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Too Much Dead Wood Can Fuel Severe Wildfires, Affecting Forest Ecosystems

Healthy forest ecosystems need dead wood to provide important habitat for birds and mammals, but there can be too much of a good thing when dead wood fuels severe wildfires. A scientist with the U.S. Forest Service's Pacific Southwest Research Station (PSW) compared historic and recent data from a forest in California's central Sierra Nevada region to determine how logging and fire exclusion have changed the amounts and sizes of dead wood over time. Results were recently published in Forest Ecology and Management.

12 Feb 2015

Natural Methane Seepage Occurring for Millions of Years near Arctic Ocean

Natural seepage of methane offshore the Arctic archipelago Svalbard has been occurring periodically for at least 2,7 million years. Major events of methane emissions happened at least twice during this period, according to a new study.

6 Feb 2015

Female Sticklebacks Rather than Males Prepare Offspring to Cope With Rapid Climate Change

Bremerhaven/Sylt, 3rd February 2015. Researchers at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) have shown that three-spined sticklebacks in the North Sea pass on information concerning their living environment to their offspring, without genetic changes.

4 Feb 2015

Holistic Analysis on Effects of Ocean Acidification on Marine Life

Many marine organisms--such as coral, clams, mussels, sea urchins, barnacles, and certain microscopic plankton--rely on equilibrated chemical conditions and pH levels in the ocean to build their calcium-based shells and other structures. A new analysis published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology provides a holistic analysis of how species will be affected worldwide under different climate scenarios.

4 Feb 2015