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Global biodiversity has declined between 2% and 11% during the 20th century due to land-use change alone, according to a large multi-model study published in Science. Projections show climate change could become the main driver of biodiversity decline by the mid-21st century.

A study published April 25, in the journal Science provides the strongest evidence to date that not only is nature conservation successful, but that scaling conservation interventions up would be transformational for halting and reversing biodiversity loss—a crisis that can lead to ecosystem collapses and a planet less able to support life—and reducing the effects of climate change.

Colonies of emperor penguin chicks were wiped out last year as global warming eroded their icy homes, a study published Thursday found, despite the birds' attempts to adapt to the shrinking landscape.

Governments in the Mesoamerican Reef region are exploring the use of nature-based solutions to strengthen coral health and societal benefits for coastal communities. A new study led by Stanford researchers in collaboration with scientists from the World Wildlife Fund, the Healthy Reefs Initiative, and others from the Smart Coasts project quantified the outcomes of different watershed interventions to support coral health at regional versus...

Thanks to drastic and evidence-based solutions, more southern mountain caribou roam Western Canada today than in previous decades; however, herd numbers are too fragile to sustain themselves without continued intervention.

While it's common knowledge that mountaintops are colder than the valleys below, a new University of Vermont (UVM) study is flipping the script on what we know about forests and climate.

Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences identifies how gentrified parts of a city have notably more urban wildlife than ungentrified parts of the same city, further limiting marginalized communities' opportunity to connect with nature.

Researchers mapping tropical forests have found many more roads than declared by official sources, which is raising fears of a huge increase in environmental degradation as the pace of road building increases.

A long-term study at the University of Cincinnati has documented the rise of invasive species in a forest devastated by a tornado 25 years ago.

A new study using NASA satellite data reveals how drought affects the recovery of western ecosystems from fire, a result that could provide meaningful information for conservation efforts.

A pair of underwater researchers at the U.S. Navy's Naval Undersea Warfare Center, working with a colleague from the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, also in the U.S., has found that sounds emanating from coral reefs change as the moon rises and sets.

Arachnophobia can make humans flee at the sight of a brown recluse, black widow or even a daddy long legs, but animal predators of spiders know no such fear.

Decommissioned offshore structures offer limited long-term ecological benefits if they are simply left in the ocean to serve as artificial reefs, a new study suggests.

What maintains stability within an ecosystem and prevents a single best competitor from displacing other species from a community? Does ecosystem stability depend upon the presence of a wide variety of species, as early ecologists believed, or does diversity do the exact opposite, and lead to instability, as modern theory predicts?

Killer whales foraging in deep submarine canyons off the coast of California represent a distinct subpopulation that uses specialized hunting techniques to catch marine mammals, Josh McInnes at the University of British Columbia and colleagues report on March 20 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

A network of artificial streams is teaching scientists how California's mountain waterways—and the ecosystems that depend on them—may be impacted by a warmer, drier climate.

Marine heat waves in the northeast Pacific Ocean create ongoing and complex disruptions of the ocean food web that may benefit some species but threaten the future of many others, a new study has shown.

Statistics made available in January 2024 show that while deforestation in the Amazon fell by half in 2023, it increased by 43% in the Cerrado, the Brazilian savanna. A research group at the State University of Campinas's Institute of Biology (IB-UNICAMP) in Brazil dedicated to ecological studies on the Cerrado has already highlighted the urgency of combating destruction of the biome. However, it is...

An ecological imbalance in a lake can usually be attributed to increased nutrient inputs. This results in increased phytoplankton growth, oxygen deficiency, toxic cyanobacterial blooms and fish deaths. Until now, controls in lake management have focused primarily on phosphorus inputs to counteract this effect.

With fish stocks declining globally, more than 190 countries recently made a commitment to protect about a third of the world's oceans within "Marine Protected Areas," or MPAs by the year 2030. But these designated areas of the ocean where fishing is either regulated or outright banned can come at a huge cost to some coastal communities, according to a new analysis.

The Bayreuth plant ecologists Prof Dr. Steven Higgins and Dr. Timo Conradi argue in favor of interpreting the coming climatic changes from the perspective of plants in order better to assess the risks of climate change for ecosystems.

Tuna is one of the most popular seafoods worldwide. But this protein-rich fish can build up high levels of methylmercury from feeding on contaminated prey, like smaller fish or crustaceans. Despite efforts to reduce mercury emissions into the environment, researchers report in ACS' Environmental Science & Technology Letters that levels in tuna appear to be unchanged since 1971. They warn that more aggressive emission...

Spruce, pine, fir and other trees tower across the frigid swaths of land that span North America, northern Europe and Russia in a great ring around the world. These boreal forests constitute the largest land ecosystem and the northernmost forests on Earth.

A large number of historical spy-satellite photographs from the Cold War Era were declassified decades ago. This valuable remote sensing data has been utilized by scientists across a wide range of disciplines from archaeology to civil engineering. However, its use in ecology and conservation remains limited.