Cities are often described as “heat islands,” with media reports warning that some neighborhoods can be 20°F hotter than others. But those temperatures are often based on satellite data rather than the conditions people actually experience, due to the dearth of near-surface urban observations. This...
Scientists have long understood that rivers and lakes influence one another, but actually observing where one system gradually transitions into the other has remained a challenge — until now.A new study led by...
Taking apart a watch and reassembling it is one thing. Rebuilding an entire river landscape from scratch is another.A collaboration among researchers across the United States and China is offering scientists a new way to understand how river landscapes form — not only on Earth, but also on worlds...
Global rice production nearly doubled between the 1960s and the 2010s, despite the negative impacts of climate change, according to a new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The study found that management decisions — including expanded irrigation and increased nutrient...
PURSUE LAS is a program at the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences with the goal of expanding access to transformative undergraduate research experiences. It supports both established...
A resident installs an air-quality sensor outside their home, hoping to contribute to a growing network of citizen-collected environmental data. But before making the information public, they drag the sensor’s location pin on the digital map slightly down the street.That small act of digital self-...
Some Arctic regions regain their “greenness” within a decade of a sudden permafrost collapse, while others can take a century or more to recover, researchers report in a new study. The difference is directly related to each site’s gross primary productivity, a measure of its photosynthetic capacity...
In April 2019, a marine heat wave struck a coral reef on the island of Moorea in French Polynesia, killing much of the coral and the beneficial algae that colonized it. This “bleaching” event reduced live coral populations on the reef from about 75% beforehand to less than 17% a year later and led...
A new study using multidecade satellite imagery and face-to-face human interviews tracked the environmental and societal impacts of gravel mining in the Lubha River, Northeast Bangladesh. The researchers found that the river had recovered its natural shape within just four years after gravel mining...
Geology can take many forms, from the study of rocks and minerals to the living records preserved in trees. At Homer Lake Forest Preserve, graduate students from the ...
