Forest landowners can greatly increase the survival rate of pine tree seedlings by changing when and how they plant, according to research conducted here. “There’s been too many (reforestation) failures over the last decade or so,” said Dr. Eric Taylor, Texas Cooperative Extension forestry specialist. “Some landowners have had to replant two, three or even four years in a row because of poor seedling survival.”

Second-year data from an ongoing comparison of planting methods sho

An international team of scientists, led by researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of Oregon and University of Sydney, has discovered an active underwater volcano near the Samoan Island chain about 2,400 miles southwest of Hawaii.

During a research cruise to study the Samoan hot spot, scientists uncovered a submarine volcano growing in the summit crater of another larger underwater volcano, Vailulu’u. Research

Woods Hole Center for Oceans and Human Health cruise provided timely data for shellfish managers

With shellfish beds from Maine to the Cape Cod coast closed from the largest outbreak of red tide in 12 years in Massachusetts Bay, scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) are studying the algae that causes these “red tides” and providing information to coastal managers using new molecular techniques and oceanographic models.

After a recent research cr

Thinking small in a time when everything was big has helped Queensland researchers to unearth new evidence that climate change, instead of humans, was responsible for wiping out Australian giant marsupials or megafauna 40,000 years ago.

Instead of only excavating ’trophy specimens’ such as giant kangaroos and wombats, the researchers from Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and Queensland Museum performed the first systematic analysis of a site in the fossil rich Darling

Catastrophic floods in Central Europe in the summer of 2002 killed 110 people and caused more than 15 billion euros of damage. A powerful Decision Support System (DSS) promises to minimise the impact of severe flooding in the future.

Developed under the IST programme-funded project Ramflood, which ended in March, the system to assess the risk of flooding and improve emergency management has continued to be used at its two trial sites in Spain and Greece amid plans to extend its imp

The accession to the European Union (EU) ten years ago was for the Finnish agriculture and food sector an unprecedented rapid shift from closed and regulated markets to open and more competitive ones. Finnish farmers faced a change in output prices, relative prices and direct support which were of exceptional magnitude compared to that of any other country which had ever joined the EU. Commitment to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) lowered the producer price level in Finland by 40-50% ri

A new analysis of Africa’s past and future climate shows that the Sahel region, which experienced catastrophic drought until rains returned in the 1990s, could experience wetter monsoons for decades to come. However, drought across southern Africa is projected to intensify further. Oceanic warming consistent with an increase in greenhouse gases appears to be a factor in these expected 21st-century changes to Africa’s monsoons.

James Hurrell of the National Center for Atmos

Sacrificing one wetland for the sake of five others may be the way to go when planning constructed wetlands to replace those destroyed during road building, but a Penn State Erie biologist is monitoring the salinity of the wetlands to see how the salt affects animals and insects.

“I am currently doing research in wetlands that the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation constructed as mitigation wetlands to replace all the ones that were destroyed by the new road,” says Dr

The great Sumatra-Andaman earthquake of December 26, 2004, was an event of stunning proportions, both in its human dimensions–nearly 300,000 lives lost–and as a geological phenomenon. The sudden rupture of a huge fault beneath the Indian Ocean unleashed a devastating tsunami. It was the largest earthquake in the past 40 years and was followed by the second largest just three months later (March 28, 2005) on an adjacent fault.

Modern monitoring technology gathered an unprece

A new research radar based in Antarctica is giving scientists the chance to study the highest layer of the earth’s atmosphere at the very edge of space.

Using the new radar, scientists will be able to investigate climate change and explore the theory that while the lower atmosphere is warming, the upper atmosphere is cooling by as much as 1 degree Centigrade each year.

They will also be able to find out more about the complex waves, tides and other mechanisms that link th

Northern metropolitan Los Angeles is being squeezed at a rate of five millimeters [0.2 inches] a year, straining an area between two earthquake faults that serve as geologic bookends north and south of the affected region, according to NASA scientists.

The compression of the Los Angeles landscape is being monitored by a network of more than 250 precision global positioning system (GPS) receivers, known as the Southern California Integrated Global Positioning System Network

The earthquake that generated the Sumatran-Andaman Islands tsunami caused massive devastation, but exactly what happened beneath the ocean is the focus of modeling activities by an international team of geoscientists.

“The earthquake rupture ran a distance equivalent to the distance from Jacksonville, Florida to Boston, Mass.,” says Charles J. Ammon, associate professor of geosciences at Penn State. “This earthquake lasted just under 10 minutes, while most large earthquakes take o

Quake was twice as strong, but much slower than thought

The Sumatra-Andaman earthquake that generated a deadly tsunami on Dec. 26 was stronger and slower than most seismologists thought, according to scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology in India and the United States Geological Survey (U.S.G.S.).

Using data from global positioning system (GPS) stations around the Pacific and Indian oceans, including previously unav

Oscillations begun by the Sumatra-Andaman earthquake in December 2004 are providing important information about the composition of the Earth as well as the size and duration of the earthquake, according to a report in the journal Science by an international group of scientists led by Professor Jeffrey J. Park of the Department of Geology and Geophysics at Yale University.

“Just like thumping a watermelon to hear if it is ripe, after a big earthquake thumps our planet we measure the n

The December earthquake and tsunami that killed approximately 300,000 people in the Indian Ocean region was so powerful that no point on Earth went undisturbed, pointing to the need for more active warnings about the consequences of future events, according to University of Colorado at Boulder seismologist Roger Bilham.

Bilham offers his perspective in “A Flying Start, Then a Slow Slip,” an overview of findings on the Sumatra-Andaman earthquake published in the May 20 issue of Scie

The crucial role that Antarctica plays in global climate change and its future contribution to sea-level rise was highlighted today by Professor Chris Rapley, Director of British Antarctic Survey (BAS). Speaking at an international convention on climate change in Bonn, Germany* he presented a summary of the latest scientific results from Antarctica.

Professor Rapley said, “The issue of sea-level rise is of great concern to all of us – the contribution from Antarctica is the gre