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The USDA Forest Service in the Boundary Waters Canoe Wilderness Area (BWCWA) will continue to use controlled burns without worrying about fish health in associated watersheds, researchers say.

“Fire is a part of this community,” said soil scientist Randall Kolka of the USDA Forest Service Northern Research Station, one of the lead authors in the study. “By using it you can lessen the chance of wildfire.”

Controlled burns prevent wildfires from ripping through the BWCWA in northern Minnesota. The million-acre area encompasses forested hills, wetlands, over 1,100 lakes, and hundreds of miles of streams. Without occasional burns, fallen trees accumulate like matchsticks, creating the perfect environment for uncontrollable wildfires.

In the past three decades, temperatures have risen by 2.5 °C in Spain, surpassing the European average of 0.95°C. Mountain ranges such as the Pyrenees are also subject to climate variations, however climate change does not affect all regions equally, hence the need for in-depth, long-term observation of these changes. 

In order to analyse this climate change in the Pyrenees, a team from Rovira i Virgili University’s Centre for Climate Change collected hundreds of climate series from meteorological observatories on the southern side of the Central Pyrenees and analysed the most complete and representative series from the area for the period 1910–2013. 

How transportation noise affects the health of people remains in many aspects unexplained. Since 2014, an interdisciplinary Swiss consortium has been studying the short- and long-term effects of transportation noise for the population in Switzerland in the frame of the SiRENE study of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).

Increased risk for developing cardiovascular diseases

The results published so far show that aircraft, rail and road traffic noise in Switzerland leads to adverse health effects. For cardiovascular disease mortality, the most distinct association was found for road noise. The risk of dying of a myocardial infarction increases by 4 per cent per 10 decibel increase in road noise at home. Also the risk of hypertension and heart failure increases with transportation noise. "Particularly critical are most likely noise events at night regularly disturbing sleep," says Martin Röösli, principal investigator of SiRENE and professor of environmental epidemiology at Swiss TPH and the University of Basel. "The threshold for negative health impact is lower than previously suspected."

On the heels of President Donald Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, a new Cornell University study finds that labels matter when it comes to acceptance of climate science.

The U.S. public doubts the existence of “global warming” more than it doubts “climate change” – and Republicans are driving the effect, the research shows.

A new study in the journal Nature Communications by researchers from Geophysical Institute, University of Bergen and Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research, Norway, and University of Oxford, UK, demonstrates that there is a clear potential for practical and useful predictions of northwestern European and Arctic climate based on the state of the ocean.

"We particularly predict that Norwegian air temperature will decrease over the coming years, although staying above the long-term (1981–2010) average. Winter Arctic sea ice extent will remain low but with a general increase toward 2020", lead author Marius Årthun says.