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Categories: Environmental: Ecosystems, Geoscience: Geography

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To protect the Amazon and support the wellbeing of its people, its economy needs to shift from environmentally harmful production to a model built around the diversity of indigenous and rural communities, and standing forests.

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Groundwater is a vital resource, sustaining plants and ecosystems, ensuring agricultural production and serving as a core component of drinking water supplies. However, climate change and anthropogenic pressures can threaten groundwater availability, especially in southwestern Europe. This threat was evaluated by a research team using multidecadal data from more than 12,000 groundwater wells in Portugal, Spain, France, and Italy. The surprising finding: Groundwater levels are not declining everywhere as widely believed, but primarily in semi-arid regions with intensive agriculture and frequent droughts. Declines are also observed in temperate regions associated with large urban areas. The authors conclude that, with suitable management practices, groundwater can be utilized sustainably.

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The first continent-wide mapping study of plant life across Antarctica reveals growth in previously uncharted areas and is set to inform conservation measures across the region. The satellite survey of mosses, lichens and algae across the continent will form a baseline for monitoring how Antarctica's vegetation responds to climate change.

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Seeds, twigs, and insect parts found under two miles of ice confirm Greenland's ice sheet melted in the recent past, the first direct evidence that the center -- not just the edges -- of the two-mile-deep ice melted away in the recent geological past. The new research indicates that the giant ice sheet is more fragile than scientists had realized until the last few years -- and reveals increased risk of sea-level catastrophe in a warmer future.

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In Brazil, climate and other human-made environmental changes threaten decades-long efforts to fight schistosomiasis, a widespread and debilitating parasitic disease. Now, researchers have developed models that can predict how the disease risk will shift in response to environmental changes.

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Using state of the art techniques, researchers use vibrations from traffic to measure underground soil moisture.

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Computational modeling shows that plate tectonics weren't necessary for early continents.

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The rising earth beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet will likely become a major factor in future sea level rise, a new study suggests.

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A new study suggests that Earth's natural forces could substantially reduce Antarctica's impact on rising sea levels, but only if carbon emissions are swiftly reduced in the coming decades. By the same token, if emissions continue on the current trajectory, Antarctic ice loss could lead to more future sea level rise than previously thought.

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Researchers have published new findings on how leaf-eating insects affect forest ecosystems worldwide. Researchers are aware of how large herbivores cycle nutrients in forests. They know much less, however, about how leaf-eating insects impact forest carbon and nutrient cycling.

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Aerosol particles imbue climate models with uncertainty. New work reveals where in the world and under what conditions new particles are born.

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Shifts in the Earth's continental plates that drove long-term changes in sea level set the stage for the evolution of the earliest animals on Earth, a study suggests.

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A new study highlights how a combination of environmental stressors -- namely plastic pollution and seawater flooding -- can increase the threats faced by plants in some of the planet's critical ecosystems. It showed that both stressors had some effects on the species tested, but being exposed to both microplastics and flooding together -- a threat likely to increase as a result of climate change and plastic use -- had a more pronounced impact on their resource allocation.

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Commercially important marine fish and invertebrate species will likely shift northwards under a warmer climate, according to new research.

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Hotter conditions prevent two tiny organisms working together for mutual benefit, new research shows.

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Current climate policies imply a high risk for tipping of critical Earth system elements, even if temperatures return to below 1.5 C of global warming after a period of overshoot. A new study indicates that this risk can be minimized if the warming is swiftly reversed. That is why reducing emissions in the current decade is crucial for the stability of the Earth systems functions, researchers write. They analyzed the tipping risks for four interconnected core climate tipping elements: the Greenland Ice Sheet, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), and the Amazon Rainforest.

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Soil liquefaction that results in infrastructure damage has long been a point of contention for urban planners and engineers. Accurately predicting the soil liquefaction risk of a region could help overcome this challenge. Accordingly, researchers applied artificial intelligence to generate soil liquefaction risk maps, superseding already published risk maps.

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Marine biologists are providing a glimpse into coral 'bleaching' responses to stress, using imaging technology to pinpoint coral survival rates following multiple bleaching events off the island of Maui. Using a time series of coral reef 3D models from Maui, the researchers tracked the bleaching response of 1,832 coral colonies from 2014 to 2021. The seven-year data set provided detailed imagery of the reefs year-by-year, allowing the team to identify patterns of coral growth and survivorship through sequential bleaching events that occurred in 2015 and 2019.

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Clues to future sea level rise have been revealed by the first detailed maps of the underside of a floating ice shelf in Antarctica. An international research team deployed an unmanned submersible beneath the Dotson Ice Shelf in West Antarctica.

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New research led proposes a plan to safeguard Earth's imperiled biodiversity by cryogenically preserving biological material on the moon. The moon's permanently shadowed craters are cold enough for cryogenic preservation without the need for electricity or liquid nitrogen.