News by Subject Policy & Ethics

Climate change is the big wild card when it comes to the survival of many Arctic species. A new study shows that climate change will be both good and bad for Svalbard barnacle goose populations -- although the balance may tip depending upon the severity of future temperature increases, and how other species react.

A research team investigated the impact of extreme fires on previously intact carbon stores by studying the soil and vegetation of the boreal forest and how they changed after a record-setting fire season in the Northwest Territories in 2014. They collected 200 soil samples and used radiocarbon dating to estimate the carbon age. They found combustion of legacy carbon in nearly half of the samples taken from young forests (less than 60 years old).

Injecting carbon dioxide (CO2) deep below the seabed could be an important strategy for mitigating climate change, according to some experts. However, scientists need a reliable way to monitor such sites for leakage of the greenhouse gas. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' journal Environmental Science & Technology have studied natural sources of CO2 release off the coast of Italy, using what they learned to develop models that could be applied to future storage sites.

Set-aside patches of high-quality forest on palm oil plantations may help protect species like orangutans, as well as various species of insects, birds and bats -- many of which are threatened with extinction in areas of Indonesia and Malaysia, where 85% of the world's palm oil is produced.

Since the first Homo sapiens emerged in Africa roughly 300,000 years ago, grasslands have sustained humanity and thousands of other species. But today, those grasslands are shifting beneath our feet. Global change -- which includes climate change, pollution and other widespread environmental alterations -- is transforming the plant species growing in them, and not always in the ways scientists expected, a new study published Monday revealed.