Many U.S. forests are privately owned, particularly in the Eastern and North Central part of the country. This makes control of invasive plants and pests challenging because efforts must be coordinated across landowners. A new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign explores how differences in ownership motivation affects willingness to control, and how economic incentives can be implemented most efficiently.

International collaborative research led by Aakash Project^* researchers at the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature (RIHN) show an unequivocal contribution of crop residue burning (CRB) to air pollution in the rural/semi-urban regions of Punjab and Haryana, and a relatively lower contribution than previously thought to the Delhi national capital region (NCR). We have installed 30 units of compact and useful PM_2.5^** in situ instrument with gas sensors (CUPI-Gs) and have continuously recorded air pollutants in 2022 and 2023. New analytical methods have been developed to assess and predict the formation and transport of air pollutants due to emissions from CRB.

A new international study highlights the severity of climate change impacts across African mountains, how farmers are adapting, and the barriers they face – findings relevant to people living in mountain regions around the world.  

Sustainability certificates such as Fairtrade, Rainforest Alliance and Cocoa Life promise to improve the livelihoods of small-scale cocoa producers while preserving the biodiversity on their plantations. Together with the European Commission's Joint Research Centre, researchers from the University of Göttingen have investigated whether sustainability certificates actually achieve both these goals. To find out, they carried out an analysis within the Ghanaian cocoa production sector. Their results show that although certification improves both cocoa yield and cocoa income for small-scale producers, they were unable to find any effects on biodiversity in the cocoa plantations. The results were published in the journal Ecological Economics.

Caio Vieira, assistant professor of soybean breeding and a researcher for the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station, tested 31 soybean genotypes over two growing seasons to see how they would respond to four-day flooding in early reproductive stages.

The study found that some genotypes visually classified as “moderately tolerant” to flooding had higher yields than those classified as “tolerant.” Another surprising discovery was that four-day flooding in the early reproductive stage did not significantly alter the soybean seed composition of any of the varieties tested compared to the non-flooded control group.

The rise of pastoralist peoples in the Eurasian steppes and their westward spread some 5,000 years ago may have been fuelled by sheep herding and people exploiting their milk. As early as 8,000 years ago the team found evidence that farmers were deliberately selecting their flocks – for example, for the genes coding for coat colour.

Sheep have been intertwined with human livelihoods for over 11,000 years. As well as meat, their domestication led to humans being nourished by their protein-rich milk and clothed by warm, water-resistant fabrics made from their wool. 

Now, an international and interdisciplinary team of researchers led by geneticists from Trinity College Dublin and zooarchaeologists from LMU Munich and the Bavarian State Collections of Natural History (SNSB) has deciphered the prehistoric cultural trajectory of this species by analysing 118 genomes recovered from archaeological bones dating across 12 millennia and stretching from Mongolia to Ireland.