Right now, a prairie dog in Colorado is busy increasing soil carbon retention, increasing water infiltration, and clipping vegetation that will help maintain local grasslands and provide nutritious forage for large herbivores like cattle and bison. And, somewhere in Mexico, a pollinating bat is ensuring agave plants make good tequila.
articles
'Weedy' fish species to take over our future oceans
University of Adelaide researchers have for the first time demonstrated that the ocean acidification expected in the future will reduce fish diversity significantly, with small ‘weedy’ species dominating marine environments.
Blue-green algae makes a colourful, scummy return to Alberta lakes
It’s slimy, it’s stinky and like a creature from a summer horror flick, it’s coming back to Alberta lakes this vacation season.
Blue-green algae—the scum-inducing bacteria to blame for the annual ‘eww’ factor in local swimming holes—should be blooming by mid-July, says a University of Alberta water expert.
California Projected to Get Wetter Through This Century
UC Riverside researchers analyze 38 climate models and project California will get on average 12 percent more precipitation through 2100.
Krill hotspot fuels incredible biodiversity in Antarctic region
There are so many Antarctic krill in the Southern Ocean that the combined mass of these tiny aquatic organisms is more than that of the world’s 7.5 billion human inhabitants.
Scientists have long known about this important zooplankton species, but they haven’t been certain why particular regions or “hotspots” in the Southern Ocean are so productive.
Hot new imagery of wintering bats suggests a group behavior for battling white-nose syndrome
Hot new imagery from temperature-sensing cameras suggests that bats who warm up from hibernation together throughout the winter may be better at surviving white nose syndrome, a disease caused by a cold-loving fungus ravaging insect-eating bat populations in the United States and Canada. The study by researchers with Massey University in New Zealand and the USGS was published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution.