As much as 70 percent of California was covered by wildfire smoke during parts of 2020 and 2021, according to a new study ..read more

To achieve global biodiversity targets, conservationists and governments must prioritize the establishment and effective management of large, interconnected protected areas with high ecological integrity, researchers argue in a new essay ..read more

A recent boom in the purple sea urchin population off the southern Oregon Coast appears to have had an indirect and negative impact on the gray whales that usually forage in the region, a new study shows ..read more

Access to gardens and citizen science projects at school can help promote pro-conservation behaviour among pupils, a new study shows ..read more

A new article has found that climate change is the most prominent threat to pollinators -- such as bumblebees, wasps, and butterflies -- who are essential for biodiversity conservation, crop yields and food security. The research suggests that many of the threats to pollinators result from human activities ..read more

PES programs are currently structured in ways that could limit their participation or create incentives to drop out before the full environmental benefits are realized ..read more

A special review examines highly-cited papers in statistical ecology. The review, which covers a century of research, details how models and concepts have evolved alongside increasing computational power ..read more

Understanding how salt marsh grass stays healthy is of crucial ecological importance, and studying the ways bacteria interact with these plants is key. Thanks to recent advances in genomic technology, biologists have begun to reveal never-before-seen ecological processes ..read more

Grassland provides many services for humans, animals and nature, such as feed production, carbon storage and recreation. Researchers spent two years investigating permanent grassland, its utilization, soils and plant communities in order to quantify the resulting ecosystem services. Grassland performs best when different types of use such as meadows, pastures and unfertilized extensive grassland exist together in a mosaic landscape ..read more

The researchers found that birds were more evolutionarily similar on smaller, more isolated islands than on larger, less remote places. The team had expected to find that forested areas had more numerous and more varied species of birds compared to farmland areas. But they were surprised to find that the opposite was true: Areas with farms and human settlements had more species of birds and greater diversity than forested areas ..read more