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Hometree’s restoration effort, says Ó Foghlú, will be based on the advice of ecologists and foresters. But the tentative vision is to return pine forests to the upper slopes of the valley, willow and alder to the floodplain, and oak and birch to the valley sides. The group will also work to regenerate blanket bogs and protect species-rich grasslands.But reforestation won’t be easy. Parts of these hills are so bereft of native trees that woods can’t easily regenerate. Centuries of heavy rainfall have also leached nutrients…

“If we’ve lost the ice, we’ve lost the 2-degree water,” Michael Litzow, shellfish assessment program manager with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told me. “Cold water, it’s their niche—they’re an Arctic animal.”The snow crab may rebound in a few years, so long as there aren’t any periods of warm water. But if warming trends continue, as scientists predict, the marine heat waves will return, pressuring the crab population again.Bones litter the wild part of St. Paul Island like Ezekiel’s Valley in the…

This story originally appeared in High Country News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.The first grainy film clip shows a black bear exploding out of the trail camera’s frame. In another, a mule deer stops munching wildflowers, backs away, and takes off in the opposite direction. In a third, a moose doesn’t move at all but stands there, vigilant. All three animals were reacting to sound bites from boom boxes in the woods, part of a study measuring the effect of outdoor recreationists’ noise on wildlife. The…

“I would feel relief and joy, that what we’re doing matters,” said 18-year-old Kian Tanner, “that when we speak out, when we create action, we can create positive change in the world.”The tension between the two sides was especially apparent while the defense was cross-examining the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses, attempting to prove that any solution would need to be far bigger than Montana could provide.“If Montana just stopped emitting CO2 today, if every farmer threw in the keys to their tractors, if I even handed you…

This story originally appeared in Hakai Magazine and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.In the Fram Strait off Greenland’s west coast, Véronique Merten encountered the foot soldiers of an invasion.Merten was studying the region’s biodiversity using environmental DNA, a method that allows scientists to figure out which species are living nearby by sampling the tiny pieces of genetic material they shed, like scales, skin, and poop. And here, in a stretch of the Arctic Ocean 400 kilometers north of where they’d ever…

To demonstrate its technology, Epic Cleantec, a water recycling company, has even brewed a beer called Epic OneWater Brew with purified gray water from a 40-story San Francisco apartment building.With the mega-drought and water crisis on the Colorado, the Rio Grande, and other Western rivers, “extreme decentralization” is making its way to other places in the American West, including Colorado, Texas, and Washington State. And decentralized projects are ongoing in Japan, India, and Australia. There are serious pressures on…

Even some species that are found while they are still alive are already on the brink. In fact, research suggests that it’s precisely the newly described species that tend to have the highest risk of going extinct. Many new species are only now being discovered because they’re rare, isolated, or both—factors that also make them easier to wipe out, said Fraga. In 2018 in Guinea, for instance, botanist Denise Molmou of the National Herbarium of Guinea in Conakry discovered a new plant species that, like many of its…

This contraction means the upper atmosphere is becoming less dense, which in turn reduces drag on satellites and other objects in low orbit—by around a third by 2070, calculates Ingrid Cnossen, a research fellow at the British Antarctic Survey.On the face of it, this is good news for satellite operators. Their payloads should stay operational for longer before falling back to Earth. But the problem is the other objects that share these altitudes. The growing amount of space junk—bits of equipment of various sorts left…

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.Seabirds evolved about 60 million years ago, as Earth’s continents drifted toward their current positions and modern oceans took shape. They spread across thousands of undisturbed islands in the widening seas. And as flying dinosaurs and giant omnivorous sea reptiles died out, seabirds also started filling an ecological niche as ecosystem engineers.They distribute nutrients, in the form of guano, that’s beneficial to…

“My view is that the US trade is largely a byproduct of other reasons for killing,” says Crawford Allan, a wildlife trade expert with the World Wildlife Fund. In Africa, he says, “nobody wastes anything. So if you kill an animal because it’s a danger to your community, then you eat the meat, you sell the skin, you sell the teeth, you sell the skull to taxidermy collectors.” Hippo parts like teeth and skin, he says, are not worth enough to local hunters to provide an important reason for killing them.Other experts echo…