As emerging threats such as warming temperatures, pollution and other cumulative stressors put pressure on freshwater populations and contribute to global biodiversity crises, experts have sought to assess how effective environmental protections are at curbing this decline. 

Now, researchers have revealed that long-term improvements in water quality, as well as the increased occurrence of certain aquatic species, are likely associated with the implementation of broad environmental regulations such as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act.

“Rivers provide a lot of cultural, recreational and ecosystem services, and we also depend on fresh and clean water to survive,” said Casey Pennock, senior author of the study and an assistant professor in the aquatic ecology laboratory at The Ohio State University. “That’s really the motivation behind these conservation policies, to ensure that the natural environment is usable for both wildlife and all other things we care about.”

Aside from negatively impacting local biodiversity, contaminated water can destroy fishing industries and damage human health. It’s thanks to widespread environmental protections that water quality in the U.S. is better today than it was only a few decades ago, said Pennock. His team’s newfound evidence for this claim stems from water quality and aquatic species data collected between 1970 and 2023 across seven major river basins in Ohio. 

By using that data to analyze how fish, insects and freshwater mussel communities changed over time, the team’s findings showed that lower levels of pollutants in rivers — such as zinc, ammonia and lead — corresponded to increases in range for many aquatic species. These findings suggest the affected groups were those with heightened sensitivity to poor water quality.

Their observations indicated that as water quality improved, 71 fish species and 171 insect groups became more common across the state of Ohio, large river basins, with only a few species decreasing. Freshwater mussels, however, experienced mixed responses over time, with nine species increasing and 10 decreasing in occurrence. The composition of fish, aquatic insects and freshwater mussels also changed significantly over time in all seven river basins researchers studied.  

“Ecological communities are not static; they’re dynamic systems,” said Pennock. “Monitoring them is important to assessing how their trajectories change as new contaminants come online.” 

The study was recently published in the journal Ecological Indicators.

Despite how critical freshwater diversity is to the health of all of Earth’s ecosystems, it can be difficult for people to link the issue of conservation to the benefits they reap from it – such as protection from infectious diseases and a safe drinking water supply – in their everyday lives, said Lindsey Bruckerhoff, a co-author of the study and an assistant professor in the aquatic ecology laboratory at Ohio State.

“Our work revolves around trying to prevent further declines of imperiled species and keep diversity on the landscape,” she said. “So extensive research like this that highlights the positive effects of those systems on humans is incredibly rare.”

Additionally, as a lack of broad-scale monitoring efforts has made it difficult for researchers to document species-specific responses to prolonged environmental changes, this study, which compiles observations from numerous archives, is a vital addition to future conservation efforts.  

“We now have a dataset where we can actually analyze long-term biodiversity trends,” said Bruckerhoff. “It’s really exciting to be able to chart success in that way.”

According to the study, implementing nationwide policies also motivates municipalities to upgrade their own conservation initiatives. In response to the Clean Water Act, for example, Columbus instituted a $200 million municipal wastewater upgrade initiative for the Scioto River, leading to significant declines in levels of ammonia and heavy metals that continue to decrease today.

Overall, their results suggest that policies that promote conservation gains for animals like fish and insects and, by extension, protect human health, should remain in place, the researchers say. These outcomes also provide evidence of the benefits derived from environmental regulations. 

“This work shows there’s still more work to do,” said Pennock. “It tells us that if we deregulate or allow more pollution to happen, then those gains could reverse themselves, to our detriment.” 

This study was supported by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Ohio Biodiversity Conservation Partnership. Other Ohio State co-authors include Seth Drake and Nathaniel Shoobs, as well as Robert Miltner from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency.

Paleontologists uncovered this finding by studying wear on the fossilized teeth of Maiasaura peeblesorum, a duck-billed dinosaur species that lived about 75 to 80 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous. First discovered in Montana, these large, herbivorous dinosaurs lived in herds and were thought to have been highly social creatures, especially in contrast to those that may have had different reproductive strategies. 

Extensive fossil findings of preserved Maiasaura nests have since made them a key species for understanding the reproductive behaviors and ecology of many other types of duck-billed dinosaurs. Now, closer analysis of their dental wear patterns has revealed that while juvenile Maiasaura teeth had significantly more crushing wear, adults exhibited more shearing wear, suggesting parents could have been bringing softer, higher-protein food to their children than they themselves ate. 

Today, this behavior is typical of birds whose young are confined to the nest for a time after hatching, said John Hunter, lead author of the study and an associate professor in evolution, ecology and organismal biology at The Ohio State University, meaning that these dinosaurs could have exhibited a level of parental care unusual for most species on Earth at the time.  

“The urge for a bird to feed a youngster is a very old behavior,” said Hunter. “What we’re providing is that evidence for that behavior probably goes much further than the origin of birds, perhaps to the origin of dinosaurs.”

Learning more about which social behaviors may have endured throughout evolutionary history can give scientists a better glimpse into how organisms made a living tens of millions of years ago, as well as help predict traits modern animals might pass on to their descendants. 

The study was recently published in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology.

Researchers specifically detail that juvenile Maiasaura likely ate more nutritious low-fiber foods like fruit while their caretakers consumed a greater proportion of tougher, nutritionally poor high-fiber plant parts. In mammals today, the same patterns of shearing wear would likely be present in grazers like horses, antelopes and cows, while low-fiber diet eaters like tapirs would have dental patterns similar to the young dinosaurs. 

In comparing the types of wear on dinosaur teeth, researchers also suggested that shifts in diet may have also performed an important role in early growth and development. In this instance, their results show that the diet of juvenile Maiasaura may have caused them to grow particularly fast in their first year.

The study also considers other interpretations of their results. Instead of consuming completely different fare, dinosaur parents could have been feeding their young partially regurgitated food, yet another behavior now common in birds. Alternatively, juveniles could also have left the nest to forage for themselves, an activity now seen in modern herbivorous lizards.  

While that solution is less likely as juveniles were helpless, and probably dependent on their parents to feed them during the first weeks after hatching, learning more about their remains can widen scientists’ perspectives of what sophisticated biological and social systems dinosaurs may have had, said Hunter.

“The further back in time you go, the less of a fossil record you have, so paleontologists have to draw from different sources of inspiration from different parts of the living,” he said. “So even among closely related dinosaurs, there is probably still quite a bit to learn about them.”

If possible, future studies could examine other fossils of the very youngest dinosaurs for dental microwear to test other hypotheses regarding dinosaur embryos and hatchlings.

Christine Janis from the University of Bristol and the University of Brown was a co-author. This work was supported by Brown University.

Now, using a novel technique that enables researchers to directly analyze millions of individual particles at once, a new study has revealed that specks of dust trapped in Antarctic ice likely originated from a common source during the last Ice Age, between about 120,000 and 11,500 years ago. 

To determine this, a team led by Stanislav Kutuzov, lead author of the study and a researcher in earth sciences at The Ohio State University, examined more than 2 million particles from ice core samples taken from Taylor Glacier in coastal East Antarctica. The researchers found that major shifts in the number and concentration of dust grains that settled during this time period were likely linked to large-scale environmental shifts in Earth’s southern hemisphere. 

“This result implies that atmospheric circulation changed when we transitioned to a warmer period, and sources like Australia and New Zealand began to contribute to local dust deposition,” said Kutuzov.

Gaining a better understanding of these sources can offer clues into ancient climate systems, as well as improve  predictions about how those systems may behave in the future. 

Overall, the breadth of compositional data gathered in this work is consistent with results from past ice core investigations. However, this team’s more precise measurement method – identifying and analyzing thousands of distinct particles with a specific type of mass spectrometry – offers substantially more insight about the mineralogy of the dust particles, confirming that this new technique can act as a powerful tool for environmental nanoscience. 

“Normally, we are limited with analysis due to our sample volume,” said Kutuzov. “But the way this new technique works, it only requires a tiny amount of water to detect a huge amount of information about each particle.”

The study was recently published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Ice cores, precious scientific tools for studying Earth’s past environmental memories, are increasingly endangered as global temperatures rise. Before they are lost to glacier melt, scientists are racing to survey and preserve them from as many global areas as they can. 

Tropical glaciers such as the Quelccaya Ice Cap or Nevado Huascarán, for instance, have dust records that reflect regional signals, whereas dust found in more environmentally pristine areas such as Greenland and Antarctica tends to capture global changes to Earth’s atmosphere. 

What’s more, unlike traditional ice cores that are drilled vertically from the glacier’s surface down to bedrock, the Taylor Glacier ice core samples were collected horizontally, a method that can give researchers a more detailed look into a single specific time period. 

This ability allowed the team to observe that the type and amount of dust in the atmosphere changed during this period, as well as note an uptick of iron in the air, a critical nutrient associated with ocean bioactivity. 

“We went from a much colder, drier, dustier world to transitioning toward a more humid world leading up to the Holocene,” said Kutuzov. “We see a relative enrichment in iron oxide at this time and with so much soluble iron available, theories suggest these conditions could have supported a lot more life.”

Their analysis also identified the presence of thousands of volcanic particles in the ice core, likely as a result of occasional Victoria Land volcano eruptions nearly 14,800 years ago. Kutuzov said scientists could use these findings to develop a much-needed reference database for various minerals such as volcanic glass and dust from well-known source regions, especially as next-generation technologies inspire new ways to study ice cores. 

“Using this new method to confirm what was known before with more certainty shows that it could be applied to different places and events where we don’t know what happened,” he said. Other such places could even include other planets, as researchers prepare for future glacial explorations on those that also have water-ice, like Mars or Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. 

“There’s so much excitement for these instruments that more and more researchers are applying them to look at their data from a completely different angle,” said Kutuzov. “There are still unknowns, but discoveries like this are what push science.”

Co-authors include John Olesik, Madeleine Lomax-Vogt and Lucas Carter from Ohio State; Gregory Lowry, Garret Bland, Jonas Wielinski and Ryan Sullivan from Carnegie Mellon University; and Paolo Gabrielli from the University of Turin in Italy. This study was supported by the U.S. Ice Drilling Program. 

Using satellite data from NASA’s GRACE missions, results show that these extensive glacier systems, often called the “water towers of Asia,” experienced significant losses in mass between 2002 and 2023. These findings reveal that if the extreme conditions that led to this decline continue, enhanced glacier melt could intensify short-term flood risks and substantially reduce long-term meltwater availability. The researchers say the findings underscore the need for reduced greenhouse gas emissions to stave off glacier melt and preserve a larger fraction of the region’s cryospheric water storage. 

Because communities in the area often rely on the glacier’s large meltwater stores for hydropower generation, renewable energy and large-scale irrigation systems, any changes in glacier size will have direct implications for local water security, agriculture and natural hazard management, said Jaydeo Dharpure, lead author of the study and a former postdoctoral research associate at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center at The Ohio State University. 

“Decreasing glacial mass change can threaten infrastructure and increase the risk of loss of life,” he said. “While some ice losses and major disturbances are inevitable, glaciers play an important role for people living beside them, so learning to better monitor their evolutions is a must.”

The study was recently published in the journal Scientific Reports.

There are currently more than 95,000 glaciers located in High Mountain Asia, most of which are spread across about 15 sub-regions, or smaller ecological areas. 

To better grasp the extent of mass loss from these critical glaciers, researchers examined changes in Earth’s gravity field to determine how much frozen water was lost or added to the glaciers each year. Machine learning models were also used to address mission gaps in long-term glacier monitoring. In all, the team found that while water and ice loss steadily went up throughout the years, there was pronounced melt variability across certain subregions. 

Eastern Kunlun, for example, a mountain system that lies between the Tibetan Plateau and the Tarim Basin in western China, gained ice over the last few decades, but West Tien Shan, a mountain range that stretches in the opposite direction, did experience rapid mass losses. 

According to the study, the differences in outcomes for these subregions could have been caused by rising global temperatures, altered precipitation patterns, or even radiation emitted by the sun. But while challenging to study, because the glacier system in High Mountain Asia significantly influences global climate regulation, using new techniques to understand how the region reacts to these drivers as a whole is potentially one of the best ways future scientists can create more accurate global climate models, said Dharpure. 

“This is important work, because if these glaciers vanish in the future, downstream communities won’t just experience drinking or agricultural water shortages,” he said. 

Instead, melting glaciers would form new, uncharted lakes and rivers that continue to accumulate water, putting nearby communities in jeopardy, he said. “So scientists should be prepared to monitor how dangerous the many issues that disappearing glaciers cause will be for the billions of people they touch,” said Dharpure. 

Co-authors include Ohio State’s Ian Howat and Akansha Patel from Texas A&M University AgriLife. This work was supported by Ohio State’s Byrd Postdoctoral Fellowship. 

The result of a global buildup in plastic pollution, microplastics and nanoplastics are small synthetic particles produced when plastic products are used or degrade. These plastic fragments are found nearly everywhere in the environment, including the nation’s waterways. 

To better understand the concentration levels in a segment of the U.S. water supply, scientists analyzed water samples from four treatment plants near Lake Erie and six different brands of bottled water. Their results showed that bottled water contained three times as many nanoplastic particles as the treated drinking water, said Megan Jamison Hart, lead author of the study and a PhD candidate in environmental sciences at The Ohio State University.

“We can make educated choices to try and reduce our daily exposure to these harmful chemicals,” said Hart. “For the average person who is thirsty and wants a drink, the best way to do that would be drinking it straight out of the tap rather than grabbing pre-bottled water.”

While previous research evaluated the presence of microplastics in different drinking water sources few have centered on nanoplastics, likely because their extremely small size makes them a challenge to study, said Hart. Using a combination of imaging (scanning electron microscopy) and chemical identification (optical photothermal infrared spectroscopy) techniques allowed the team to detect and identify particles down to their smallest parts.

The study was recently published in the journal Science of The Total Environment. 

Although the extent of microplastics’ effect on human health is still unclear, many experts suggest their presence may be detrimental to our well-being in the long term, as smaller plastic pieces, called nanoplastics, are more likely to cross vital biological barriers in the body. 

“While we don’t really fully understand the human health risks associated with nanoplastic exposure, it’s still better to try and mitigate that risk because evidence indicates that they do cause problems, even if we’re not fully aware of what those are yet,” said Hart. 

During their experiments, researchers found that the most common plastics in the bottled water came from the bottled water packaging, which they expected, but the source of the plastics in the drinking water is still unclear. Over 50% of all the particles detected were nanoplastics, demonstrating how pervasive these tiny chemicals can be, even in drinking water.

These details confirm that nanoplastics are a significant component of the world’s overall amount of microplastic contamination and scientists likely underestimate the true scope of their environmental threat, said John Lenhart, senior author of the study and a professor of environmental engineering at Ohio State.

“The concentrations we saw were higher than anticipated, which, unlike prior studies, we were able to attribute to the inclusion of the nanoplastics,” said Lenhart. “That emphasis validates a lot of the information we’ve learned.”

Incorporating nanoplastics into this study’s measurements may lead to additional insights down the line, including whether the team’s analytical techniques could also be utilized to evaluate which treatment processes work best at removing these silent invaders from the environment. 

“By understanding the basic composition of the materials in water and the reactions important for controlling that composition, we can make better design decisions for future treatment or for remediation,” said Lenhart. “That’s why analyses like these are so promising.”

The study was supported by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration through its Ohio Sea Grant College Program and the National Science Foundation.  

To unravel the cause behind this spike, researchers used nationwide forest data to examine how six environmental factors may have contributed to the increase in carbon sequestered by forests. They found that natural forces such as increasing temperatures, shifting precipitation, and carbon fertilization are among the largest contributors to carbon gains, but human drivers, like letting forests get older and planting trees, are also becoming bigger factors.

Since most decarbonization efforts focus on curbing active emissions, this new analysis aims to help researchers better separate what portion of carbon held by forests is related to human action and which portion isn’t, said Brent Sohngen, co-author of the study and a professor of environmental and resource economics at The Ohio State University.  

“Identifying and separating these influences hasn’t really been done before,” said Sohngen. “But with this data, the U.S. can be much more explicit about its carbon accounting, and that ability will provide a lot more information and long-term benefits for people who manage their forests and try to create carbon sinks.”

The study was published recently (Jan. 20, 2026) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Forests act as vital tools to slow warming of the planet, as the more carbon that trees sequester, the less there is in the atmosphere. Large areas such as the Amazon Rainforest and the Congo Basin are known as “passive” carbon sinks because they absorb more carbon than they release without the need for human intervention. 

In temperate regions, forests like Ohio’s Wayne National Forest are more likely to become carbon sources because they require extensive active inputs, such as tree-planting or other forest management activities to remain a strong sink, said Sohngen.

“The forests that we aren’t managing are doing exactly what we want them to do, which is to be ecosystem buffers,” he said. “That’s a good thing, but as we hit global carbon thresholds, the strength and size of that sink is slowing down in all these forests.”

The study looked at six drivers – temperature, precipitation, carbon dioxide, management, age composition and area – and the team was surprised by exactly how much natural factors influenced the total amount of carbon stored by U.S. forests. For instance, changes in temperature and precipitation from 2005 to 2022 led to an increase of 66 million metric tons of carbon sequestration per year. 

During the same period, human intervention had both negative and positive effects, as human-caused deforestation reduced stored forest carbon by about 31 million tons per year, while activities like tree-planting and reforestation added about 23 million tons per year. Yet it was forest age — mostly structural changes in the peak growth stages of local trees — that helped lock in the most carbon, by 89 million metric tons per year.

Overall, these results suggest that while climate policies are doing their part to mitigate current climate challenges, scientists should also recognize the extent to which natural processes continue to shape our world. 

This work also highlights the vast difference in the amount of carbon forests can absorb naturally versus when they are actively managed. If used in tandem with other environmental analyses, these findings may help other countries better plan how to utilize their national forest inventories to meet future net-zero requirements, said Sohngen. 

Going forward, researchers may seek to localize their observations further, as having more detailed state or county carbon forestry data could help inform conservationists and wildlife managers on how to optimize the well-being of their land on a local rather than regional level.

“We have to think about how we start to address the impacts of climate change in parts of the country where there’s a slowdown of forest growth, and figure out how to adapt a region’s forests  to the best climate future possible,” said Sohngen.  

Co-authors include Eric C. Davis from the United States Department of Agriculture-Economic Research Service, and David J. Lewis from Oregon State University. The research was supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service. 

Trees are the planet’s living lungs; they remove carbon from the atmosphere to clean the air, and filter our water. Yet depending on their species, not all record long-term environmental changes, such as fires, floods and droughts, in the same way. 

By analyzing how various types of tree rings grow in response to these distinct weather-related events, researchers discovered that some can act as useful tools in managing local watersheds, that drain water into nearby streams and rivers. 

Specifically, they found that trees in the Midwest are extremely apt at recalling past wet and dry conditions, noting that using more than one type of tree’s rings to reconstruct previous environmental periods can paint a much more accurate picture of the region’s current water ecosystem.

“One human lifespan is not going to show us the big picture,” said Alessandra Bertucci, lead author of the study and a graduate student in food, agricultural and biological engineering at The Ohio State University. “So using trees to address these gaps of understanding is really important for managing water resources, even in intensively managed watersheds.“ 

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, healthy watersheds serve nature by helping to ensure water quality, connecting aquatic habitats and ecosystems, and shaping diverse biological communities. But when left unprotected, they eventually degrade, leading to issues like less productive fisheries and polluted drinking water.

Consequently, as the planet continues to warm and water resources are impacted, learning new ways to manage altered watersheds is an urgent priority, said Bertucci. The research was presented this week at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

While tree ring chronologies are often used to understand long-term climate changes in the western United States, the tool is often left out of similar studies of the Midwest, where large-scale agricultural production relies heavily on the health of local watersheds. Additionally, already scarce instrumental data in some areas can make it difficult for researchers to grasp historical trends in the region, resulting in misleading estimates about past events, said Bertucci. 

These hurdles motivated Bertucci’s team to retrieve tree cores from places where watershed data reporting is sorely lacking, such the Old Woman Creek State Nature Preserve near Lake Erie in northern Ohio. There, they took samples from three species of common riparian trees and will plan to compare aspects like ring width and density to real recorded climate data.

Now, with updated measurements, the team expects to be able to build models that could predict how weather and local water flow will change over the next few decades. 

“If we can round out that historical data and understand what to expect, we can better plan for how to manage our water resources in the future,” said Bertucci. These improved solutions might include helping local resource managers determine which environmental conditions to focus on accounting for when coming up with smart water-saving strategies. 

In the future, the team will work to increase the range of tree species they sample and utilize the expanded data they gather to create better reconstruction models of other important watersheds. These models may be especially helpful to farmers in the Midwest, and later on, the United States as a whole. 

“Water is life,” said Bertucci. “We literally cannot live without it, so it’s important to protect and make sure that we are taking care of it, because that is our lifeline.”

Bertucci conducted the research with Lorrayne Miralha, assistant professor of food, agricultural and biological engineering at Ohio State. 

Findings showed that communities that added green infrastructure — systems designed to protect the natural water cycle, such as rain gardens or constructed wetlands — saw a notable reduction in cadmium, copper, nickel and zinc being sent into local waterways. All of these are heavy metals harmful to human health in large concentrations. 

Using these systems to manage stormwater flow at the source is imperative to preserving our environment, said Joseph Smith, lead author of the study and a researcher in food, agricultural and biological engineering at The Ohio State University. 

“Humans cause a lot of alterations to the environment,” said Smith. “So things like rain gardens allow nature to return to how it’s supposed to work.” 

The study was recently published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials. 

The project is part of Blueprint Columbus, a 30-year community effort to install green infrastructure into local neighborhoods. The goal is to address sanitary sewer overflows and reduce total suspended solids pollution in runoff by 20%.

After studying the performance of two watersheds in the Clintonville neighborhood of Columbus in managing stormwater pollution for about 3.5 years, researchers found that once installed, green infrastructure systems exceeded expectations, from mitigating peak storm flow rates and pollution to potentially improving residents’ well-being and altering local biodiversity. In one particular neighborhood, researchers noted that rain gardens worked to prevent a good amount of heavy metal pollution from entering downstream waterways. 

Additionally, because their results were compared to a control watershed – one without green infrastructure – the study was robust enough to determine that the changes the team saw in hydrology, water quality and heavy metals were due to the presence of rain gardens, not seasonal or annual fluctuations in climate, said Smith. 

In short, implementing more of these systems in urban areas could make the city’s ecosystems healthier and more resilient, said Smith. “Not only does green infrastructure improve water quality, but it also helps cities to be cooler because it adds more green space. The goal is to design spaces where people want to walk around and enjoy beautiful surroundings and experience the many ecosystem services created,” he said. 

According to the paper, many of these benefits can also be attributed to the design and continued maintenance of the city’s connected green infrastructure systems. 

“Ohio State’s been involved in this project from multiple angles,” said Smith. “But what made our study really special is that we could see changes that were happening at the pipe level leading to the stream.”

Their results also suggest that engaging with communities to improve public acceptance and functionality of these green measures is of the utmost priority, said Smith. Notably, the long-term success of the project may be achieved by educating homeowners about the benefits of having and maintaining these systems, as some citizens have opposed the addition of green systems to their neighborhoods, raising concerns over safety and convenience. 

“Being involved in this watershed-scale rain garden project has made me realize that while there are lots of benefits for the community, there’s also more we can do to explain how these projects help individuals who live there,” said Smith. 

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, investing in green infrastructure also helps create jobs and other lucrative economic development opportunities for the public. 

For the time being, Blueprint Columbus is expected to continue retrofitting more areas of the city with green infrastructure through at least 2043. Hundreds of rain gardens already exist across the city, but this work emphasizes how important and beneficial it is to protect the environment through proven, eco-friendly methods. 

“Columbus is becoming a leader and model for other municipalities that are facing similar problems,” said Smith. 

Other co-authors include Kay Bernard, Kathryn Boening-Ulman, Jay Martin, R. Andrew Tirpak, David Wituszynski and Ryan Winston, all from Ohio State. This study was supported by the City of Columbus, Ohio. 

This suite of open-source tools, called ECODATA, was designed to support the analysis and visualization of complex datasets, as valuable observations about animal movement are often made by analyzing massive amounts of wildlife tracking data. 

Their tool accomplishes this by creating animations that help ecologists study animal movement, such as how extreme weather conditions or seasonal vegetation growth might influence a species’ normal activities, said Gil Bohrer, co-author of the study and a professor in civil engineering and geodetic engineering at The Ohio State University.

“We’re not creating new information, but we are taking data that ecologists typically find hard to utilize and making it easy and accessible,” said Bohrer. “This can help users understand an ecosystem and quickly identify what’s going on, or test a good hypothesis they have.”

ECODATA works by combining direct wildlife location observations with complex remote sensing and geospatial data to process image frames into multiple layers of customizable maps.

For example, in one case study, the researchers used the software to animate movements of elk and wolves in relation to roads, wildlife crossing structures and changes in seasonal vegetation near Banff National Park in Canada.

Although interpreting and integrating large datasets into research and other wildlife applications can be a difficult and tedious process, ECODATA makes it easy to create animations that act as powerful tools for illustrating study results, supporting animal exploration in uncharted territories, and even aiding wildlife managers in garnering support for conservation efforts, said Bohrer. 

“These animations are very effective,” he said. “They can process and plot lots of changing environmental conditions and corresponding animal movement in a really temporally dynamic way.”

The study was recently published in the journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution.

Previous attempts at creating user-friendly research software required scientists to have some programming skills, but what makes ECODATA unique is that it is flexible enough that scientists don’t need technical skills to employ it, said Justine Missik, lead author of the study and a researcher in civil, environmental and geodetic engineering at Ohio State.

“There are all sorts of environmental datasets that are out there that are difficult for people to work with,” she said. “Our project was helping address those research gaps.”

In this paper, researchers demonstrated ECODATA’s abilities through two case studies, both of which answered very different questions about its potential uses, said Bohrer. 

In the case study of elk and wolves in Banff, the animation researchers developed showed that both species migrate from the northeast during late spring to their summer range, where some spend considerable time near highways, including during times that coincide with peak annual traffic volumes. 

The second case illustrated how the software could be used in wildlife management, as ECODATA’s animation could inform wildlife managers about the timing and location of caribou movements during their birthing season. These visual insights helped reveal territory in the caribou’s seasonal range that management hadn’t previously recognized. This can help wildlife managers understand the conservation impacts of caribou movements.  

That ECODATA can help identify such situations makes it a valuable resource for many purposes, most notably as an asset for protecting all kinds of wildlife. “These animations are tools to explore the data in a different way, by many different users in many different contexts,” said Bohrer. 

Moving forward, the team hopes that the custom animations ECODATA provides work as a complement to existing research tools and inspire more detailed explorations of ecological models used for impactful, sustainable decision-making. 

Other Ohio State co-authors include Sarah Davidson and Madeline Scyphers, as well as Mark Hebblewhite from the University of Montana, Allicia Kelly from the Government of Northwest Territories in Canada, John Fieberg from the University of Minnesota, Roland Kays from the North Carolina State University, Ashley Lohr from the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, and Kelsey Russell and Mike Suitor from the Government of the Yukon in Canada. This work was supported by NASA and the MathWorks MATLAB Community Toolbox Program.

By studying how six months of elevated ocean temperatures would affect a species of coral from the northern Red Sea called Stylophora pistillata, scientists found that although these organisms can certainly survive in conditions that mimic future warming trends, they don’t thrive.

Stylophora pistillata tend to be tolerant of high ocean temperatures, but when continuously exposed to temperatures of 27.5 and 30 degrees Celsius (81.5 and 86 degrees Fahrenheit) — baseline warming expected in tropical oceans by 2050 and 2100 — scientists saw various changes in coral growth, metabolic rates, and even energy reserves. For instance, coral in 27.5 degrees Celsius waters survived, but were 30% smaller than their control group; those placed in 30 degrees Celsius waters wound up being 70% smaller. 

“In theory, if corals in the wild at these temperatures are smaller, reefs might not be as diverse and may not be able to support as much marine life,” said Ann Marie Hulver, lead author of the study and a former graduate student and postdoctoral scholar in earth sciences at The Ohio State University. “This could have adverse effects on people that depend on the reef for tourism, fishing or food.”

Overall, the team’s results suggest that even the most thermally tolerant coral species may suffer in their inability to overcome the consequences of warming seas. 

The study was published today in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

While current predictions for coral reefs are dire, there is some good news. During the first 11 weeks of the experiment, researchers saw that corals were only minimally affected by elevated baseline temperatures. Instead, it was the cumulative impact of chronic high temperatures that compromised coral growth and caused them to experience a higher metabolic demand. 

The coral later recovered after being exposed for a month to 25 degree Celsius waters, but had a dark pigmentation compared to corals that were never heated. This discovery implies that despite facing ever longer periods of threat from high ocean temperatures in the summer months, resilient coral like S. pistillata can bounce back when waters cool in the winter, researchers say. 

Still, as ocean temperatures are expected to increase by 3 degrees Celsius by 2100, expecting coral reefs to predictably bend to projected climate models can be difficult, according to the researchers. 

This team’s research does paint a more detailed picture of how coral reefs may look and function in the next 50 years, said Andrea Grottoli, co-author of the study and a professor in earth sciences at Ohio State.

“Survival is certainly the No. 1 important thing for coral, but when they’re physiologically compromised, they can’t do that forever,” said Grottoli. “So there’s a limit to how long these resilient corals can cope with an ever increasing warming ocean.”

Gaining a more complex understanding of how warming waters can alter coral growth and feeding patterns may also better inform long-term conservation efforts, said Grottoli. 

“Conservation efforts could focus on areas where resilient coral are present and create protected sanctuaries so that there are some ecosystems that grow as high-probability-success reefs for the future,” she said. 

For now, all coral reefs are still in desperate need of protection, researchers note. To that end, Hulver imagines future work could be aimed at investigating the resilience of similar species of coral, including replicating this experiment to determine if sustained warming might cause trade-offs in other biological processes, such as reproduction. 

“For coral, six months is still a very small snapshot of their lives,” said Hulver. “We’ll have to keep on studying them.”

Other Ohio state co-authors include Shannon Dixon and Agustí Muñoz-Garcia as well as Éric Béraud and Christine Ferrier-Pagès from the Centre Scientifique de Monaco, and Aurélie Moya, Rachel Alderdice and Christian R Voolstra from the University of Konstanz. The study was supported by the National Science Foundation and the German Research Foundation. 

While only 10% of Earth is covered in glacial ice, these masses have far-reaching impacts on all the world’s ecosystems. Rapid melting can trigger natural disasters, and glaciers help to regulate the planet’s temperature and sea level and are sources of pristine fresh drinking water.

To better differentiate between seasonal ice loss and that caused by long-term climate trends, researchers studied the fluctuating heights of three glaciers: the La Perouse Glacier in North America, the Viedma Glacier in South America and the Skamri Glacier located in Central Asia.

Their analysis revealed that between 2019 and 2023, the Viedma Glacier (Argentina) and the La Perouse Glacier (Alaska) experienced consistent thinning, but the Skamri Glacier (Pakistan)  had been stable enough to experience a small net gain of ice, said Rongjun Qin, co-author of the study and an associate professor of civil, environmental and geodetic engineering at The Ohio State University.

Measurements in this study were made using daily high-resolution images gathered by the PlanetScope satellite constellation, which researchers then used to create 3D reconstructions of how glacial ice flows evolved over time. By incorporating local and global climate data into these models to explore seasonal variations of glacier melt, the team essentially designed a way to monitor the behavior of glaciers across diverse regions.

“This is something that we’ve been thinking about for a long time, because existing glacier studies have such sparse seasonal observations since it’s difficult to get data out of remote areas,” said Qin, who is also a core faculty member of Ohio State’s Translational Data Analytics Institute. “What we wanted to do is to use medium-to-high resolution data to broaden those capabilities and improve the accuracy of the 3D models generated from that data.”

The study was recently published in the journal GIScience & Remote Sensing.

According to the study, while many modern 2D tracking techniques can provide valuable insights into glacier flow, previous studies tend to capture only short-term snapshots or else offer observations without in-depth motion analysis or high-resolution 3D data. This team’s work may help scientists keep better track of seasonal climate issues like glacier melt and expand long-term observations of these masses, and their 3D model method also reveals new data about how quickly the glaciers react to changes in the weather.

The Viedma and Skamri Glaciers, for example, exhibit a 45-day lag time in response to changes in local climate conditions like rain or snow. The La Perouse Glacier, however, was shown to react to changes almost immediately, meaning that its flow can very quickly become faster or slower based on how much precipitation it has accumulated.

In another finding, researchers concluded that behavior differences in all three are driven by distinct environmental and climatic conditions, but suggest that both local and global factors, rather than any single one, are responsible for patterns in glacier motion dynamics worldwide.

Such observations are vital to deepening our global understanding of glacier science, and with further improvements, this study’s algorithm could also be a useful tool for future disaster prediction and management, said Qin. Already, scientists have used similar systems to warn communities of natural disasters that would have led to tragedy.

In all, researchers hope that supporting modeling works like this one will inspire more scientists to utilize satellite data to investigate other types of important environmental research questions.

“Hopefully we can build on all sorts of applications that people are interested in with this,” said Qin.

Shengxi Gui of Ohio State was a co-author. This work’s data was provided by PlanetScope.

Take, for instance, the Pacific Ocean. The largest and deepest ocean basin on the planet, it is a vital wheel in many complex ecological systems, including the carbon cycle. But despite its vast influence, much of what scientists know about the Pacific stems from only a few continuous long sediment core records recovered over the last five decades, said Elizabeth Griffith, co-author of a new paper and a professor in earth sciences at The Ohio State University.

“It's easy to forget that two-thirds of our planet is covered with salty ocean water, especially when you don’t live near the coast,” said Griffith. “It’s also hard to realize just how much of it we haven’t explored yet.”

The commentary paper was recently published in the journal Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology.

In past decades, studying the physical environment of the deep ocean could be a challenging endeavor, partly due to how difficult and time-consuming it is to reach these dark and undiscovered depths. Fortunately, scientists today largely rely on scientific ocean drilling to collect important marine samples, a process that involves specialized ships that use cutting-edge technology to bore down and extract sediment cores from the ocean floor.  

Depending on where sediment cores are collected, scientists are able to learn many novel things about Earth’s history and dynamics. For example, samples retrieved from places known as Pacific Highs, undersea shallow geological features that have the potential for well-preserved paleoceanographic records, have helped scientists answer key research questions about subjects like the evolution of life, past extinction events, Earth’s tectonic and volcanic history as well as slight changes in its orbit. 

While only eight of these sites, found in the central and western North Pacific, have ever been explored using modern drilling technologies, discoveries made in these locations offer valuable insights into some of the most dynamic environmental shifts of the past 100 million years, said Griffith. 

“When you’re extrapolating from such a huge time and spatial scale, you need more than one or two data points to get complete records and ground truth modeling,” she said. 

Yet as global temperatures continue to rise and cores collected from these sites are depleted of material that might help reveal key events, new data is needed to continuously improve future climate models and transform our understanding of Earth’s complex life systems. 

To better prioritize research questions best answered by future ocean drilling discoveries, the international scientific ocean drilling community held a workshop in October 2024 at The Ohio State University’s Stone Laboratory.

Participants determined that in order for ocean discovery science to move forward, scientists will need to create both short- and long-term plans for recovering these sediments. 

“One of the benefits of the ocean drilling community has always been that it’s a larger effort,” said Griffith. “There’s support for this idea that we’re answering big questions on a scale that you just can’t do in a single lab or just working with a small subset of people.”

Overall, researchers suggest that future reconstructions of Earth’s past environmental stages will require more data, as gaps in spatial and temporal data coverage hinder the community’s ability to test various hypotheses and validate model simulations of the Pacific Ocean’s behavior during different climate states. Notably, existing sediment core materials are too degraded to apply some new techniques to test these models. 

The paper also notes that taking the time to dig deep into whatever long-buried secrets our ocean floors hold will also be beneficial in predicting what tomorrow’s climate future might entail, said Griffith. “Warm periods in Earth’s recent history might tell us something about future conditions on Earth and how life will respond to those changes,” she said. 

Nevertheless, while drillship expeditions allow scientists to study some of Earth’s most challenging environments, they also require massive amounts of coordinated international collaboration. Ocean drilling science must expand on these opportunities to grow, but with the recent loss of a U.S. riserless drillship, next-generation scientists worry that losing access to vital data now could jeopardize the field. 

“Working with legacy core material is a crucial part of my research, but it will never replicate the experience of sailing on a deep-sea scientific drilling expedition and fostering international collaboration at sea,” said Batoul Saad, co-author of the paper and a PhD student in earth sciences at Ohio State. 

While private and public sector leaders work to preserve U.S. federal research funding, scientific experts suggest identifying new opportunities to expand international, collaborative science and help sustain ocean drilling science.

“As individuals, much of the work of supporting science involves just being curious about the planet that we live on and that sustains us,” said Griffith. “Once you become curious, realizing how much you impact your surroundings leads to better decisions and new scientific discoveries.”

The U.S. Science Support Program provided financial support for U.S. participants in the workshop, while Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation), European Consortium for Ocean Research Drilling MagellanPlus Workshop Series Travel Grant, Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, and Australian and New Zealand International Scientific Drilling Consortium provided support for international participants. The National Science Foundation is supported by the U.S. Science Support Program. 

Thomas Westerhold of the University of Bremen in Germany was a co-author. 

The research, led by Jai Tiarks, a recent graduate alum in environment and natural resources at The Ohio State University, found that age was a deciding factor in whether fish could successfully cope with new conditions in their underwater environment.  

The study in the Blue Lips cichlid, a species native to swamps and lakes of Uganda, showed that the eyes and pupil size of young fish raised in cloudy water grew larger than those of fish raised in clear water. This phenomenon happened regardless of the environment each brood’s parents originated from. 

The study was recently published in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

Vision is a vital sense for many creatures, as being able to navigate their surroundings well gives them an edge when it comes to holding onto their spot in the food chain. But when an ecosystem is bombarded with new environmental stressors, most organisms in the animal kingdom have three ways they respond to the negative outcomes.

Those choices, said Tiarks, are to adapt, move to another location, or die out. 

“Cichlids are known for filling a huge diversity of different ecological niches and being able to adapt to changes in their environment,” they said. “That has driven a lot of interest from an evolutionary standpoint, especially for the timescale that this adaptation occurs.”

To learn more about how and when these adaptations occur, researchers raised half of a brood of fish in tanks with clear water and placed the other half in tanks with cloudy water. 

Researchers then measured the diameter of the eye and pupil of both the young fish and adult cichlids in the experiment, determining younger populations had indeed gained traits that allowed them to grow larger eye structures in response to cloudy waters. 

“When the cichlids were young, they had this huge plasticity and were able to alter their physiology in order to cope with the turbid environmental conditions,” Tiarks said. “But when we looked at the fish that were older, they didn’t have that same flexibility.”

The study also makes note of an overall difference in the pattern of eye and brain sizes between young and old fish. Originally, the team expected to find that fish reared in murky water would exhibit larger brains than those reared in clear water, since having bigger eyes doesn’t mean much if the brain doesn’t evolve to process that visual information.

Instead, digital photographs of their biological systems revealed that older fish had bigger brains and optic lobes relative to their length and brain mass compared to the relative sizes of those structures in younger fish. This could indicate that similar to mammals, fish experience different sensory demands at various stages throughout their lives. 

It’s still unclear if many of these changes are brought on by outside environmental variables like the amount of oxygen in the water or physical changes, like sexual maturation. 

The issue of growing up in clear versus murky water is a real one for the Blue Lips cichlid, especially with changing ecosystems in their African habitat.

Deforestation is one of the leading causes of rising habitat destruction and murkiness in rivers and lakes. When trees are cut down, the stability of the nearby soil is uprooted, leading to deposit of sediment into nearby aquatic systems, said Tiarks. 

“Anytime there’s a storm, all of that soil, sediment and vegetation that was held in place by trees isn’t held in place anymore,” they said. “It all ends up in whatever body of water is nearest, and it’s a direct stressor to our field sites and the populations that live there.”

Studies like this one suggest that as human-induced environmental change continues to worsen, certain animal populations like fish may be able to persist even in less-than-ideal habitats. 

To Tiarks, this phenomenon offers some measure of hope that humans’ negative influence on the environment isn’t as life-altering for all species as it currently seems. 

“We are causing and driving changes within these fishes’ systems,” said Tiarks. “But holding on to examples of species that can actually cope with the changes happening around them is a good reminder of how powerful and flexible nature is.”

Suzanne M. Gray from Ohio State and Lauren J. Chapman from McGill University were co-authors. 

While accelerating sea level rise will result in widespread intermittent flooding and long-term inundation in many coastal communities, the paper, recently published in Nature Communications, showed that when these levels increase above 4 feet, minority populations will be disproportionately at risk of isolation.

Rising sea levels could lead to isolation by disrupting transportation networks and roads, meaning that those affected lose access to essential locations such as critical emergency services and schools. 

The study further exposed that renters and older adults face a greater risk of isolation, highlighting the growing connection between historical drivers of existing social inequality and the groups that incur the most risk of climate change.

According to Kelsea Best, lead author of the study and an assistant professor of civil, environmental and geodetic engineering at The Ohio State University, the first step in better characterizing these threats is changing how researchers assess community risk, as most studies measure this by exclusively determining impacts via direct flooding. But concentrating on this sole measurement neglects more complex aftereffects of sea level rise, such as isolation, and reinforces inequality in coastal areas, Best said. 

“We need to re-conceptualize how we measure who is burdened by sea level rise because there are so many ways that people might be burdened before their home is flooded,“ she said. 

Current reports estimate that around 20 million coastal residents in the U.S. will be affected by rising sea levels by 2030, but the paper notes that this number doesn’t include the whole impact global warming will have on certain communities and demographics. 

Notably, because people need access to essential places like grocery stores, public schools, hospitals and fire stations, Best and her colleagues argue that an inability to reach these places impacts individuals just as negatively as if they were living in inundated homes themselves, and should be documented as such. 

Most importantly, their results expose one of the main reasons for these vast differences in risk: A group’s risk of isolation is intimately entwined with specific road networks and where vital services are located in relation to where affected individuals reside. 

They identified these disparities in risk by overlaying OpenStreetMap (OSM) road network data with National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) mean higher high water (MHHW) scenarios. These projections were then combined with recent census data to estimate the percentage of a population that would be left out or missed in estimates of who would be impacted by sea level rise if researchers only counted those who suffered direct inundation. 

“If we take a one-size-fits-all approach, or a seemingly ‘neutral’ approach to understanding who gets access to safe, affordable housing and community in a world with climate change, then we’re really just exacerbating these inequities and it’s not good enough,” said Best. “We have to deliberately seek to provide access to adaptation resources to groups of people who have historically been left out and therefore have fewer resources to respond in the first place.”

The researchers showed that Hispanic populations are often overrepresented in the total citizenry for being at risk of isolation beginning at 4 feet of sea level rise, and Black populations are overrepresented after 6 feet. Alternatively, white populations are underrepresented after 5 feet of sea level rise. 

But to determine when these disparities will begin to develop, Best’s team compared two long-term sea level rise scenarios: an intermediate scenario in which global sea level rise increased by a meter by 2100, and a high scenario in which that number increased to 2 meters by the same year. 

Alarmingly, the study found strong evidence that these isolation effects would set in by 2120 in the intermediate scenario and as early as 2090 in the high scenario. “This timeline matters from a planning and adaptation perspective,” said Best. “Part of why we included the temporal piece is to say this issue would not be as much of a problem if we had urgent, aggressive mitigation. 

“The effects of climate change are going to be further reaching and more cascading than might be directly obvious, and those effects are not going to be felt equitably,” said Best. “So we need to be thinking about those populations most at risk from the beginning and develop policies to support them.” 

The work was supported by the Clark Distinguished Chair Endowment (given to study co-author Deb. A. Neimeier of the University of Maryland) and the National Science Foundation. Other co-authors were Qian He from Rowan University, Allison C. Reilly from the University of Maryland, and Mitchell Anderson and Tom Logan from the University of Canterbury.