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It is August, the month when a new generation of black-legged ticks that transmit Lyme and other diseases are hatching. On forest floors, suburban estates and urban parks, they are looking for their first blood meal. 

Every July, for four years running, Shannon LaDeau inspected nine ceramic toilets sitting idly in a vacant lot behind a building, near a block of abandoned lots and houses on the edge of the West Baltimore neighborhood of Franklin Square. No, she is not weird. This was for science.

A recent Ecology and Evolution study is the first to explore how IHNV spreads among juvenile hatchery-raised fish in the Pacific Northwest, where high rates of infection and mortality can occur. 

During winter storms, snowplows rumble along the roads ringing New Hampshire's Mirror Lake. A spray of salt whirls out from behind each truck—sodium chloride settles on the frozen asphalt and helps break up the ice. Road salt is great for combatting winter's hazards, but it's a tool with potentially devastating consequences.

In the politically-charged world of climate change, an important paper appeared in Science last month, written by Solomon Hsiang and 11 others, assessing the regional impacts of the projected changes in climate on the economic productivity within the U.S. 

Stephen Hamilton’s principal research interests involve ecosystem ecology and biogeochemistry, with particular emphasis on water. He has studied wetlands, streams, lakes, reservoirs, and watersheds, as well as agricultural cropping systems and their effects on water and climate.

We often forget that some of today's obvious and formidable environmental problems were not recognized without tedious long-term studies by dedicated scientists with a hunch.

White-footed mice — known for their wide eyes and ears, long tails and snow-white bellies and the feet from which they get their name — are often overlooked by humans, hiding out by the billions in U.S. forests, shrubby thickets and even wooded wetlands. But there's one creature that knows them well: the tick.

With a bumper crop of blacklegged ticks possible this season, researchers in a Lyme disease-plagued part of New York's Hudson Valley are tackling tick problems across entire neighborhoods with fungal sprays and bait boxes. 

Over the course of the past year or so, there have been a number of incredible tech projects aimed at stopping the spread of Ebola. One approach that we’ve never come across before, however, involves plotting the possible spread of Ebola and other “filoviruses” of the same family by predicting which bat species they’re most likely to be carried by

As an investigation by scientists at Duke University and the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies shows, the value of long-term studies can't be understated. In it, investigators looking at the impacts of acid rain on the soil acidity of a New Hampshire forest found that everything behaved as expected for about a decade. But after that, the system went haywire.

Amid political turmoil in Brazil, there is a threat to abolish the country's environmental licensing process, derailing decades of conservation efforts in the Amazon.

A team of scientists has developed a model that can predict bat species most likely to transmit Ebola and other filoviruses. Findings highlight new potential hosts and geographic hotspots worthy of surveillance. So reports a new paper in the journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases.

William Schlesinger is active in communicating science to policy makers and media. He has testified about environmental issues in Congress and in state houses, and has been featured in media including NOVA, the Weather Channel, Discover, National Geographic, and the New York Times.

He discusses a range of environmental issues in his weekly blog, Translational Ecology.

Testimony of David L. Strayer before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Natural Resources Subcommittee on Water, Power, and Oceans. 23 June 2016

The Adirondack Park Invasive Plant Program (APIPP) and the Adirondack Mountain Club (ADK) are co-hosting an Adirondack Forest Pest Summit, a free conference meant to help raise awareness about invasive insects negatively affecting New York forests. The event will take place at the Tannery Pond Community Center in North Creek from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Monday, July 11th.

A legacy of acid rain has acidified forest soils throughout the northeastern US, lowering the growth rate of trees. In an attempt to mitigate this trend, in 1999 scientists added calcium to an experimental forest in New Hampshire.

When it comes to emerging diseases, the Zika virus is just the tip of the iceberg. New research has revealed several hot spots around the world where diseases are most likely to move from wildlife—wild mammals, specifically—into the human population. 

Of all the ailments that plague people, the majority began like these three: with a bacteria, virus, parasite or other pathogen that jumped from an innocuous animal host to the human population. But there's no global database documenting where these kinds of infections — called zoonoses — might be lying in wait.

There are many infections in humans which originate from animals. Diseases which spread in this way are called zoonoses. Zika is one example and was first discovered in a monkey with a mild fever in the Zika forest in Uganda in the 1940s. Another is Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome or MERS – which originates in camels.