Background Articles

The bill, which got unanimous approval, seeks to help Alaska earn money by allowing its tree-covered tracts to continue absorbing carbon dioxide.

Charitie Ropati, 21, wants to reimagine scientific research to include her traditional values, like community and collective wellbeing.

Climate change is knocking some Pacific salmon out of alignment with the growth of the ocean plankton they eat to survive, new research says.

If added altogether, deposits of wood across the Mackenzie River Delta would cover a third of Yellowknife. Researchers calculated how much carbon it stores — which is at risk of entering the atmosphere more quickly as the climate changes.

Taking care of Hawaii's unique natural environment takes time, people and money. Now Hawaii wants tourists to help pay for it.

The Copper River Basin in Alaska has experienced less reliable snow and ice conditions in recent years, impacting winter activities such as trapping, hunting, and gathering firewood. This study, based on nine oral interviews with local residents, reveals that crossing rivers has become more treacherous and difficult, with significant changes in ice conditions observed since the 1970s. Decreased snowpacks and increased shrub growth have also posed obstacles for accessing winter trails, requiring individuals to cut through forests. These changes, combined with socio-economic and technological factors, have affected the way people engage in winter activities in the Copper River Basin. Overall, this research contributes to the understanding of climate change's impact on winter activities in Alaska and the Circumpolar North.

Climate change has been observed for hundreds of years by the plant specialists of three Odawa Tribes in the Upper Great Lakes along Lake Michigan. Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore is the focus of two National Park Service (NPS) studies of Odawa Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) of plants, ecosystems, and climate change. Data collected during these studies contributed to developing Plant Gathering Agreements between tribes and parks. This analysis derived from 95 ethnographic interviews conducted by University of Arizona (UofA) anthropologists in partnership with tribal appointed representatives. Odawa people recognized in the park 288 plants and five habitats of traditional and contemporary concern. Tribal representatives explained that 115 of these traditional plants and all five habitats are known from multigenerational eyewitness accounts to have been impacted by climate change. The TEK study thus represents what Native people know about the environment. These research findings are neither intended to test their TEK nor the findings of Western science.

A loose raft of brown seaweed spanning about twice the width of the U.S. is inching across the Caribbean. Among annual Sargassum censuses in the Atlantic Ocean, “2018 was the record year, and we’ve had several big years since,” says Brian Lapointe, an oceanographer at Florida Atlantic University, who has studied seaweed for decades. “This is the new normal, and we’re going to have to adapt to it.”

A study published in Nature Climate Change examined how 10 big rivers in the Arctic had moved 50 years, and found they did not migrate as much as expected.

Seen as a bright spot in a troubled coastal economy, seaweed cultivation must overcome many obstacles to become big business in Alaska.

A volunteer program in Saanich, B.C., is helping to beat back invasive species on the island.

Harmful algal blooms will become a more common feature of a warming Arctic. Last summer, a massive bloom was detected off the coast of Western Alaska, almost by chance, when scientists sailing through the Bering Strait and Chukchi Sea found worryingly high levels of Alexandrium catenella.

Underwater forests, such as kelp forests, have been found to cover a large area and have the potential to absorb significant amounts of carbon dioxide, making them important in addressing the climate crisis, although more research is needed to understand their long-term carbon sequestration capabilities.

As the driest summer in Seattle’s record books ended, trees across the city were sounding silent alarms. It was the latest in a string of Seattle summers in the last decade, including a record-breaking heat dome in 2021, to feature drier conditions and hotter temperatures that have left many trees with premature brown leaves and needles, bald branches and excessive seeding –- all signs of stress.

Researchers found pesticide-contaminated plants in nurseries in 15 states

A new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), finds that black spruce trees — a key species on the boreal landscape for millennia — are losing their resilience and capacity to regenerate in the face of warming temperatures and increasingly frequent Arctic wildfires.

Scientists, concerned hikers and residents have observed more stressed and dying bigleaf maple across urban and suburban neighborhoods as well as in forested areas. While forest pathologists have ruled out several specific diseases, the overall cause of the tree’s decline has stumped experts for years.

While the Kenai Peninsula is relatively lucky that the ecosystems here are fairly intact, there are still a handful of invasive species making their way into the streams, fields and gardens here.

As sea levels rise along the Atlantic coast, saltwater is intruding inland, killing trees and turning coastal forests into marshes. Should scientists try to slow the process, or work with it?

Vancouver Island’s arbutus trees are looking more brown than green these days. Forest biologist Andy MacKinnon says a fungus is attacking the trees, causing the leaves to die off.