Enviro

Foxes are beautiful, charismatic creatures that enrich any landscape – sometimes quite literally. A study published today in the Ecological Society of America’s journal Ecosphere reveals that trees growing on and around the sites of fox dens, especially long-established fox dens, grow faster than trees without vulpine intervention. “Fox dens are cool to study because they’re uncontrolled, […]

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should stop scraping live sea bottoms in the Gulf of Mexico for fishery studies, urges Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). The group contends that the NOAA trawls needlessly damage coral and other marine habitats seeking data that can obtained less obtrusively. Every year, NOAA conducts two bottom […]

Water resources will fluctuate increasingly and become more and more difficult to predict in snow-dominated regions across the Northern Hemisphere by later this century, according to a comprehensive new climate change study led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Although past research looked at the impacts of climate change on water availability, the new study […]

Research published this week in Science offers the clearest picture yet of the reverberating consequences of land mammal declines on food webs over the past 130,000 years. It’s not a pretty picture. “While about 6% of land mammals have gone extinct in that time, we estimate that more than 50% of mammal food web links […]

Pennsylvania children living near unconventional oil and gas (UOG) developments at birth were two to three times more likely to be diagnosed with leukemia between the ages of 2 and 7 than those who did not live near this oil and gas activity, after accounting for other factors that could influence cancer risk, a novel […]

Water levels on the Rhine River, Europe’s second-largest river, have continued to drop owing to soaring temperatures and lack of rainfall, preventing many vessels from navigating through the waters at full capacity. The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission captured part of the Rhine River near Cologne – showing the stark difference between August 2021 and August 2022. Flowing from […]

CORVALLIS, Ore. August 9, 2022 – Oregon State University scientists are proposing management changes on western federal lands that they say would result in more wolves and beavers and would re-establish ecological processes. In a paper published today in BioScience, “Rewilding the American West,” co-lead author William Ripple and 19 other authors suggest using portions of […]

WASHINGTON, August 6, 2022 – Today the USDA officially committed to reinstate the 2017 Organic Livestock and Poultry Practices (OLPP) rule, affirming that the USDA Organic label includes animal welfare protections—a major win for organic advocates, farmers, and consumers. Today’s pre-publication proposed rule reverses Trump administration moves that gutted the OLPP in 2018. “This is […]

For the generations who grew up watching Finding Nemo, it might not come as a surprise that the North American West Coast has its own version of the underwater ocean highway – the California Current marine ecosystem (CCME). The CCME extends from the southernmost tip of California up through Washington. Seasonal upward currents of cold, nutrient-rich […]

New evidence from Antarctica shows that toxic ‘fluorinated forever chemicals’ have increased markedly in the remote environment in recent decades and scientists believe CFC-replacements could be among likely sources. Known as forever chemicals because they do not break down naturally in the environment, chemicals such as perfluorocarboxylic acids (PFCAs) have a wide array of uses […]

SAN RAFAEL, Calif. (July 25, 2022) — More than 250 organizations are joining In Defense of Animals on August 1 to celebrate the third annual Respect for Fish Day. The awareness day highlights the issues fish face and spreads compassion for them. This year’s focus is the harmful impact of fishing and ghost gear on fish and other wild […]

Old Crow, Yukon, Canada – Delegates of the Gwich’in Nation from Alaska and Canada met in Old Crow on July 19, the first full day of the 2022 Gwich’in Gathering, to unanimously reaffirm a resolution calling for protections for the birthplace and nursery grounds of the Porcupine caribou herd. The resolution calls for the United […]

Continuing a 22-year downward trend, water levels in Lake Mead stand at their lowest since April 1937, when the reservoir was still being filled for the first time. As of July 18, 2022, Lake Mead was filled to just 27 percent of capacity. The largest reservoir in the United States supplies water to millions of people across seven […]

Washington, D.C.  July 21, 2022— Greenhouse gases are driving profound changes to the Earth’s climate, contributing to record-breaking heat waves and droughts,  millions of acres of wildfires, and widespread flooding from sea-level rise, among many other problems. In the face of this crisis, some industry advocates have tried to position natural gas as a “bridge fuel” […]

shutterstock. Nicole Allenden, University of New England; Amy Lykins, University of New England, and Annette Cowie What we eat and how we produce food matters. Food systems are responsible for more than a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. We cannot fully tackle the climate crisis without reducing the greenhouse footprint of our food. […]

Globally, June 2022 was the sixth-warmest June in the 143-year NOAA record. The year-to-date (January-June) global surface temperature was also the sixth warmest on record. According to NCEI’s Global Annual Temperature Outlook, there is a greater than 99% chance that 2022 will rank among the 10-warmest years on record but only an 11% chance that […]

After the 2018 wildfire in Paradise, Calif., many fire-damaged homes were razed. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Emily E. Schlickman, University of California, Davis; Brett Milligan, University of California, Davis, and Stephen M. Wheeler, University of California, Davis Wildfires in the American West are getting larger, more frequent and more severe. Although efforts are underway to create […]

NOAA Fisheries is initiating a review of designated critical habitat for endangered North Pacific right whales, of which there are only an estimated 30 animals remaining. The review is in response to a petition we received on March 10, 2022 from the Center for Biological Diversity and Save the North Pacific Right Whale. The petition requested […]

June 30, 2022 – Researchers at University College Cork (UCC) and the Swedish Museum of Natural History examined the end-Permian mass extinction (252 million years ago) that eliminated almost every species on Earth, with entire ecosystems collapsing. The researchers discovered a sharp spike in wildfire activity from this most devastating of mass extinctions. Promoted by rapid […]

Salmon famously travel hundreds of miles upstream to reach their home waters to spawn, but climate change is shrinking their destination. A new study offers high-resolution details on how Chinook salmon habitats are being lost on Bear Valley Creek, a headwater stream of the Salmon River in central Idaho. The study, published today in the AGU journal Geophysical Research […]