyard is being devoured by a silent but aggressive invader, multiflora rose (Rosa multiflora). This thorny perennial shrub is an Asian import with arching green stems called canes that can reach 10-15 feet long.

As spring settles in around us, there is a lot of evidence of how organisms and the ecosystems they are part of respond to the shifts in the seasons.

How is the fish on your dinner plate tied to agricultural fertilizer? Let’s use the ecosystem approach to think about the big picture. On land, nitrogen-rich fertilizer is applied to crops to stimulate production. 

Change is underway at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies. For over two decades, the Cary Institute has been at the forefront of ecological research. Now, in an effort to maximize the organization’s influence on environmental policy, it’s embracing solution-driven science and enhanced outreach.

As the Director of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES), a Long Term Ecological Research project, I work with colleagues to reveal how watersheds can be used to understand interactions among social, biophysical, and built environments.

Simply defined, sustainability is ensuring that future generations have access to the resources that we enjoy today. It was the topic of a recent workshop at the Cary Institute, where over forty ecologists discussed the sustainability of biofuel, an emerging source of alternative energy.

Look for a new animal in the Hudson this summer. The Chinese mitten crab is at our doorstep.

On their journey toward the ocean, small streams carry materials from adjacent terrestrial ecosystems. For decades this capacity to transport salts, soils and organisms was viewed as the primary ecological function of streams.

We have passed a tipping point in the search for "carbon-neutral" energy sources, leading to an explosion of interest in the use of plant-derived ethanol and biodiesel as a replacement for fossil fuels.