Coastal mangroves are among the most imperiled ecosystems on earth, with current estimates indicating that up to 67 per cent have been lost to date – according to the United Nations science wing.

“The stakes are high, because mangrove ecosystems provide benefits and services that are essential for life,” said Irina Bokova, Director-General of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in a message on the International Day for the Conservation of the Mangrove Ecosystem.

The world lost nearly 49 million acres of forest in 2015 to logging, wildfires, palm oil plantations, and other development activity, according to new data by the conservation group Global Forest Watch. That is equal to an area roughly the size of Nebraska, Climate Central reported. 

A new study found that Caribbean staghorn corals (Acropora cervicornis) are benefiting from “coral gardening,” the process of restoring coral populations by planting laboratory-raised coral fragments on reefs.

The research, led by scientists at the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science and partners, has important implications for the long-term survival of coral reefs worldwide, which have been in worldwide decline from multiple stressors such as climate change and ocean pollution.

A lonely bird call breaks my concentration and I glance upward. Where glacier-topped mountains should be filling the horizon, instead my view is obscured by a strange orange haze. Even the bright sun has given up. It seems to float in the sky as a faint pink ball.

I am a field ecologist working east of the Denali mountain range in Alaska, but the postcard-worthy view of my sites today is obscured by smoke drifting across the border from wildfires burning throughout British Columbia. I have been studying boreal wildfires for years and have a strong understanding of the importance of fire to the boreal forest of Canada.

For nearly a century, the O’Shaughnessy seawall has held back the sand and seas of San Francisco’s Ocean Beach. At work even longer: the Galveston seawall, built after America’s deadliest hurricane in 1900 killed thousands in Texas.

A new study on mosses found in the polar regions reveals when and how often they have migrated across the Equator.

Mosses are the dominant flora in Antarctica, yet little is known of when and how they got there. The majority of Antarctica’s moss flora (~45% of species) has a curious distribution pattern – a pattern with species only occupying regions in the high latitudes of both hemispheres, with no or very small populations at higher elevations in the tropical regions. This non-continuous distribution pattern has puzzled scientists, including biologists such as Darwin and Wallace, since the 19th century.

This summer, NOAA and partner scientists will conduct their most collaborative ocean acidification sampling of the Gulf of Mexico yet. Set to depart today, July 18th, the Gulf of Mexico Ecosystems and Carbon Cruise (GOMECC-3) will travel through international waters with 24 scientists from the United States, Mexico and Cuba on board.

A new research tool to safeguard drinking water is now keeping a watchful eye on Lake Erie. This week, a robotic lake-bottom laboratory began tracking the levels of dangerous toxins produced by cyanobacteria that bloom each summer in the lake's western basin.

The goal is to provide advance warning to municipal drinking water managers and thereby prevent a recurrence of the water crisis that left more than 400,000 Toledo-area residents without safe drinking water for about two days in early August 2014 due to high levels of microcystin toxins.

Coral reefs in the Red Sea’s Gulf of Aqaba can resist rising water temperatures. If they survive local pollution, these corals may one day be used to re-seed parts of the world where reefs are dying. The scientists urge governments to protect the Gulf of Aqaba Reefs.

Coral reefs are dying on a massive scale around the world, and global warming is driving this extinction. The planet’s largest reef, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, is currently experiencing enormous coral bleaching for the second year in a row, while last year left only a third of its 2300-km ecosystem unbleached. The demise of coral reefs heralds the loss of some of the planet’s most diverse ecosystems.

Three new species of toads have been discovered living in Nevada's Great Basin in an expansive survey of the 190,000 square mile ancient lake bottom. Discoveries of new amphibians are extremely rare in the United States with only three new frog species discovered since 1985 - and toad species are even more rare, with the last species discovered north of Mexico, the now extinct Wyoming toad, in 1968.

"We've found the toads in small, wet habitats surrounded by high-desert completely cut off from other populations," Dick Tracy, a renowned biology professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, and lead scientist on the project, said. "These are absolutely new, true species that have been separated from other populations for 650,000 years."