Often maligned and largely misunderstood throughout history, bats have more recently been recognized for the important role they play in ecosystems all over the world, pollinating flowers, dispersing seeds and controlling pests by eating insects.
But many North American species are now threatened by white-nose syndrome (WNS), a deadly fungal disease affecting millions of bats, primarily in the eastern US. The Ecology and… Read more
Sept. 25, 2019
The world’s oceans are getting hotter and acidifying under climate change at unprecedented rates, threatening coastal and high-mountain communities, marine ecosystems and global fishing stocks, according to a new Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (SROCC) released this week by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Ted Schuur, a researcher in the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society (Ecoss) at Northern Arizona University, was one of the lead authors on the… Read more
Since the mid-20th century, the global human population has grown from 2.5 billion to 7.7 billion, according to the most recent United Nations estimate. Much of this growth was due to the unprecedented agricultural expansion made possible by the widespread use of synthetic pesticides starting in the 1950s.
By applying pesticides to prevent a variety of insects,… Read more
Some experts estimate that a single mature oak tree produces between 200,000 and 1 million leaves each year—all of which fall from the tree in the autumn. Although “litter” from decaying leaves is sometimes viewed as a problem in urban and suburban settings, fallen leaves play a critical role in the natural world. Decomposing leaves… Read more
As collaborators on one of the first coordinated ecology research projects to study what happens to streams as they dry across the United States, Northern Arizona University researchers Ben Ruddell and Abe Springer will develop an improved smartphone application for mapping wet and dry reaches of streams.
Based on lessons learned from phone apps developed to map the desert springs of… Read more
Snowmelt is a vital source of soil moisture in northern Arizona, but in overly dense forests where tree canopies merge, up to 60 percent of the snow never reaches the ground.
A new grant from The Nature Conservancy is funding a two-year interdisciplinary project in which a team of NAU scientists will study the effects of mechanical thinning on forest… Read more