Background Articles

Five Central Asian countries have jointly confirmed their interest to mitigate the risk of zoonosis emergence in the region by enhancing overall landscape resilience through the One Health approach.

The 'phantom' Tulare Lake once the biggest lake west of the Mississippi and drained for agriculture purposes is slowly reemerging.

The government of Nunavut has once again flipped its position on resource development on caribou calving grounds, now supporting a "prohibition of development within calving grounds and key access corridors, with seasonal restrictions on activities in post-calving grounds."

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.

The ice outside of Kotzebue in the sound and further out into the Bering Sea is more like May Ice then March ice.

Only certain Alaska Native people can hunt sea otters. But as otter populations have grown, so have calls to loosen federal laws protecting them.

Questions still linger about what caused the bear to kill a woman and her baby — but more important for Wales is the question of how to move on.

Scientists say climate change appears to be a factor making Florida and other parts of the U.S. welcoming to non-native mosquitoes.

Take a typical Alaska cruise and see the damage in its wake. Waste-water disposal to on board garbage piles up leaking into the natural environment and local waste sites. Noise pollution from the ships impact whales and other species that rely on sounds for communication. Total visitors from the industry impact on small communities has pros and cons. The evidence is clear: the industry needs an overhaul.

World leaders already have many options to reduce greenhouse gas pollution and protect people, according to the United Nations report.

Some of the world's leading makers of flu vaccines say they could make hundreds of millions of bird flu shots for humans within months if a new strain of avian influenza ever jumps across the species divide.

Trapped in all that permafrost is an estimated 30 billion tons of carbon. It’s an unfathomable amount, Kirkwood says. With global warming, the permafrost is thawing, threatening to release a “carbon bomb” of heat-trapping methane gas into the atmosphere. But there’s something else lurking in the permafrost that has the potential to be more immediately dangerous to the people and wildlife living in the area: mercury.

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.”

The lawmakers discussed the challenges faced by Alaska’s fishermen in a remote address to Kodiak’s annual commercial fishing trade show.

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.

More than 700 inches of snow have fallen at Mammoth Mountain, almost burying entire houses and setting new record for snowfall. The snowfall in the Sierra Nevada range will help mitigate drought conditions in coming years.

The Barents area is the fastest warming place on the planet. A new study shows that the warming is happening twice as fast as previously thought.

Oulu has more than 900 kilometres of separated bike paths, which is comparable to Montreal. In the winter, the city plows this huge bike network by 6 a.m. every day and will plow multiple times a day if needed.

With ice declining, bowhead whales of the Pacific Arctic choose to stay longer in the waters up north. A change in migration patterns could affect the bowheads' health and safety, as well as the hunters' access to the subsistence resource.

The recent death of an 11-year-old girl in Cambodia's Prey Veng province infected with avian influenza has reinvigorated concern over the virus potentially gaining the ability to spread among humans. And while experts maintain the risk of that happening "remains low" at this time, the World Health Organization has said that increasing reports of avian influenza infection in humans are "worrying."