The forests you see today are not what you will see in the future. That’s the overarching finding from a new study on the resilience of Rocky Mountain forests, led by Colorado State University.

Researchers analyzed data from nearly 1,500 sites in five states — Colorado, Wyoming, Washington, Idaho, and Montana — and measured more than 63,000 seedlings after 52 wildfires that burned over the past three decades. They wanted to understand if and how changing climate over the last several decades affected post-fire tree regeneration, a key indicator of forest resilience.

The Thomas Fire burning north of Los Angeles in Ventura County, California is now the state’s fifth-largest wildfire on record. Less than 15 percent contained and moving west quickly, the fire is being fueled by dry conditions and strong winds. It is one of five wildfirescurrently burning in southern California.

The federally endangered bird, the snail kite, was faced with an interesting dilemma: The island apple snail was good to eat, but about two to five times bigger than the native snail that the bird usually consumed. What’s a hungry bird to do? Evolve – quickly.

A study by a team of University of Florida researchers has found that in about 10 years, the snail kite has evolved to develop a larger beak as its new prey, the island apple snail, proliferated and became invasive. The study is published in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Enhanced monitoring tool adds groundwater storage to assessment factors

When a forest fire decimated more than 3,000 acres of Rice University-owned timberland in 2011, biogeochemist Carrie Masiello saw a silver lining in the blackened trees.

For millennia, the Beaufort Gyre — a massive wind-driven current in the Arctic Ocean — has been regulating climate and sea ice formation at the top of the world. Like a giant spinning top, the gyre corrals vast amounts of sea ice. Trapped in this clockwise swirl, the ice has historically had more time to thicken than it generally does in other parts of the Arctic Ocean, where currents such as the Trans Polar Drift transport the ice into the warmer north Atlantic more rapidly. In this way, the Beaufort Gyre — located north of Alaska and Canada’s Yukon Territory — has helped create the abundant layers of sea ice that, until recently, covered large parts of the Arctic Ocean year-round.

North Atlantic right whales are one of the world’s most critically endangered large whales, but if you’re lucky, you can still see them: a mother nursing her newborn in the warm waters off the Georgia or Florida coast, their only known calving grounds; right whales socializing and feeding in the fertile waters of Cape Cod Bay, sometimes within sight of shore; whales — black, 50 feet long, and weighing some 100,000 pounds — rising through the water in the Bay of Fundy or the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the northern end of their thousand-mile-plus migration route.

Invasive species continue to be a critical threat to freshwater ecosystems in Saskatchewan and across North America.

But the species that have yet to enter Saskatchewan waters might be of greatest concern.

Researchers have determined what could be considered a “Goldilocks” climate for rainfall use by plants: not too wet and not too dry. 

A University of Central Florida biologist whose groundbreaking work tracking the movements of sea turtle yearlings in the North Atlantic Ocean attracted international attention has completed a similar study in the South Atlantic with surprising results.