News

A two decade-long drought fueled by climate change has farmers and ranchers worried about their future, reports a National News story that quotes INSTAAR Keith Musselman.

River deltas change over time, and the freedom to shift river location is important to maintaining a healthy ecosystem. However, humans are used to the stability of fixed infrastructure, so they struggle dealing with dynamic landforms like river deltas. But rivers changing course and evolving over time is a good sign for the delta and the environment around it. In a new commentary published in Earth’s Future, a national team of experts including Irina Overeem examines the ongoing conflict between stability and sustainability in heavily populated river deltas, such as the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna in India/Bangladesh and Mississippi in the U.S.

Restoration of degraded drylands is urgently needed to mitigate climate change, reverse desertification and secure livelihoods for the two billion people who live in these areas, say an international group of ecologists who examined the success of seeding drylands with key native plant species. Their study is published today in Nature Ecology & Evolution. Lead author Nancy Shackelford started the project as a postdoc in Katie Suding's group.

Wildfires across parts of the U.S., Canada, and Siberia are burning unusually intensely and emitting larger amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than typical during midsummer, scientists say. The fires are thriving in areas experiencing extreme heat and drought conditions. They are both a consequence of climate change and an accelerant of global warming.

Core libraries store a treasure trove of data about the planet’s past. What will it take to sustain their future?

The sudden and sustained rise in atmospheric levels of the potent greenhouse gas methane since 2007 has posed one of the most significant and pressing questions in climate research: Where is it coming from? Now a research team has tested the leading theories for surging methane levels by analyzing the stable carbon isotope ratios (δ13C-CH4) from methane captured in a large set of global air samples to determine if one of the theories is more feasible than the others.

Across the tundra, warming temperatures are causing plants to stay greener longer and flower earlier—and that could reshape life there, according to new research led by INSTAARs. The findings, published today in Nature Communications, synthesized 30 years of experimental warming data from 18 different tundra sites across the globe and found that not only are leaves coming out earlier and staying on the plants longer in this critically understudied biome, but their reproductive cycles are not responding in the same way. This change could not only have cascading effects through the ecosystem, but could also change the balance of carbon between the land and the atmosphere.

The Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network has generated 40 years of careful, reliable science about the Earth's changing ecosystems, which may prove to be just what's needed in this rapidly shifting world. By harnessing decades of rich data, scientists are beginning to forecast future conditions and plan ways to manage, mitigate, or adapt to likely changes in ecosystems that will impact human economies, health and wellbeing.

CU Boulder's earth science and atmospheric science disciplines remained ranked No. 1 globally in ShanghaiRanking's report, the 2021 Global Ranking of Academic Subjects (GRAS). The university also scored highly in a dozen other academic categories in those rankings, highlighting the breadth of impactful CU Boulder research.

In INSTAAR's Stable Isotope Lab lie rows of metal flasks holding clues to the cause of an alarming rise in a powerful greenhouse gas. They contain samples of air from around the world that Sylvia Michel‘s team of methane detectives analyse to reveal whether the gas came from burning fossil fuels and wood, or from wetlands and cow guts. Note that a subscription is required to read this article.