Environment

Extreme cold days in China's rice-growing regions roughly doubled in frequency over the past two decades, and the cold cut the national rice yield by about 5%, according to a study published Sept.…

Picture a familiar landscape (a stretch of coast, a patch of forest, a wetland you have known for years), and then imagine it slowly filling with the wrong things. Species that were never there…

An atmospheric river is a corridor of water vapor sliding through the air toward a coast, and it behaves less like a storm than like plumbing. The water is going somewhere. What decides where it…

An open-access study published Sept. 26 in Communications Earth & Environment reports that how deep groundwater sits below the surface helps determine where plants across the contiguous United States…

Farmers in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh who enrolled in government-supported agroforestry programs planted 89% more commercial trees than those who did not, according to a peer-reviewed,…

In dry country a river is often a line on a map and a bed of dry stones. Then a storm arrives, the stones are wet for an afternoon, and somewhere downstream a gauge registers a pulse of water. How…

Researchers at Nanjing University report that China's long shift in diet began by improving health and easing pressure on the environment together, then split into a trade-off: health gains continued…

In a laboratory study published Sept. 25 in Nature Communications, microbes from the soil that thaws above permafrost each summer sharply raised the greenhouse gas output of formerly frozen ground…

About 40% of the faint aerosol haze in the lower stratosphere is made of organic particles that begin as gases given off by plants at ground level, according to a study published Sept. 25 in Nature…

Warming is projected to divert atmospheric rivers, bands of airborne water vapor, away from lower latitudes and toward densely populated parts of Asia, according to a multi-model study published…

Chemists at the University of Almería have published a laboratory method for separating microplastic particles as small as 0.05 millimeter from agricultural soil and used it to measure the soils…

Six small shoreline crustaceans of about the same size and diet, collected along the same stretch of central Mediterranean coast, carried very different amounts of plastic, and the spread tracked…