When it comes to storing carbon, alpine peatlands are powerhouses. But feral horse grazing and trampling tips the carbon balance in the other direction. We need to protect and restore our peatlands.
What does fire management do to soils? We compared prescribed burning to cultural burning and looked at how soil properties changed after fire. Cultural burning was better.
Australia’s approach to estimating bushfire emissions is credible and sophisticated. But it must be refined as technology improves and the climate changes.
An old-growth forest of noble fir trees at Marys Peak in Oregon’s Coast Range.
Beverly Law
How will Earth’s vast boreal forests look in a warmer world? Combining satellite-based research with fieldwork shows that the planet’s largest wilderness may be changing in unexpected ways.
From policies to support carbon farming, to setting up local ‘soil museums’, governments need to do much more to protect the soil we rely on for growing food and a healthier life on Earth.
Woodland caribou of the Pipmuacan herd. The effects of predation and habitat loss have greatly contributed to the decline of caribou in southern Nitassinan.
(Stéphane Bourassa, Canadian Forest Service)
A realistic look at forest management on the Nitassinan of Pessamit, based on data from the Québec government’s forest inventories.
Small-scale farmers, organic producers and local markets receive a tiny fraction of farm bill funding.
Edwin Remsberg/VWPics/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
Protecting old and mature trees is the simplest and least expensive way to pull carbon out of the atmosphere – but proposed logging projects threaten mature stands across the US.
Most food waste still goes into red bins of mixed waste bound for landfill. It’s using up precious landfill space and harming the environment when it could produce valuable compost and biogas instead.
Lake Couridjah, Thirlmere Lakes National Park in New South Wales.
Shutterstock
80% of carbon on land in stored in soil. Our new research investigated how erosion transports this carbon to the bottom of lakes, where it’ll never be released into the atmosphere.
Native grasses, long overlooked, have been shown to benefit cattle and diverse native animals.
Patrick Keyser
As environmental engineers, invasive caterpillars can have remarkable effects on water quality and soil conditions. But from a climate perspective they’re pretty much a nuisance.
Companies’ net-zero pledges count on vast expanses of forest to hold carbon so they can continue emitting.
AFP via Getty Images
Yes, trees and soils can absorb and store carbon, but the carbon doesn’t stay stored forever. That’s one of the problems with how net-zero plans for the climate are being designed.
Xiaoming Xu, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Atul Jain, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
A new study provides a detailed way to calculate the climate impact of food production, which could lead to more sustainable farming policies and methods.