A new study of Peruvian frogs living at a wide variety of elevations—from the Amazon floodplain to high Andes peaks—lends support to the idea that lowland amphibians are at higher risk from future climate warming.

An afternoon rainstorm might seem like an inconvenience at times, but rainfall is an essential part of the world ecosystem. Most of us know this.

Led by VTT, the EU North State project has developed a new method of using satellite images to evaluate the forest carbon balance. The carbon balance indicates how much carbon is sequestered or released by forests each year. This enables the carbon balance to be displayed on digital maps, with an accuracy of up to ten metres.

A new study from the University of Eastern Finland presents, for the first time, the isotopic fingerprint of nitrous oxide produced by Arctic soils. The finding opens new avenues for predicting future trends in atmospheric nitrous oxide as well as in identifying climate change mitigation actions in the Arctic, a region that is particularly sensitive to climate change.

To find out how rising temperatures could affect species diversity, biologists from the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) and the Leipzig University have developed a simple experiment: they covered the bottom of different Petri dishes with litter material, then put in two species of springtails, that is, arthropods only a few millimetres in size, and then added mites feeding on springtails. Subsequently, for some of the Petri dishes they increased the ambient temperature from originally 13.5°C to 18.5°C and for some other Petri dishes to 23.5°C. In those Petri dishes, the temperatures were hence five, respectively ten degrees higher than the conditions to which the animals had been exposed to in long-term cultures over years. This created simplified miniature ecosystems under climate change conditions, in which the springtail species that peacefully coexist in the wild represented the prey, and the mites represented the predators. For two months, the researchers then observed how the interactions between the three species would develop with different temperatures.

Turbulence strong enough to catapult unbuckled passengers and crew around the aircraft cabin could become twice or even three times as common because of climate change, according to a new study from the University of Reading published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences (AAS), an international journal published by Springer and hosted by the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Potentially explosive methane gas leaking from energy wells may travel extensively through groundwater and pose a safety risk, according to a new study by University of Guelph researchers.

Urbanization and the notion of smart cities have been emerging topics for some time now. This is no surprise, given that urban residents accounted for 54 percent of the total global population in 2015, and are expected to grow to 60 percent by 2030, according to the World Health Organization.

For every tropical depression, tropical storm and hurricane in the Atlantic and eastern North Pacific basins, a comprehensive review, known as a Tropical Cyclone Report, is performed by the National Hurricane Center.

Climate scientists have shown that the early mitigation needed to limit eventual warming below potentially dangerous levels has a climate ‘payback’ much earlier than previously thought.