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IMAGE: New research will help to quantify the vital role that lakes play in the global carbon cycle. view more
Credit: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
TROY, N.Y. As the planet heats up, are lakes releasing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere? With a prestigious National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant, researcher Kevin Rose will examine large-scale patterns in concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) and dissolved oxygen to answer the question.
Dissolved oxygen levels in freshwater lakes are declining, indicating a potential increase in CO2 emissions. Theoretically, freshwater life links CO2 and dissolved oxygen to one another. Algae and plants consume CO2 and produce dissolved oxygen, while animals like zooplankton, fish, and bacteria consume dissolved oxygen and produce CO2. But for many reasons, the relationship between the two measurements has not been rigorously tested.
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IMAGE: The National Science Foundation is funding a new long-term ecological research (LTER) site in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota. The site is one of two urban LTERs in the nation. view more
Credit: Yinan Chen from Pixabay
The USDA Forest Service is part of a partnership that will establish the first urban long-term ecosystem research (LTER) site in the Midwest. Funded by a $7.1 million grant from the National Science Foundation, the Minneapolis-Saint Paul (MSP) Long-Term Ecological Research Program will focus on the dynamics of urban nature and the urban social system in the face of rapid environmental and social change.
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The habitats of freshwater fish species are threatened by global warming, mainly due to rising water temperatures. A 3.2-degree Celsius increase in global mean temperature would threaten more than half of the habitat for one third of all freshwater fish species. The number of species at risk is ten times smaller if warming is limited to 1.5 degrees. This is the conclusion of a study led by Radboud University, in collaboration with Utrecht University, PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, Leiden University and others, and published in
Nature Communications on March 15th.
Many studies have already assessed the potential impacts of climate change on animal and plant species in terrestrial systems. However, freshwater fish species have been largely ignored, even though they represent approximately a quarter of the global known vertebrate diversity , says Valerio Barbarossa, lead author of the paper. This is the first study that investigated the potential impact o
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Louisiana State University researchers recently published findings that blight leads to an increased abundance of disease-carrying mosquitoes. The researchers investigated the presence of several mosquito species in two adjacent but socio-economically contrasting neighborhoods in Baton Rouge: the historic Garden District, a high-income neighborhood, and the Old South neighborhood, a low-income area. They found significantly higher adult and larvae abundance of the Asian tiger mosquito (a carrier of Zika and dengue) and higher mosquito habitat availability particularly discarded tires in the Old South neighborhood. This indicates that environmental conditions in the low-income neighborhood were most ideal for this mosquito to breed and proliferate.
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IMAGE: The built environment, from roads to sidewalks to parking lots, affects the water cycle and climate. Scientists at ORNL have explored the use of statistical relationships for evaluating representations of. view more
Credit: Andy Sproles/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy
Modeling - Urban climate impacts
Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have identified a statistical relationship between the growth of cities and the spread of paved surfaces like roads and sidewalks. These impervious surfaces impede the flow of water into the ground, affecting the water cycle and, by extension, the climate. We ve shown that there is a specific mathematical shape to the relationship between a city s population and the total paved area, ORNL s Christa Brelsford said. Using that, we examined climate model predictions and determined they correctly represent some important attributes we know about cities.