In the future of wildlife tracking, sea otters have their own social network.

Whereas we might carry cell phones or tablets, each sea otter has a small, solar-powered tag clipped carefully to one of its flippers. When the sea otters gather to nap at the ocean’s surface, their tags boot up, and check in with one another. Who else did the sea otter interact with today, where, and when?

The ocean is changing around the world—less oxygen, warmer water, higher acidity. The ability to quantify and observe those changes has never been more important, says Maia Hoeberechts, a scientist with the University of Victoria’s world-leading Ocean Networks Canada (ONC).

As far as anyone can tell, the cold-water crayfish Faxonius eupunctus makes its home in a 30-mile stretch of the Eleven Point River and nowhere else in the world. According to a new study, the animal is most abundant in the middle part its range, a rocky expanse in southern Missouri – with up to 35,000 cubic feet of chilly Ozark river water flowing by each second.

Access to wood fuels for cooking must be considered when formulating policy to deal with food insecurity in sub-Saharan Africa, according to researchers who advocate expanding the effort to improve wood-fuel systems and make them more sustainable.

Times are tough for 31 of Michigan’s 45 varieties of freshwater mussels. Sporting evocative names like wavy-rayed lampmussel and round pigtoe, these residents of the state’s rivers are imperiled by habitat disruption and pollution and are also threatened by climate change.

Cleaning up beaches could boost local economies in addition to preserving natural treasures and animal habitats.

In southern California’s Orange County alone, the economic benefits of beach cleanup could range from $13 per resident in a three-month period if debris were reduced by 25 percent to $42 per resident with a 75 percent drop in plastics and other trash along the oceanfront, according to a new study. That could mean up to a $46 million boost to the county’s economy in just one summer.

New research published today in Nature Ecology & Evolution demonstrates the extraordinary value of Earth’s remaining intact forests for addressing climate change and protecting wildlife, critical watersheds, indigenous cultures, and human health.  Yet the global policy and science communities do not differentiate among the relative values of different types of forest landscapes—which range from highly intact ones to those which are heavily logged, fragmented, burnt, drained and/or over-hunted—due in part to the lack of a uniform way of measuring their quality.

Scientists from Oldenburg and Bremerhaven verify theory of the role of the South Pacific in natural atmospheric CO2 fluctuations

The interplay between surface-water salinity and climate change in Central New York is the subject of a recent paper by researchers in Syracuse University’s College of Arts and Sciences.

NASA and the nonprofit Conservation International are partnering to use global Earth observations from space to improve regional efforts that assess natural resources for conservation and sustainable management.