Take a trip down into the soil beneath a field of crops. You won’t find just dirt, water, and creepy-crawlies. You’ll also find reactions that remind you of high school chemistry lab.

A new study conducted at the University of Michigan reveals a previously unrecognized threat to monarch butterflies: Mounting levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide reduce the medicinal properties of milkweed plants that protect the iconic insects from disease.

Coastal cliffs from Santa Barbara to San Diego might crumble at more than twice the historical rate by the year 2100 as sea levels rise.

They exist all over the world, are among the most productive ecosystems on Earth and are home to a diverse array of wildlife. They also are essential to the global economy. They are estuaries — coastal embayments where fresh river water and salty ocean water meet.

Fish that ‘farm’ their own patches of seaweed alter their ‘cropping’ practices under high CO2 conditions, researchers at the University of Adelaide in Australia have found.

Coral reefs support a quarter of all marine life, feed hundreds of millions of people and contribute vastly to the global economy. But they are dying in mass bleaching events, as climate change warms our oceans and breaks down vital relationships between corals and energy-providing algae.

The Baltic Sea is home to some of the world’s largest dead zones, areas of oxygen-starved waters where most marine animals can’t survive. But while parts of this sea have long suffered from low oxygen levels, a new study by a team in Finland and Germany shows that oxygen loss in coastal areas over the past century is unprecedented in the last 1500 years. The research is published today in the European Geosciences Union journal Biogeosciences.

Tropical forests are important to all of us on the planet. As well as being home for rare and fascinating biodiversity (like the lemurs of Madagascar), tropical forests lock up enormous amounts of carbon helping to stabilise our climate.  However tropical forests are also home to many hundreds of thousands of people whose lives can be affected by international conservation policies.

In a perfect world, garden plants would feed themselves. As it is, we’ve got to help them along sometimes.

Electronic radio tags could be used to track invasive Asian hornets and stop them colonising the UK and killing honeybees, new research shows.