Researchers, students, and professionals working in soil science, environmental science, agriculture, and related fields will gather in Gainesville, Florida, on December 4, 2026, for the MDPI workshop “Science to Advance Soil Health and Future Directions.”

Tree planting provides wood, biomass and climate benefits, but the location where those new forests are established matters. An international study by researchers in Spain, Chile and Finland shows that converting non-forested land into planted forests can increase wildfire activity, with contrasting outcomes across temperate regions.

MIT researchers developed a new way to control how nanoparticles come together to create high-performing materials for photonics, chemical catalysis, medicine, agriculture, and more.

Using 15.5 million tree records and a forest dynamics model, researchers examined harvesting strategies in China through 2100. Compared with current management, carefully timed and targeted harvesting could increase total forest and wood-product carbon storage by 4.2% and timber production by 38%, while reducing losses from tree mortality. The findings suggest that protecting forest carbon and supplying wood need not always be competing goals.

Nitrogen is essential for crop growth, yet much of the nitrogen supplied through conventional fertilizers is not efficiently used by plants. This inefficiency increases farming costs and contributes to environmental pollution. Now, researchers have discovered that tiny particles derived from biochar could improve nitrogen delivery in soybeans, increase grain production, and enhance nutritional quality, opening new possibilities for sustainable crop management.

A genome sequence is only half the story: the gene models built on top of it are often wrong in exactly the places that matter. A team led by Rui Xia, Ling-Ling Chen and Chengjie Chen has released GSAman, a desktop tool that lets biologists correct those models by hand — dragging exons, trimming boundaries, undoing freely, with real-time checks of whether RNA-seq reads support the edit. Built on the widely used IGV browser and running entirely offline, it removes the server deployment that has kept the rival Apollo2 out of many labs. In one demanding test case, the team curated 11,496 gene models in an elite rice genome, lifting BUSCO completeness from 86.93% to 99.63% — above the Nipponbare reference.

The Mollisols in Northeast China are a precious arable land resource in China and a core base for safeguarding national food security. Long-term intensive tillage can readily cause soil degradation, compaction, and declines in soil fertility. As a mainstream conservation tillage practice, no-tillage with straw mulching (NTSM) has been widely promoted in Northeast China; this practice can stabilize soil, conserve water, and increase soil organic matter content.