Public Affairs — Page 9

A warmer environment could mean more mosquitos as it becomes harder for their predators to control the population, according to a recent study.

In a first-of-its-kind study for North America, scientists accumulated a list of potential invasive species for Florida, and researchers deemed 40 pose the greatest threat.

Adding protruding rocks to restored streams can help boost the abundance of aquatic insects, benefiting the fish, amphibians, reptiles, and birds that eat them, and promoting overall stream health.

A 20-year experiment in the Sierra Nevada confirms that different forest management techniques — prescribed burning, restoration thinning or a combination of both — are effective at reducing the risk of catastrophic wildfire in California.

Using weather radar and bird count data, an international team of researchers reveals that millions of birds take flight after Dutch New Year’s Eve fireworks begin, with effects extending up to 10km away from each pyrotechnics display.

Jessica Murray publishes in the journal ‘Geoderma’; presents at Ecological Society of America Annual Meeting on the basic mechanisms of soil carbon sequestration in canopy soils from sites in Costa Rica.

New research led by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center scientists offers participatory action research as a potential bridge between the macro scope of the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the needs and desires of local communities.

Newly published research describes the successful pilot of a novel method to study how well grassland birds are faring on croplands. The study may serve as a model for monitoring wildlife on working lands more generally, which can also include cattle ranches and logged forests.

A new study from U.S. Geological Survey biologists shows that grassland birds in North Dakota have responded more negatively to the expansion of corn and soybeans as compared with oil and gas development and other types of agriculture.

New research underlines the need to monitor and understand how changes in the supply of organic material affect life in the sea, especially in view of climate changes.

A new study that analyzed more that 500,000 camera grid images taken at the HREC in the years before and after the Mendocino Complex Fire is one of the first studies to compare continuous wildlife observations made before and after a megafire.

A new analysis of National Park Service data published in the journal Ecosphere shows a steady increase in non-native plant cover since 2014, and rapid regrowth of non-native annual grass and herbaceous species after the 2018 Woolsey Fire, which burned nearly 80% of the entire region.

A new method developed by the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior has counted Africa’s largest colony of bats with the greatest accuracy yet. The method uses GoPro cameras to record bats and then applies artificial intelligence (AI) to detect animals without the need for human observers.

Honey bees are more faithful to their flower patches than bumble bees when it comes to returning to collect more pollen and nectar, according to a study by U.S. Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service scientists.

The Wildlife Conservation Society released footage of a wolverine foraging for fish frozen in a perennial spring along a river in the Alaskan Arctic. It is the first-known observation of a wolverine eating fish – usual prey includes everything from snowshoe hares to caribou to voles.

In a study published in the journal Ecology, a University of Michigan-led research team used a pint-sized predator-prey-parasite system inside 20-gallon water tanks to test the “healthy herds hypothesis.”

Researchers compared cacao productivity and arthropod diversity in the presence and in the absence of birds and bats in organically managed, native cacao agroforests from northwestern Peru. Their results showed that the presence of birds and bats increased cacao productivity by 118%.

Healthy bat and bird populations don’t only help to keep the endangered tropical dry forests of northern Peru in equilibrium. For the regions’ farmers of cacao—the main ingredient in chocolate— these predators are worth almost $1,000 per hectare of annual production.

Tick season is here, along with the increased danger of Lyme disease, and it turns out the tiny arachnids are even tougher than scientists previously thought. A recent study in Ecological Monographs shows blacklegged ticks (Ixodes scapularis) are actually really good at surviving extreme cold and heat in nature.

Scientists at the ARS’s Jornada Experimental Range and Army Research Laboratory in N.M. used 100 years of measurements of perennial grass growth from their Long-Term Agroecosystem Research site to identify how climate controls abrupt changes in grass cover.