A recently published study led by University of Hawai‘i (UH) at Mānoa researchers brought together experts from the fields of oceanography, genetics, ecology, fisheries biology, and social sciences to develop unprecedented insights into the natural and commercial flow of fish.

Researchers in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences will use a newly awarded $1.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to work with 13 other land-grant universities in the eastern U.S. to create an education program that would help private forests owners adapt to and mitigate climate change

Bumblebees are important pollinators because they pollinate many different plant species and are extremely resilient. They can still manage to fly at temperatures that are too cold for other pollinators. Like many other insects, they are in sharp decline. This makes it even more important to find out what bumblebees need to reproduce successfully. A team from the University of Göttingen has shown that a diverse landscape and a diverse pollen diet, which the bumblebees collect as a protein source to nourish their offspring, play a significant role in this. A more diverse diet could even mitigate negative effects of infestation with parasitic wax moth larvae. The results were published in the journal Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment.

Black eyed peas’ ability to attract beneficial bacteria isn’t diminished by modern farming practices, new UC Riverside research shows. Planting it in rotation with other crops could help growers avoid the need for costly, environmentally damaging fertilizers.

In 2011, the nuclear accident at Fukushima, Japan, resulted in the deposit of radioactive cesium (radiocesium) into habitats in the vicinity. A decade after the accident, researchers from the National Institute of Environmental Studies, Japan, have collated the complicated dynamics of radiocesium within forest-stream ecosystems. Understanding radiocesium flow in the environment could help mitigate contamination and inform future containment strategies.

Pesticides have become indispensable for modern agriculture, although their harmful effects on human health and the ecosystem are being reported every day. Monitoring of pesticide concentrations thus constitutes an entire area of active research. In a recent study, scientists from China have successfully developed a sensitive electrochemical detection method based on bifunctional cerium oxide nanozyme to detect the organophosphate pesticide, methyl-paraoxon, in plant extracts, adding to the ever-increasing pool of pesticide detection methods.