An ambitious ESA project to chart ten years in the life of the Earth’s vegetation has reached a midway point, with participants and end-users having met to review progress so far. Harnessing many terabytes of satellite data, the GLOBCARBON project is intended to hone the accuracy of climate change forecasting.

GLOBCARBON involves the development of a service to generate fully calibrated estimates of land products based on a variety of Earth Observation data, suitable for a

Hurricanes can completely re-structure themselves inside, and that presents forecasters with great uncertainty when predicting their effects on the general population.

Recently, scientists used data from NASA’s Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite to analyze transformations that take place inside a hurricane. Stephen Guimond, a graduate research assistant at Florida State University, Tallahassee, Fla., lead a study that used TRMM data to view the height at which i

Wind turbines have caused the deaths of huge birds of prey on isolated islands off the Norwegian coast.

The discovery of four dead white-tailed eagles, and the failure of almost 30 others to return to nesting sites within the wind farm area, has increased fears that wind farms in Britain could take a similar toll on native and migrating wild birds.

The white-tailed eagle, Europe’s largest eagle species, is found in significant numbers on Smøla, a set of islands about six m

One of the paradoxes of recent explorations of the Martian surface is that the more we see of the planet, the more it looks like Earth, despite a very big difference: Complex life forms have existed for billions of years on Earth, while Mars never saw life bigger than a microbe, if that.

“The rounded hills, meandering stream channels, deltas and alluvial fans are all shockingly familiar,” said William E. Dietrich, professor of earth and planetary science at the University of Ca

Two new studies by a University of Rochester researcher show that mountain ranges rise to their height in as little as two million years–several times faster than geologists have always thought. Each of the findings came from two pioneering methods of measuring ancient mountain elevations, and the results are in tight agreement.

The research papers, appearing in today’s issue of Science and next week’s issue of Earth and Planetary Science Letters, mean scientists will

Studies in Chile and Sweden show that conflicts among various water interests play a fully decisive role in how well countries protect their water resources. The consequence is that we can neither alleviate the environmental damage now affecting water resources nor solve the problems entailed by possible climatic change.

In his new doctoral dissertation, the political scientist Victor Galaz at Göteborg University in Sweden shows that conflicts among municipalities, industries, a

An analysis of seven tropical forests around the world has found that nature encourages diversity by selecting for less common trees as the trees mature.

The landmark study, which was conducted by 33 ecologists from 12 countries and published in the January 27 issue of the journal Science, conclusively demonstrates that diversity matters and has ecological importance to tropical forests.

“Ecologists have debated for decades over whether there is something of ecological

Properly designed “rain gardens can effectively trap and retain up to 99 percent of common pollutants in urban storm runoff, potentially improving water quality and promoting the conversion of some pollutants into less harmful compounds, according to new research scheduled for publication in the Feb. 15 issue of the American Chemical Society journal, Environmental Science and Technology. The affordable, easy-to-design gardens could help solve one of the nation’s most pressing pollution problems,

Ancient water bodies may contain ecosystems adapted to life beneath more than two miles of ice

The Earth Institute at Columbia University–Lying beneath more than two miles of Antarctic ice, Lake Vostok may be the best-known and largest subglacial lake in the world, but it is not alone down there. Scientists have identified more than 145 other lakes trapped under the ice. Until now, however, none have approached Vostok’s size or depth.

In the February 2006 issue of

Scientists May Soon Have Evidence for Exotic Predictions of String Theory

Researchers at Northeastern University and the University of California, Irvine say that scientists might soon have evidence for extra dimensions and other exotic predictions of string theory. Early results from a neutrino detector at the South Pole, called AMANDA, show that ghostlike particles from space could serve as probes to a world beyond our familiar three dimensions, the research team says.

Scientists from the University of Nizhny Novgorod believe that ozone, an original synthetic porous material called KhIPEK and a special catalyst will protect us from the harmful effect of potentially hazardous matter – chemical and biological substances. The research by chemists and biochemists is supported by the International Science and Technology Centre, which has placed information on this promising development on its website (http://tech-db.istc.ru).

Chemically and biol

A team led by a University of Minnesota researcher has found a universal rule that regulates the metabolism of plants of all kinds and sizes and that may also offer a key to calculating their carbon dioxide emissions, a number that must be known precisely in order to construct valid models of global carbon dioxide cycling. Emissions of the gas occur in both plants and animals through the process of respiration; Peter Reich, a professor of forest resources, and his colleagues have found that plant

Conservation scientists generally agree that many types of protected areas will be needed to protect tropical forests. However, little is known about the comparative performance of inhabited and uninhabited reserves in slowing the most extreme form of forest disturbance: conversion to agriculture. In a paper recently published in Conservation Biology (2006, Vol 20, pages 65-73), an international team of scientists, led by Daniel Nepstad of the Woods Hole Research Center and the Instituto de Pesqui

We may well be shivering through an unusually chilly winter, but the dip in temperature is not all bad news, at least for your lawn. Researchers at Harper Adams University College, Shropshire, believe a cold winter leads to a better crop of summer grass.

Dr Peter Kettlewell, a crops specialist at the university college, says grass growth in the summer varies greatly from year to year because of differences in the amount of water in the soil. The team he has headed has discovere

NASA scientists are leading an airborne field experiment to a warm tropical locale to take a close look at a largely unexplored region of the chilly upper atmosphere. This area is critical to the recovery of the ozone layer and predicting future climate change. This very cold region far above the Earth’s equator (54,000 feet), a few miles higher than commercial aircraft can fly, is the main pathway where the lower part of the atmosphere, known as the troposphere, flows into the stratosphere.

The year 2005 may have been the warmest year in a century, according to NASA scientists studying temperature data from around the world.

Climatologists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City noted that the highest global annual average surface temperature in more than a century was recorded in their analysis for the 2005 calendar year.

Some other research groups that study climate change rank 2005 as the second warmest year, based on com