Using too much fertilizer is a very bad idea. It doesn't help crops, and in fact can be harmful to them. Excess fertilizer runs off and contributes to river and stream contamination and a new study shows that it is bad for the climate too!
But farmers sometimes think that if some is good, more MUST be better!
Helping farmers around the globe apply more precise amounts of fertilizer nitrogen is a great objective that can improve crop yields, reduce pollution, and combat climate change.
That's the conclusion of a study published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In the paper, researchers at Michigan State University (MSU) provide an improved prediction of nitrogen fertilizer's contribution to greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural fields.
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While one may think that forest and lake ecosystems are two separate networks, new research shows how forest debris is an important contributor to freshwater food chains. How? Debris in the form of organic carbon from trees washes into freshwater lakes, which consequently supplements the diets of microscopic zooplankton and the fish that feed on them. Researchers at the University of Cambridge conducted a study at Daisy Lake in Ontario, Canadian by observing Yellow Perch fish from different parts of the water body with varying degrees of surrounding forest cover. Carbon from forest debris has a different elemental mass than carbon produced by algae in the aquatic food chain. By analyzing the young Perch that had been born that year, scientists were able to determine that at least 34% of the fish biomass comes from vegetation, increasing to 66% in areas surrounded by rich forest. Essentially, the more forest around the edge of the lake, the fatter the fish in that part of the lake were. Similarly, the sparser the forest leaves, the smaller the fish.
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With Europe and the United States slow to ban the pesticides that science says is probably drastically harming our bee populations, could one of the world's most venomous spiders hold one solution to saving our pollinators?
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¿Cómo dice el dicho? ¿Sólo tú puedes prevenir los incendios forestales? O, ¿sólo las cabras pueden prevenir los incendios forestales? Vas a entender la confusión cuando se reúnan las últimas cuadrillas de prevención de incendios de la zona de la BahÃa: Las cabras.
California se enfrenta a un pronóstico de lo que podrÃa ser la peor temporada de incendios gracias a las condiciones de sequÃa y una gran acumulación de yesca. Profesionales de la gestión de incendios están trabajando antes de que sea demasiado tarde para tratar de limpiar la hierba alta y otros riesgos de incendio con la esperanza de reducir la propagación de los incendios inevitables que ya están cruzando el estado.
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Even though daytime temperatures in the tropics of Mars can be about –20°C, a summer afternoon there might feel about the same as an average winter day in southern England or Minneapolis. That’s because there’s virtually no wind chill on the Red Planet, according to a new study—the first to give an accurate sense of what it might feel like to spend a day walking about on our celestial neighbor.
"I hadn't really thought about this before, but I'm not surprised," says Maurice Bluestein, a biomedical engineer and wind chill expert recently retired from Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis. The new findings, he says, "will be useful, as people planning to colonize Mars need to know what they’re getting themselves into."
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