https://phys.org/ en-us Phys.org internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Physics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. Flood management is a priority for many governments around the world. Recent floods have led to hundreds of deaths and caused significant damage in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam, Albania, Kenya and elsewhere. https://phys.org/news/2025-12-frequent-large.html Environment Thu, 04 Dec 2025 10:40:51 EST news684067201 A new study from the University of British Columbia shows that even modest increases in river flows can dramatically raise flood frequency, with major implications for infrastructure and community safety. The researchers call for a shift in flood management—from focusing solely on rare, large floods to tracking how often floods occur. https://phys.org/news/2025-10-tracking-frequency-key-communities.html Earth Sciences Tue, 07 Oct 2025 10:10:15 EDT news679050601 Across the western U.S., wildfires are becoming larger and more severe—and even trees that initially survive are dying in subsequent years, making it harder for forests to regenerate, according to new research from Portland State University. https://phys.org/news/2025-05-slowly-dying-trees-impact-forest.html Plants & Animals Wed, 28 May 2025 08:48:21 EDT news667640897 Increasingly common since 1980, persistent multi-year droughts will continue to advance with the warming climate, warns a study from the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow, and Landscape Research (WSL), with Professor Francesca Pellicciotti from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) participating. https://phys.org/news/2025-01-year-extreme-droughts-frequent-severe.html Earth Sciences Thu, 16 Jan 2025 14:00:01 EST news656243341 As firefighters strive to contain the blaze threatening to consume homes in Malibu, California, other wildfires burn in Texas, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Virginia. Forest fires are natural phenomena, yet studies show they are becoming more widespread, consuming larger areas of forest each year. https://phys.org/news/2024-12-expert-factors-forest-ignitions.html Environment Wed, 18 Dec 2024 11:12:03 EST news653742721 It's an early morning in January and we're walking through a patch of native heathy woodland in southwest Victoria, a few kilometers west of the town of Casterton, known as the birthplace of the kelpie. https://phys.org/news/2024-02-reptiles-threats-australia-biodiversity.html Plants & Animals Tue, 20 Feb 2024 12:16:04 EST news627653761 An Oregon State University-led collaboration of ecologists and art historians has demonstrated that landscape paintings from more than 150 years ago can advance environmental science. https://phys.org/news/2023-09-art-science-merge-19th-century-landscape.html Ecology Tue, 12 Sep 2023 12:23:15 EDT news613740190 Many at-risk forest tree species will probably need biotechnology along with traditional tree-breeding approaches to survive, according to insights published in the July issue of the journal New Forests. https://phys.org/news/2023-07-biotechnology-holistic-approach-at-risk-forest.html Plants & Animals Wed, 05 Jul 2023 15:00:50 EDT news607788044 Researchers are deploying the latest mapping techniques to identify the most important suburban habitat for North America's largest woodpecker. https://phys.org/news/2023-03-cities-room-woodpeckers.html Ecology Fri, 31 Mar 2023 13:10:04 EDT news599485705 Mulching is a possible management method for forest meadows and is important to their upkeep. During the process, the meadow is cut and the cuttings are shredded and left on the meadow. Despite its significance, the effects of this method on insects living in this habitat has rarely been studied up to now. https://phys.org/news/2023-03-mulching-forest-meadows-insect-diversity.html Ecology Wed, 01 Mar 2023 15:10:06 EST news596905801 Over a 50-year period, logging on British Columbia's Central Coast preferentially targeted the highest value locations on the landscape, according to new research from Simon Fraser University. The systematic depletion of high-value components of the environment raises concerns about future sustainability and intergenerational access to natural resources. https://phys.org/news/2022-10-chain-future-forest-sustainability.html Ecology Wed, 05 Oct 2022 16:31:03 EDT news584206261 Remnant trees play an important role for post-disturbance forest landscape recovery. Due to the nucleation of remnant trees in forest recovery, their spatial configuration, e.g., location and abundance, is a critical factor driving forest landscape recovery. https://phys.org/news/2022-04-quantify-effects-remnant-tree-abundance.html Ecology Mon, 25 Apr 2022 12:38:39 EDT news570109117 The intensification of land use poses a major threat to biodiversity, including herbivorous insects and their host plants. If beetles, Orthoptera (grasshoppers/crickets), Heteroptera (true bugs) and Auchenorrhyncha (cicadas/leafhoppers/treehoppers/planthoppers/spittlebugs) specialize in only one or just a few plant species, they have to migrate or else they become locally extinct when their host plants disappear. On the other hand, if an insect can feed on a wide range of species, it is able to survive even if the number of plant species declines. The interaction of species from different groups of organisms is ultimately a decisive factor in ecosystem stability. https://phys.org/news/2021-05-impoverished-meadow-forest-flora-threaten.html Plants & Animals Mon, 17 May 2021 09:53:04 EDT news540463977 In northern California, forests are at risk of becoming a landscape dominated by shrubs and small trees as wildfires become dramatically more intense and temperatures rise. In North Carolina, coastal forests are expected to shift inland as sea levels rise. https://phys.org/news/2021-01-people-landscapes-ecologist.html Ecology Mon, 25 Jan 2021 10:07:17 EST news530791635 Rupert Seidl (Professor of Ecosystem Dynamics and Forest Management in Mountain Landscapes at TUM) and his colleague Cornelius Senf (lead author of the study) for the first time produced a high-resolution map of all openings in the canopy of European forests. They have analyzed more than 30,000 satellite images and identified more than 36 million areas where large trees have given way to open spaces of young trees. This corresponds to a loss of the canopy in 17 percent of the European forests in 30 years. https://phys.org/news/2020-09-satellite-images-condition-european-forests.html Environment Tue, 15 Sep 2020 12:38:49 EDT news519392326 Reduced resilience of plant biomes in North America could be setting the stage for the kind of mass extinctions not seen since the retreat of glaciers and arrival of humans about 13,000 years ago, cautions a new study published August 20 in the journal Global Change Biology. https://phys.org/news/2020-08-fossil-pollen-vulnerability-mass-extinction.html Ecology Mon, 24 Aug 2020 12:27:34 EDT news517490832 When historians and paleoecologists work directly together to study the past (what is called a consilience-driven approach) we are able to develop much more nuanced explanations for the role of people (or climate) as a cause of past abrupt environmental change. The joint histories of socioeconomic change, developed from archival sources, and ecologic change, reconstructed from pollen analysis of lake sediments, has helped clarify the interrelationship between societal factors and climate forcing in shaping land-use legacies along the Italian Peninsula. We found that different communities, guided by different political and economic structures, created entirely different landscapes, even during periods of similar climate, but after the black plague the rewilding landscape is a common trait in the Apennines https://phys.org/news/2020-07-legacies-historical-human-medieval-forest.html Archaeology Thu, 30 Jul 2020 10:10:05 EDT news515320405 Viruses that jump from animals to people, like the one responsible for COVID-19, will likely become more common as people continue to transform natural habitats into agricultural land, according to a new Stanford study. https://phys.org/news/2020-04-forest-loss-disease.html Ecology Wed, 08 Apr 2020 03:15:41 EDT news505534531 Scientists from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) have reported in a paper published in the journal Oikos that bats forage on their own in insect-rich forests, but hunt collectively in groups over insect-poor farmland. They seem to zoom in on places where conspecifics emit echolocations during the capture of insects, an inadvertent clue that reveals high-yielding areas to others. However, "listening" to their hunting companions to find food only works when sufficient numbers of bats forage in the same area. If numbers continue to decline, density could fall below a critical level and joint hunting could become difficult or impossible. This could pose an additional threat to the survival of species such as the Common noctule. https://phys.org/news/2020-03-teamwork-foraging-farmland.html Plants & Animals Thu, 26 Mar 2020 08:12:28 EDT news504429145 A new study in the journal Nature Sustainability overturns long-held interpretations of the role humans played in shaping the American landscape before European colonization. The findings give new insight into the rationale and approaches for managing some of the most biodiverse landscapes in the eastern U.S. https://phys.org/news/2020-01-climate-humans-early-forests-england.html Earth Sciences Mon, 20 Jan 2020 11:00:11 EST news498723044 University of Cincinnati geography researchers have identified a tipping point for deforestation that leads to rapid forest loss. https://phys.org/news/2020-01-geographers-deforestation.html Earth Sciences Tue, 07 Jan 2020 15:20:56 EST news497632848 Small woodlands in farmland have more benefits for humans per area, compared to large forests according to a new study. The small woodlands, sometimes even smaller than a football field, can easily go unnoticed in agricultural landscapes. Yet, these small forest remnants can store more carbon in the topsoil layer, are more suitable for hunting activities and host fewer ticks than large forests. https://phys.org/news/2019-12-tiny-woodlands-important-previously-thought.html Environment Mon, 02 Dec 2019 12:51:55 EST news494513513 How do humans affect forest fires? And what can we learn from forest fires in the past for the future of forestry? An international team of researchers led by Elisabeth Dietze, formerly at the German Research Centre for Geosciences GFZ in Potsdam and now at the Alfred Wegener Institute—Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, now provides new answers to these questions. The research team has shown for a region in north-eastern Poland that forest fires increasingly occurred there after the end of the 18th century with the change to organised forestry. Among other things, the conversion of forests into pine monocultures played a role. The increased number of fires subsequently made it necessary to manage and maintain the forests differently. The researchers report on this in the journal PLOS ONE. https://phys.org/news/2019-09-action-forest.html Earth Sciences Tue, 17 Sep 2019 11:57:05 EDT news487940218 Connected areas of high-quality forest running through oil palm plantations could help support increased levels of biodiversity, new research suggests. https://phys.org/news/2019-08-forest-networks-oil-palm-plantations.html Environment Tue, 20 Aug 2019 10:08:32 EDT news485514506 CABI has led an international team of scientists who strongly suggest that the global trade of forest tree seeds is not as safe as previously believed, with insect pests and fungal pathogens posing a great risk to trees and forest ecosystems worldwide. https://phys.org/news/2019-07-forest-tree-seeds-pose-great.html Plants & Animals Wed, 31 Jul 2019 12:49:27 EDT news483796160 For pollinating butterflies, it is more important to be close to forests than to agricultural fields, according to a study of 32,000 butterflies by researchers at Linköping University and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) in Uppsala. The results provide important knowledge about how to plan and manage the landscape to ensure the survival of butterflies. https://phys.org/news/2019-02-butterflies-grasslands-forest.html Plants & Animals Mon, 04 Feb 2019 09:07:36 EST news468493650 Fragmentation within intact forests has a higher impact on vertebrate biodiversity than equivalent losses in already degraded landscapes, but the relationship between forest 'intactness' and extinction risk has not been quantified. https://phys.org/news/2018-12-loss-forest-intactness-extinction-birds.html Ecology Wed, 19 Dec 2018 02:32:54 EST news464409164 How people who live close to burned forests feel about landscape recovery—whether they sense overwhelming loss or see positive signs in the growth of new vegetation—depends largely on their attachment to the area and on their appreciation for the ecological role of fire. https://phys.org/news/2017-12-wildfire-attitudes-recovery-vary-beliefs.html Environment Tue, 12 Dec 2017 08:07:27 EST news432288439 With changing environments, pond-breeding salamanders face increasingly hazardous treks as the space between breeding ponds and their non-breeding habitat widens or is degraded. A study from the University of Missouri suggests that a salamander's success may depend more on when it breeds than on the landscape obstacles it might face. Scientists believe that knowing the patterns in which salamanders move back and forth could lead to better forest management and conservation strategies. https://phys.org/news/2017-08-salamander-patterns-forest-strategies.html Ecology Wed, 09 Aug 2017 15:36:56 EDT news421511628 With rain forests at risk the world over, a new collaboration is equipping conservationists with the tools to predict and plan for future forest loss. https://phys.org/news/2017-05-approach-threats-rainforests.html Ecology Thu, 25 May 2017 13:03:09 EDT news414936182