Since antiquity, cultures around the world have been extracting vegetable oil from plants to use as food and fuel. Some vegetable oils have important health benefits, including lowering cholesterol levels and decreasing the risk of cardiovascular disease.

Climate change is expected to make many grape-growing regions too hot and dry to produce high-quality wine from traditional varieties.

NASA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture have signed a memorandum of understanding aimed at strengthening their longstanding partnership on space-based assets benefitting life on Earth.

California fires such as the Bobcat fire lofted smoke high into the stratosphere, where it can linger and contribute to variability in the climate record.

Germany's plant diversity is on the decline: over the last 60 years, decreases have been observed across Germany in over 70 percent of the more than 2000 species examined. 

Diverting urine away from municipal wastewater treatment plants and recycling the nutrient-rich liquid to make crop fertilizer would result in multiple environmental benefits when used at city scale, according to a new University of Michigan-led study.

A serious drought has flared up across half of the United States—a familiar story for the past two decades.

The vast majority of nutrients and sediment washed into streams flowing into the Chesapeake Bay are picked up by deluges from severe storms that occur on relatively few days of the year. 

University of Delaware Professor of Entomology Doug Tallamy published a new research study in Nature that systematically identifies the most critical plants needed to sustain food webs across the United States.

In 2006, Greenpeace launched a campaign exposing deforestation caused by soy production in the Brazilian Amazon. In the previous year, soy farming expanded into more than 1,600 square kilometers of recently cleared forests. The destruction, they said, had to stop.