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Like many freshwater scientists, I suffer from Cousteau envy. To me, fresh waters are fascinating, but they get no respect from the public

Do biodiversity losses aggravate transmission of infectious diseases spread by animals to humans? The jury is still out but several scientists say there is a “biodiversity dilution effect” in which declining biodiversity results in increased infectious-disease transmission.

Even before COVID-19 cleared the air in major world’s cities—New York, Los Angeles, Beijing and Delhi—the urban sky is much cleaner in the United States than it was a few decades ago.

In a March column in The New York Times, Donald McNeil proposed a thought experiment. Imagine if every person on the planet could sit down, at least six feet from each other, and not move for 14 days. At the end of those 14 days, the virus would be gone, or close enough . We’d be done with this.

This webinar, led by Cary educators, will explore the basics of data jamming and strategies for engaging K-12 learners in data exploration and communication. This session will be especially helpful for team captains, but all jammers are welcome to join. 

Methane is a strong absorber of infrared (heat) radiation leaving the Earth’s atmosphere, and thus implicated in the ongoing global warming of our planet. After a lull in the 1990s, the concentration of methane in the atmosphere began rising rapidly in 2006.

Working as a team, families can explore scientific datasets, interpret the stories they tell, and share them through visual or performing arts. Sing a song, make a video, paint a picture – your imagination is the limit. Prizes will be awarded to top projects.

With a lethal concentration for humans of about 10%, the current concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere, 0.04%, would seem to pose only a minor threat to us.

Every now and again, I find someone who believes that carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted by the breathing of humans accounts for the rise of CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere.  After all, there is a direct and powerful correlation between the rise of the human population and the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere during the past few decades.

Just as a Full Moon reflects the Sun’s radiation to the Earth, the Earth reflects some of the Sun’s incoming radiation to space. If you were standing on the moon, the Earth would appear as a bright body in the heavens. Overall, the Earth reflects about 30% of the incoming solar radiation it receives. The Earth’s reflection, also known as albedo, produces Earthshine on the Moon

The housing of the world contains a lot of carbon, mostly in wood, so it is interesting to ask if this carbon stock is large enough to represent a significant removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by the process of photosynthesis that produced the wood.

When most of us think about the energy we use to drive a car, we focus on the gas mileage.  We buy fuel, use it to propel the car, and expect that the exhaust (largely carbon dioxide and water vapor) will leave the tailpipe.  Few of us think of the energy used to build the car, including the energy it takes to convert the raw materials into car parts.

In the past few years, many agronomists have promoted the sequestration of carbon in soils as a means of mitigating climate change by reducing the amount of carbon dioxide that accumulates in the atmosphere. 

Explore New York State wildlife, their ecological roles, and the threats they face. This session's topics include: threats to wildlife and their habitats, dealing with invasive plants, and managing deer overpopulation via controlled hunting.

This talk will showcase qualitative and quantitative methods to assess resilience. The qualitative case looks at the resilience as adaptive capacity of communities in the Arctic to ecological and socio-political perturbations. The quantitative case builds on the work of early warning signals of critical transitions to assess resilience loss in global primary productivity.

The Mid-Hudson Young Environmental Scientist (MH-YES) program brings together local high school students, science teachers, undergraduates, and scientists to investigate watershed ecology in the Mid-Hudson region.

Explore New York State wildlife, their ecological roles, and the threats they face. This session's topics include: techniques to enhance wildlife populations, cost-sharing opportunities with the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, best practices to prevent wildlife damage.

Strap that roller coaster seatbelt across your lap – our montane forests are in for a ride over the next century. Dr. Jason Hill, an ecologist at the Vermont Center for Ecostudies, will discuss how climate change is forcing our northeastern flora and fauna to rapidly adapt, with a special focus on the responses of montane bird populations.

As a social scientist interested in how residents use and care for public green spaces, I’ve been delighted with the sudden influx of people using city parks. Yet, like all facets of the pandemic, the increasing use of green space reveals how segregation is built into all aspects of public life.