As boreal forest wildfires increase in severity and frequency, new patterns of post-fire recovery are emerging. Research led by Jill Johnstone and colleagues at the U.S. National Science Foundation-supported Bonanza Creek Long-term Ecological Research site found that recent wildfires led to changes in tree species dominance that are persisting through post-fire succession in Alaska’s boreal forests. Boreal black […]
A review article published in Nature Climate Change evaluates whether severe winter weather in the United States, Europe and Asia is sensitive to Arctic temperatures. The lead author is NSF-funded scientist Judah Cohen, director of seasonal forecasting at Atmospheric and Environmental Research. Despite a warming planet, winter weather has remained surprisingly resilient across the mid-latitudes of the Northern […]
Sadness, more than other emotions, heightens craving to smoke and likelihood of relapse What drives a person to smoke cigarettes—and keeps one out of six U.S. adults addicted to tobacco use, at a cost of 480,000 premature deaths each year despite decades of anti-smoking campaigns? What role do emotions play? Why do some ex-smokers […]
Chickadees are interested in scents. That’s the news from a study out of Lehigh University, the first to document naturally hybridizing songbirds’ preference for the smell of their own species. Amber Rice, an evolutionary biologist at Lehigh, studies hybridization — when separate species come into contact and mate — to better understand how species originate […]
Image-Researchers studied changes in soil microbes in tundra near Denali National Park in Alaska. Credit: Ted Schuur Rising temperatures in the tundra of northern latitudes could affect microbial communities in ways likely to increase their production of the greenhouse gases methane and carbon dioxide, a new study of experimentally warmed Alaskan soil suggests. The […]
The National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.K. Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) have announced that they will jointly fund as much as $25 million in research, and make available additional funding for associated logistical support, to understand a massive Antarctic glacier whose collapse could significantly affect global sea level. NSF and NERC issued a […]