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Categories: Environmental: Wildfires, Offbeat: Earth and Climate

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With help from an experienced underwater cave-diving team, researchers have constructed the most complete map to date of the microbial communities living in the submerged labyrinths beneath Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula. Researchers found the cave system's microbiome is distinct from the nearby sea, and microbial communities vary between cave systems forming distinct 'neighborhoods.'  

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High-intensity, often catastrophic, wildfires have become increasingly frequent across the Western U.S. Researchers quantified the value of managed low-intensity burning to dramatically reduce the risk of such fires for years at a time.

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Hummingbirds are highly maneuverable fliers, flitting forward and backward as they home in on flowers. But in the dense foliage many inhabit, they often encounter gaps that are too narrow for their wingspan. Since they can't bend their wings in flight, how do they get through? Researchers used high-speed cameras to capture their movements, discovering two unique strategies: they sidle through while fluttering, or fold their wings in a tuck and glide.

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A long-beaked echidna named after Sir David Attenborough and last seen by scientists in 1961 has been photographed for the first time in an Indonesian tropical forest. An international team of researchers worked with local communities to deploy over 80 camera traps to film the elusive animal. Besides rediscovering the echidna, the team uncovered a wealth of species completely new to science, including beetles, spiders, and a remarkable tree-dwelling shrimp.

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Some barnacles are 'morphing' to protect themselves from predatory warm-water sea snails, which are expanding into their territory due to climate change.

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Most wildfires in boreal forests, such as those in Canada, are caused by lightning strikes, according to a study aimed at attributing fire ignition sources globally. 

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Analyses of U.S. national forests shows that increased protections for two Alaskan forests is a key to meeting climate and biodiversity goals.

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When animals 'sing' sitting on the ground -- such as when crickets chirp -- their volume and reach increase dramatically, by as much as ten-fold. This result contradicts long-held beliefs in the field of animal communication, which presume the ground is a hindrance to sound transmission.

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Researchers studied how young trees respond to a hotter, drier climate. Their findings can help shape forest management policy and our understanding of how landscapes will change.

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Research on neighboring chimpanzee communities in the forests of West Africa suggests a warfare tactic not previously seen beyond humans is regularly used by our closest evolutionary relatives.

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The chance discovery of a note written in a 15th century Hebrew prayer book fills an important gap in the historical Italian earthquake record, offering a brief glimpse of a previously unknown earthquake affecting the Marche region in the central Apennines.  

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The remnants of an ancient planet that collided with Earth to form the Moon lie deep within the earth, according to a new model.

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Sunflowers famously turn their faces to follow the sun as it crosses the sky. But how do sunflowers 'see' the sun to follow it? Plant biologists show that they use a different, novel mechanism from that previously thought.

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Scrape, cluck, lay eggs -- that's it? Anyone involved in chicken farming knows that the animals are capable of much more. Researchers have found evidence that roosters could recognize themselves in a mirror. Whether this is successful, however, depends on the experimental conditions -- a finding that points beyond the experiment with roosters and could also be of importance for other animal species.

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New research suggests that increasingly severe weather driven by climate change may push oceangoing seabirds to their limits.  

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Recently discovered microfossils date back half a billion years. Resembling modern-day algae, they provide insight into early life in our oceans.

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A team has identified several factors to help answer a fundamental ecological question: why is there a ridiculous abundance of species some places on earth and a scarcity in others? What factors, exactly, drive animal diversity? They discovered that what an animal eats (and how that interacts with climate) shapes Earth's diversity.

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What if your house plant could tell you your water isn't safe? Scientists are closer to realizing this vision, having successfully engineered a plant to turn beet red in the presence of a banned, toxic pesticide. 

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Using satellite images, researchers found that fires in North America's boreal forest may be changing the environment in ways that researchers didn't previously anticipate.

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Using lake sediment cores, scientists determined how these subalpine ecosystems recovered after 4,800 years of fire.