A scenario-based framework researchers developed to model how counties across the Midwest might respond to several grid expansion strategies revealed that even the most expensive policies that take community health concerns and employment needs into account are only 0.7% more costly than typical, cost-minimizing approaches. 

Researchers determined this by examining five different policies that could guide the evolution of the energy grid, comparing factors like resulting costs, job creation and fossil fuel emissions. 

While each policy had important trade-offs, the analysis widely showed that supporting the development of renewable energy technologies, like wind and solar, can make it easier to address future  socioeconomic impacts for little to no cost. 

This discovery adds to a growing body of work debunking the idea that improving communities through clean energy projects is a task too expensive for taxpayers to support, said Daniel Gingerich, co-author of the study and an assistant professor in civil, environmental, and geodetic engineering and integrated systems engineering at The Ohio State University.

“We can create a power sector that addresses the goals that we have as a society, while keeping the cost to us as ratepayers negligible,” said Gingerich. “In actuality, it’s less than a 1% increase in the overall cost of the system.”

The study was recently published in the journal Energy Policy. 

As the U.S. experiences record-breaking electricity demand, which is projected to rise dramatically over the next few decades, many scientists have urged policymakers to modernize and decarbonize our current energy systems by shifting away from fossil fuel infrastructure. The issue is, according to the study, doing so could make some regions more vulnerable to economic shocks because even minimizing costs doesn’t always incentivize new infrastructure to move into those communities.   

Ohio, specifically its Appalachian regions, would benefit from minimizing power sources that release carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, said Gingerich. 

“We need a transitional electricity grid to better meet not just the amount of power that we will require in the future, but also the needs of the people that rely on energy as the lifeblood of their community,” he said. Without those considerations, many communities may be left behind or become much more resistant to next-generation grid changes, especially if people can’t envision how those advances will help create a better future for themselves and their families. 

Still, depending on the chosen policy, there are significant trade-offs communities must navigate, given that decisions that prioritize economic benefits may not be the best option to protect the environment, or vice versa. Although this can make it difficult to create a more just energy sector, policymakers can overcome these challenges by designing transition strategies that target a region’s past struggles, said Gingerich. 

For instance, one proposed energy transition pathway to expanding the electricity grid from 2022 to 2050 assumes that only counties with historic negative health effects would be prioritized for clean electricity-generating infrastructure. 

Alternatively, the most expensive of these options — only 0.6% costlier than it would be to expand the grid using the cheapest method possible — suggests that wind and solar only be added in counties with a large percentage of lost energy industry jobs. Over time, this would likely lead to about 233,500 more jobs in the clean energy sector, said Gingerich. 

“The decisions that we make now will have decades of consequences,” he said. “So to prevent wasted economic investments, we have to pick the right technologies to use in the right places.” 

Gingerich also notes that it isn’t only hotter temperatures that are driving changes in how we generate power. As large-scale electricity users like data centers and EV chargers come online, the grid will also need to evolve to accommodate their increased needs. Alternative renewable energy sources like wind and solar power could be the solution to that. 

More sophisticated iterations of the team’s model could also be useful in evaluating both the economic burden and environmental impacts of these additions to the grid and eventually help promote policies that champion a more equitable future for the energy sector. 

”While we don’t know what the future looks like or how costs for certain technologies may change over the years, we can plan for how communities should start thinking about new sources of economic activity,” said Gingerich.

The study was supported by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and is based on work developed under a U.S. National Science Foundation Traineeship program. Other Ohio State co-authors include Diego Hincapié-Ossa, Aashma Upreti, Jeffrey Bielicki and Kelsea Best.

After collecting nearly 30 vacuumed dust samples from places like schools, university residence halls and office buildings, researchers simultaneously identified the presence of 54 distinct viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, influenza, norovirus, Epstein-Barr virus, and others. 

Indoor dust tends to accumulate biological material shed by occupants and also integrates signatures from the air, surfaces and human activity over time, which means using these particles to monitor viral pathogen trends could aid early detection efforts against future outbreaks. 

“It’s really important that we understand broadly how to track disease in our community,” said Karen Dannemiller, senior author of the study and an associate professor of civil, environmental and geodetic engineering and environmental health sciences at The Ohio State University. “Similar to wastewater monitoring, which tracks disease clusters on a large-scale level, we’ve created an intermediate tool that has those same benefits for a smaller population.” 

Compared to traditional sampling methods, dust-based techniques are advantageous because the particles are easily collected during routine cleaning, it requires no specialized plumbing access, and dust can remain stable at room temperature for extended periods. These simple but critical aspects can lead to quick, high-resolution insights into what is happening within a specific space and help researchers take appropriate measures to address it, said Dannemiller. 

“This is groundbreaking work,” she said. “While people have sequenced viruses out of dust before, it’s been on a pretty limited basis and was not proposed as a surveillance tool.”

The study was recently published in the journal Building and Environment.

To take a targeted look at these pathogens, researchers utilized both PCR analysis and a novel sequencing technique that detects the RNA molecules that viruses leave behind after they decay. By comparing the findings in their sample to a library panel of 200 potential pathogens, the team measured and categorized many viruses at once, a capability that, on the ground, would increase both the efficiency and utility of future viral investigations. 

“Research like this is useful for monitoring a range of buildings where there’s a variety of things that you're concerned about,” said Dannemiller. “By using that information to help pinpoint those issues, it’s possible to improve our decisions about where to direct limited mitigation resources.”

Significantly, building dust could also be used to capture data from both symptomatic and asymptomatic individuals, a noninvasive aspect that would allow researchers and decision-makers to infer viral patterns without the need for direct clinical testing. 

While researchers in this study did not measure the viability of the sampled viruses, it’s unlikely that leftover viral particles in dust would still be infectious – depending on the bug. Given the minimal risk, establishing a robust and easily scalable dust-based monitoring tool would provide the public with a much broader understanding of community transmission. 

For instance, three of the viruses the team found were shown to be more prevalent in child-associated settings, like daycares, rather than in buildings primarily occupied by adults, and a total of 85% of all collected samples contained at least one rhinovirus. Such results signify that dust can even capture public health trends by occupant demographic, like age. 

Overall, findings suggest that dust-based surveillance may be a powerful complement to wastewater surveillance, particularly for early warning of threats in enclosed environments. Future work may include exploring the use of this sampling in military and healthcare settings and determining if the team’s new viral sampling technique could help automate detection pipelines. 

“This is an initial step to understanding how we can use technology to better monitor at the building level for different infectious diseases,” said Dannemiller. “Ultimately, that leads to a more informed use of precautions and better targeting for the use of resources.”

Other Ohio State co-authors include Austin Shamblin, Calissa Carlisle, Nicholas Nastasi, Seth Faith, Michael Sovic and Vanessa Varaljay, as well as Genny Cook, Anthony Fries, Richard Agans from the United States Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine. This study was supported by the United States Air Force Research Laboratory, the National Institutes of Health and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. 

This was recently demonstrated by researchers investigating how a total solar eclipse might affect the soundscape of Midwestern United States prairie communities. Their objective was to discover how soundscapes — combinations of natural and artificial sounds that shape an environment — are influenced by ambient light, as light level helps cue annual biological events such as sexual reproduction and migration. 

Using novel acoustic capture devices to record animal vocalizations in the days before, during and after the April 2024 eclipse, researchers measured changes in soundscape diversity, complexity, and intensity at three different sites in Ohio: Larry R. Yoder Prairie Learning Laboratory, the Tecumseh Nature Preserve and Highbanks Metro Park. Their findings showed that while the eclipse was associated with both changes in sound activity and diversity, it was not associated with major changes in acoustic complexity.

“Solar eclipses are wonderful events that let us experiment in natural settings what sudden losses of light could be doing to animals,” said Madison Von Deylen, lead author of the study and a PhD student in evolution, ecology and organismal biology at The Ohio State University. 

“Both overexposure and underexposure to light can have negative consequences on animal physiology, and only a handful of studies have experimentally assessed how eclipses influence animal behavior.”

The study was recently published in the journal Ethology Ecology & Evolution. 

While similar soundscape research has been used to detect cryptic species and even identify members of those once thought extinct, Von Deylen said this study is one of the few to have used passive acoustic monitoring to quantify the effects of a solar eclipse on the animal soundscape. 

“We used a fairly novel technique to accomplish this,” she said. “Acoustic monitoring and soundscape analysis has a lot of promise for being able to track changes in ecosystem composition over time.”

Analyzing these subtle ecosystem changes allowed the team to dig deeper into the circumstances behind their results. For example, the time of year was important in this work. Any number of environmental differences would have altered the natural soundscape, but since  the eclipse coincided with the breeding season for many prairie birds, many unique calling patterns were able to be detected. 

Initially, researchers expected that a sudden decrease in ambient light would cause the prairie soundscape to mimic that of dusk. Their results suggest that overall sound activity was highest on the day of the eclipse, suggesting that even temporary environmental changes, such as lowered temperatures and moon phases, can inspire unexpected behavioral responses.

These new insights will not only aid scientists in understanding animal adaptability in the wild, but could spark new ideas on how to quantitatively measure environmental change, said Von Deylen, 

“The conclusions that we were able to draw from this study were extremely context-specific,” said Von Deylen. “But it lays the groundwork for more complex, larger-scale studies.” 

Future work will likely aim to sharpen the novel quantitative methods used in this paper so that soundscape analysis can become a vital research tool for other areas of study as well. 

“I’m really excited to see where soundscape work goes in the next couple of decades,” said Von Deylen. ““It will be of great help in answering new conservation questions.”

The study was supported by Ohio State’s Summer Research Opportunities Program. Other Ohio State co-authors include Sabeel Haddad and Susan Gershman. 

Created in the aftermath of the 2014 Toledo water crisis, HABRI is a statewide research program that provides near-term solutions for the full suite of issues surrounding harmful algal blooms.

The initiative consists of 29 science teams across the state that are working to fill critical knowledge gaps identified by frontline state agencies, including the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, Ohio Department of Agriculture, Ohio Department of Health, Ohio Lake Erie Commission and Ohio Department of Natural Resources. 

Ohio’s state agencies, researchers and local partners are collaboratively generating and applying new science to reduce nutrient pollution, improve water quality, and strengthen public health responses to harmful algal blooms thanks to this initiative.

The 2025 report highlights that the state of Ohio continues to benefit from HABRI, showcasing the following results:

• The Ohio EPA, with HABRI support and researchers, is working directly with water treatment plant operators to optimize removal of cyanotoxins.
• Several HABRI projects have helped Ohio EPA understand the nature of how nutrients move from the working landscape to streams and, ultimately, Lake Erie, enabling better planning for and support of nutrient reduction implementation actions.
• Researchers at Bowling Green State University and Ohio State are collaborating with Ohio EPA and local farmers to evaluate the beneficial use of dredge materials to amend agricultural soils. This research is providing information for stakeholders on the impact of dredge sediment on soil properties and economic feasibility of beneficial use for agriculture.
• HABRI research has demonstrated that Drinking Water Treatment Material effectively binds phosphorus. Based on the results of the research, Ohio EPA is working with stakeholders to explore new and innovative reuse opportunities to utilize the materials to improve water quality.
• New information regarding nutrient loss pathways, as well as losses from nutrient application activities and losses from residual soil phosphorus, is helping the Ohio Department of Agriculture adjust program practices and specifications to better address nutrient loss from row crop agriculture. Additionally, recent projects studying farmland water management practices are providing valuable insight into their nutrient capture potential.
• Working directly with the academic research community, through the ODHE HABRI, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources is able to more deeply explore the mechanisms that are driving the water quality impacts of its wetland restoration program. The program now has a sharper understanding of the results of its work and better tools to use as the program strengthens the effect of natural infrastructure restoration in the battle against harmful algal blooms in Ohio’s waterways.
• A HABRI-supported review of human health data repositories by researchers has enhanced the Ohio Department of Health’s understanding of harmful algal bloom (HAB) susceptibility by identifying several potential risk factors, including respiratory illness, smoking and diabetes, that may influence future health recommendations.
• In partnership with the Ohio Department of Health, with support from HABRI, researchers are working to improve the dissemination of health education on HABs to current and future physicians. More evidence-based HAB education will aid physicians in swiftly diagnosing, treating and reporting HAB-related illnesses, improving overall state response to HAB events.

“HABRI research projects continue to inform us about the effectiveness of actions included in Ohio’s Domestic Action Plan and to help the state improve our understanding of nutrient reductions from the H2Ohio work being implemented,” said Joy Mulinex, executive director, Ohio Lake Erie Commission, on behalf of Ohio Department of Natural Resources, Ohio Environmental Protection Agency and Ohio Department of Agriculture.

HABRI is funded by the Ohio Department of Higher Education (ODHE) with $24 million made available since 2015. Matching funding from participating Ohio universities increases the total investment to more than $37 million, demonstrating the state’s overall commitment to addressing the harmful algal bloom issue. 

Final results from 12 projects funded from 2022-2024 make up this year’s report, in addition to one-year results of 17 projects funded in 2024. 

“Gov. DeWine’s leadership through H2Ohio has positioned Ohio as a national leader in investing to improve water quality,” said ODHE Chancellor Mike Duffey. “Recent research has demonstrated common drinking water technology offers further promise in reducing phosphorus-related algae blooms.” 

HABRI comprises 62 scientists leading 114 research projects from Bowling Green State University, Case Western Reserve University, Central State University, Defiance College, Heidelberg University, Kent State University, Oberlin College, Sinclair Community College, the University of Akron, the University of Cincinnati, Miami University, Wright State University, Youngstown State University and consortium leaders the University of Toledo and Ohio State. 

Information about individual HABRI projects, as well as partner organizations and background on the initiative, is also available on the Ohio Sea Grant website at go.osu.edu/habri. The report can be downloaded directly at https://ohioseagrant.osu.edu/p/l6rmc.

Ohio Sea Grant is supported by The Ohio State University College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences (CFAES) School of Environment and Natural Resources, Ohio State University Extension and NOAA Sea Grant, a network of 34 Sea Grant programs nationwide dedicated to the protection and sustainable use of marine and Great Lakes resources. Stone Laboratory is Ohio State’s island campus on Lake Erie and is the research, education and outreach facility of Ohio Sea Grant and part of CFAES School of Environment and Natural Resources.

Mushrooms have long been recognized for their extreme resilience and unique properties. Their innate abilities make them perfect specimens for bioelectronics, an emerging field that, for next-gen computing, could help develop exciting new materials. 

As one example, researchers from The Ohio State University recently discovered that common edible fungi, such as shiitake mushrooms, can be grown and trained to act as organic memristors, a type of data processor that can remember past electrical states. 

Their findings showed that these shiitake-based devices not only demonstrated similar reproducible memory effects to semiconductor-based chips but could also be used to create other types of low-cost, environmentally friendly, brain-inspired computing components.

“Being able to develop microchips that mimic actual neural activity means you don't need a lot of power for standby or when the machine isn't being used,” said John LaRocco, lead author of the study and a research scientist in psychiatry at Ohio State’s College of Medicine. “That's something that can be a huge potential computational and economic advantage.”

Fungal electronics aren’t a new concept, but they have become ideal candidates for developing sustainable computing systems, said LaRocco. This is because they minimize electrical waste by being biodegradable and cheaper to fabricate than conventional memristors and semiconductors, which often require costly rare-earth minerals and high amounts of energy from data centers. 

“Mycelium as a computing substrate has been explored before in less intuitive setups, but our work tries to push one of these memristive systems to its limits,” he said. 

The study was recently published in the journal PLOS ONE.

To explore the new memristors' capabilities, researchers cultured samples of shiitake and button mushrooms. Once mature, they were dehydrated to ensure long-term viability, connected to special electronic circuits, and then electrocuted at various voltages and frequencies. 

“We would connect electrical wires and probes at different points on the mushrooms because distinct parts of it have different electrical properties,” said LaRocco. “Depending on the voltage and connectivity, we were seeing different performances.”

After two months, the team discovered that when used as RAM – the computer memory that stores data – their mushroom memristor was able to switch between electrical states at up to 5,850 signals per second, with about 90% accuracy. However, performance dropped as the frequency of the electrical voltages increased, but much like an actual brain, it could be fixed by connecting more mushrooms to the circuit.  

Overall, their research details how surprisingly easy it is to program and preserve mushrooms to behave in unexpected and useful ways, said Qudsia Tahmina, co-author of the study and an associate professor in electrical and computer engineering at Ohio State. Moreover, it’s an example of how technology can advance when it relies on the natural world.

“Society has become increasingly aware of the need to protect our environment and ensure that we preserve it for future generations,” said Tahmina. “So that could be one of the driving factors behind new bio-friendly ideas like these.”

Building on the flexibility mushrooms offer also suggests there are possibilities for scaling up fungal computing, said Tahmina. For instance, larger mushroom systems may be useful in edge computing and aerospace exploration; smaller ones in enhancing the performance of autonomous systems and wearable devices. 

Organic memristors are still in early development, but future work could optimize the production process by improving cultivation techniques and miniaturizing the devices, as viable fungal memristors would need to be far smaller than what researchers achieved in this work. 

“Everything you'd need to start exploring fungi and computing could be as small as a compost heap and some homemade electronics, or as big as a culturing factory with pre-made templates,” said LaRocco. “All of them are viable with the resources we have in front of us now.” 

Other Ohio State co-authors include Ruben Petreaca, John Simonis and Justin Hill. This study was supported by the Honda Research Institute.

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. 

Findings showed that two novel devices, the Underwater Zooplankton Enhancement Light Array (UZELA) and 3D printed artificial settlement modules, could together boost the population of a species of coral native to Hawaii. 

In a previous study led by researchers at The Ohio State University, scientists found that UZELA successfully attracted nearby zooplankton, microscopic organisms that coral feed on. That study found that the light greatly enhanced local zooplankton density and increased the feeding rates of adult coral. In this one, they found that combining the light with 3-D printed housing modules could double survivorship and quadruple the growth of baby corals, which are called recruits.

Coral reefs are vital drivers of the marine ecosystem. Yet as rising global temperatures and acidifying oceans threaten their food sources, many coral reefs are now experiencing severe population declines. Typically, these losses would be recovered slowly via a process called coral recruitment, where adult coral colonies reproduce by releasing small larvae to recolonize the reef. 

But juvenile corals often die before they can become larger colonies, creating a population bottleneck that nature can’t always overcome alone, said Shannon Dixon, lead author of the study and a graduate student in earth sciences at Ohio State. 

“Coral recruitment is super important for reef persistence throughout time,” she said. “Just like how trees drop seeds to create new trees, the life cycle of coral is very similar.”

While this process also acts as a way for coral to cope with environmentally stressful events like heat stress or cyclones, some reefs, like the Florida Keys, experience little to no coral recruitment, so human intervention is needed to ensure the reef continues to thrive, said Dixon. 

Now, as the first team to exhibit a combined technology method for coral recovery, the researchers in this study reveal that the presence of UZELA and the complex settlement modules could reduce the time coral need to complete this vulnerable “baby” phase of their lives, while accelerating the timeline for establishing genetically diverse coral populations. More importantly, by exposing coral recruits to higher concentrations of zooplankton, these tools worked to double coral survivorship and quadruple their growth.

“Making reefs more habitable for coral recruits is extremely important,” said Dixon. “If we can create the ideal living conditions for struggling coral reefs, we’ll see more survivorship, higher biodiversity, and more reefs in geographical locations than we would see without these tools.”

The study was recently published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

On the quest to help coral offspring survive a harrowing early life, scientists used UZELA in tandem with three types of artificial ceramic settlement modules.

Of the 30 modules used in this experiment, 10 had flat surfaces, 10 were smooth domes, and 10 were spiral domes. Half of the modules of each type were coupled with UZELA to concentrate zooplankton, while the other half did not have UZELA as a control. Researchers had theorized that certain domes would be better for the survival and growth of the coral because of their complexity, which turned out to be true.

After six months on the reef, no corals on the flat surface survived, but some had on both the smooth and spiral domes. However, those that grew with UZELA on the smooth and spiral dome settlement modules survived at twice the rate of those that didn’t have UZELA. 

Unsurprisingly, these findings are consistent with the idea that coral larvae tend to avoid horizontal surfaces, preferring to settle in a structure’s minute crevices, said Dixon.

At the end of the experiment, all surviving coral recruits appeared healthy, suggesting the tools this team used are extremely adept at improving coral feeding. This result is great news during a time when global coral mortality is reaching record highs, said Andrea Grottoli, senior co-author of the study and a professor in earth sciences at Ohio State, but it is especially meaningful for baby corals, as they usually require lots of high-quality nutrition to prosper. 

“This outcome is directly applicable to what we might expect survivorship and growth to look like on other reefs using these technologies,” she said. “It just goes to show how a little goes a long way when you give coral a little more to eat.” 

UZELA is currently patent pending in three countries, including the United States. This work illustrates how effectively the project could be scaled up for use in active coral restoration programs, potentially making both local and worldwide conservation efforts faster and far more effective. But there’s only so much that man-made gadgets can do for the coral community, said Grottoli. 

“Technological interventions like UZELA and the settlement modules will help some corals survive in some places, sometimes,” she said. “But with all technologies, there are real costs and real efforts associated with them.” 

One of the most important keys to bridging the current coral survivorship gap may be to determine the impact this study’s devices will have on multiyear coral recruit survivorship, maturation and reproduction, which the team plans to investigate. 

“This project highlights how wonderfully you can combine technological interventions that you didn’t necessarily see fitting together, but push the envelope to solve problems in new multidisciplinary ways,” said Dixon. “Research like this allows us to embrace the collaborative nature of science to make the environment better for coral.”

Co-authors include Ann Marie Hulver and Jacob Welter from Ohio State, Hendrikje Jorissen, Robert J. Toonen, and Joshua S. Madin from the University of Hawaiʻi, and the R3D Consortium. This work was supported by the University of Hawaiʻi Foundation, the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

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.

The device, dubbed the Underwater Zooplankton Enhancement Light Array (UZELA), is an autonomous, programmable underwater light that works to draw in nearby zooplankton, microscopic organisms that coral feed on. 

After testing the submersible on two species of coral native to Hawaii over six months, researchers found that UZELA could greatly enhance local zooplankton density and increase the feeding rates of both healthy and bleached coral. Importantly, providing coral with greater amounts of food makes them stronger and more likely to be resilient against certain environmental threats, like heat stress or ocean acidification.

This result is impressive, especially at a time when rising ocean temperatures are forcing entire coral reefs to the cusp of collapse, said Andrea Grottoli, lead author of the study and a professor of earth sciences at The Ohio State University.

“Coral reefs house one-third of all marine species, yet occupy less than 1% of the ocean,” she said. “They are disproportionately responsible for ocean health and we’re at risk of losing them.”

The study was recently published in the journal Limnology and Oceanography: Methods.

Millions of humans rely on coral reefs, as they support fishing industries and protect coastline communities from dangers like erosion and floods. Unfortunately, many climate models project that at Earth’s current rate of warming, these vital coral reefs may be completely devastated by 2050, jeopardizing the complex ecosystems they sustain. 

Although the technology in this study is only a short-term solution to the environmental threats that coral reefs face, the device will likely be very beneficial to coral restoration efforts, said Grottoli. “Think of it as a band-aid for about a couple decades,” she said. “It can protect some corals in some places, sometimes.” 

The team also found that UZELA, which can be powered for half a year on a single battery, could optimize a coral’s feeding time by operating for just one hour after dusk. 

Understandably, artificial lights can disrupt the behavior of other marine animals, so researchers could choose not to use the device year-round. That said, the study emphasizes that corralling zooplankton with this human-made tool doesn’t seem to harm the environment or interrupt the flow of other zooplankton in the surrounding area. 

“If you imagine zooplankton in a column floating above coral, instead of being naturally dispersed, UZELA is just pulling them down, but it’s not taking away from the coral beside it,” said Grottoli. “We show that if you put the coral close to the light, they benefit from that concentrated zooplankton, and feeding rates go up 10- to 50-fold.”

This number is equivalent to an 18-68% increase in the amount of metabolic demand that can be met by zooplankton alone, meaning that increased feeding helps supplement a large part of the coral’s diet, which successfully leads to an increase in coral survivorship and persistence. 

“The real intent of this project is to inject new technology and energy into coral restoration success,” Grottoli said. “It’s something that can be deployed strategically for high-value reefs, or projects that have already had a lot of investment in them.”

Widely adaptable to various marine environments, UZELA can also easily be serviced by divers once placed in optimal underwater locations.

Notably, while the current generation of UZELAs are handmade, the team is working with an Ohio-based engineering company to redesign the technology to make it more manufacturable. Grottoli expects these more enhanced versions will be available within the next one to three years. 

“We are not mitigating climate change fast enough to save coral, and UZELA is not going to instantly save coral reefs,” she said. “But it is an exciting solution that will buy us time as we work toward a more sustainable environment.”

Other co-authors include Shannon Dixon and Ann Marie Hulver from Ohio State as well as Claire Bardin, Claire Lewis, Christopher Suchocki and Rob Toonen from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa and the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology. 

The study was supported by the University of Hawai’i Foundation, the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Built as an alternative to traditional firefighting countermeasures like toxic chemical foams or hydrants whose use can strain water resources, this device works to suppress flames using the power of conductive aerosols, small particles that can direct electricity. 

These aerosols are carried by vortex rings — small donut-shaped bands of air — that transform the particles into short pulses of wind that convert nearby oxygen into ozone. Once released, their accelerated airflow generates rapid turbulence, disrupting the natural combustion process and quickly extinguishing the target fire, said John LaRocco, lead author of the study and a research scientist in psychiatry at The Ohio State University College of Medicine. 

“Using a combination of electricity and this vortex ring technology, we found a more efficient way of solving an environmental problem that will improve our quality of life,” said LaRocco. 

The launcher device resembles a small bucket, attached to an arm brace. Firefighters would aim the bucket toward the fire, and the bucket would use bursts of compressed air or an elastic diaphragm to deliver aerosols in an electric arc to fight the fire.

The idea to create this low-cost, safe and portable device originally began as a method to help refine current fire management techniques, said Qudsia Tahmina, co-author of the study and an associate professor in electrical and computer engineering.

The study’s first step was to determine what chemical combinations would best make up the conductive aerosols. Once seven mixtures were tested across two trials, the most conductive of them, a coarse copper solution, was chosen as vortex ring material. After the study’s simulations showed that the device would succeed in suppressing fires, researchers aimed to test how they could further optimize the launcher’s power. 

To do this, they tested two versions of their prototype: a compressed air launcher with a conical muzzle that generated vortex rings by releasing compressed air and an elastic diaphragm launcher with a square-edged muzzle that generated vortex rings with an elastic membrane. 

Although the compressed air vortex generator was significantly more efficient than its counterpart, their work revealed that both prototypes had an effective range of nearly 2 meters, or about 6.5 feet.

“In both instances, we were blown away by the invention,” said LaRocco. 

The study was recently published in the journal Technologies. 

Depending on the size of a fire and how many firefighters are deployed to battle it, it’s likely that several of these devices would be required in a real-life emergency. 

“The design of our Vortex Launcher is actually really simple in nature,” said John Simonis, another co-author of the study and an undergraduate student in electrical and computer engineering, “One of the benefits of that simplicity is it’s also very scalable.”

“It’s maneuverable in tight spaces so that you can walk through doors and indoor environments, but also large enough to have the practical benefits of generating those vortex rings,” he said. 

Since vortex rings also retain their shape as they dissipate, they can carry chemical payloads over longer distances — an advantage over other methods — that will make firefighters safer as they wouldn’t have to risk injury by getting close to the flames to put them out.  

The study concludes that their device could be further developed by integrating multimodal sensors or image analysis into the system. These computer vision upgrades would allow the launcher to target fires caused by a wide variety of sources, said Simonis. 

The research also has future implications for industrial automation and aerospace technologies, where the device could be used to protect military vehicles and even spacecraft interiors from fires.

“There are lots of applications for our device to make a difference,” said Simonis.

Stan Essel of Ohio State was a co-author. 

Researchers examined soil core samples taken from two constructed freshwater wetlands and compared them to data from previous studies of the same wetlands over 29 years to determine how well human-made wetlands sequester — or capture and store — carbon as they age. 

Findings showed both wetlands captured similar amounts of carbon over the decades, but neither has shown a net gain or loss since year 15.

But their value in sequestering carbon is remarkable, the researchers said.

“Wetlands are generally thought of as the kidneys of our world because they can clean water naturally and sequester carbon well,” said Jay Martin, a distinguished professor in food, agricultural and biological engineering at The Ohio State University and a co-author of the study. “As we try to combat climate change, they also provide habitat for many species that are important to us.”

The researchers analyzed data from the Schiermeier Olentangy River Wetland Research Park (ORWRP), a site ideal for long-term study due to the overwhelming amount of environmental data it generated over the past three decades.

Previous studies of the park revealed that its soil has shown an increase in carbon levels. But by using detailed measurements taken in the wetland’s 29th year post-construction, Martin’s team found that wetlands’ ability to sequester carbon diminishes as they mature. 

The study was recently published in the journal Ecological Engineering. 

Under current conditions, the wetlands have become a stable ecological force, and this equilibrium isn’t expected to change anytime soon. 

“When you first construct a wetland, the initial plant growth is often what causes carbon to be sequestered so quickly,” said Daniel Ruane, a former master’s student in ecological engineering and the lead author of the study. “But it just isn’t possible to have infinite growth.” 

Although there are limits to how much atmospheric carbon artificial wetlands can effectively store, since their carbon sequestration and storage rates are still far greater than other ecosystems, they still represent a potential solution to counter climate change, said Ruane. 

As a result, future research into the health of the ORWRP is likely to analyze the various plant communities that grow within the area as well as investigate methane emission levels to determine how long the land can function as a carbon sink. 

“The benefits that wetlands provide are increasingly positive,” said Martin. “Our findings emphasize that these ecosystems should be looked at in a better light now than ever before.”

Due to an increase in urban and agricultural land use, more than 50% of Earth’s natural wetlands have disappeared over the last few centuries. This decline has impacted ecosystem services all around the U.S., but most notably in the Midwest, said Martin. 

In Ohio, for example, projected wetland loss is closer to 90%, jeopardizing many essential processes that humans rely on, like water quality improvement and flood mitigation. 

This provides even more reason why policymakers should be trying to build and maintain wetland ecosystems, Ruane said.

“If we started to create and restore more wetlands now, that could solve a lot of our problems down the road,” he said. 

Co-authors of the study include Michael Brooker and William Mitsch of Ohio State, Blanca Bernal of Greencollar US Inc., Chris Anderson of Auburn University, and Robert Nairn of the University of Oklahoma.

Carbon dioxide (CO₂) is a greenhouse gas that accounts for a large part of Earth’s warming climate, and is produced by power plants, factories and various forms of transportation. Typical carbon capture systems aimed at reducing its presence in the atmosphere work to lower carbon dioxide emissions by isolating CO₂ from other gases and converting it to useful products. However, this process is difficult to implement on an industrial scale due to the massive amount of energy required for these systems to operate. 

Now, using a special nickel-based catalyst, researchers have figured out a way to save much of this precious energy by turning captured carbon dioxide directly into methane, said Tomaz Neves-Garcia, lead author of the study and a current postdoctoral researcher in chemistry and biochemistry at The Ohio State University.

By employing nickel atoms laid out on an electrified surface, the team was able to directly convert carbamate, the captured form of carbon dioxide, to methane. They found that nickel atoms, a cheap and widely available catalyst, were extremely good at making this conversion.

“We are going from a molecule that has low energy and producing from it a fuel that has high energy,” said Neves-Garcia. “What makes this so interesting is that others capture, recover and then convert carbon dioxide in steps, while we save energy by doing these steps simultaneously.” 

Most importantly, streamlining the carbon capture process helps reframe what scientists know about the carbon cycle, and is a vital step to setting up more complex strategies for faster and more efficient climate mitigation technologies. 

“We need to focus on spending the lowest energy possible for carbon capture and conversion,” said Neves-Garcia. “So instead of performing all the capture and conversion steps independently, we can combine it in a single step, bypassing wasteful energy processes.”   

The paper was recently published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. 

Although many carbon capture methods are still in their early stages, with researchers from an array of fields working to improve them, the field is a promising one, said Neves-Garcia. 

Converting CO₂ into a fuel using renewable electricity has the potential to close the carbon cycle. For example, when methane is burned to generate energy, it emits carbon dioxide, which, if captured and converted back to methane, could lead to a continuous cycle of energy production without adding to Earth’s global warming burden.  

The study also represents the first time that researchers discovered they could use electrochemistry to achieve carbamate conversion to methane. Although many attempts have been made to convert captured CO₂ into useful products, until now most researchers have only shown the ability to produce carbon monoxide.  

“Methane can be a really interesting product, but the most important thing is that this opens a path to develop more processes to convert captured CO₂  into other products,” he said. 

Moving forward, the team expects to keep exploring other chemical clean energy alternatives to help inspire the creation of a variety of sustainable carbon capture routes. 

“Everything always goes back to energy, and there’s a lot of excitement and effort invested in the future of this field to save more of it,” said Neves-Garcia. 

Other co-authors include Quansong Zhu and L. Robert Baker from Ohio State, Liane M. Rossi from the University of Sao Paulo, Mahmudul Hasan and Robert E. Warburton from Case Western Reserve University, Jing Li and Hailiang Wang from Yale University, as well as Zhan Jiang and Yongye Liang from the Southern University of Science and Technology.

By examining ice cores taken from the Guliya ice cap in northwestern Tibet, researchers found that by measuring lead isotopes in dust-filled samples, they could detect a clear change in lead source levels present in the environment long after the Industrial Revolution. 

While increases in the amount of lead could be found in ice core samples dated to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, a significant change in its origin was noted beginning in 1974, when regulatory agencies in the U.S. began to institute strong emissions policies to curb dangerous overexposure to the metal. Though this caused a decrease in some types of gasoline use in some countries, other sources of lead emissions peaked later, said Roxana Sierra-Hernandez, lead author of the study and a senior research associate at The Ohio State University’s Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center. 

“Our lead isotope samples date to about 36,000 years ago, a time when we know that no civilizations at the time were using lead – meaning that much of what we found is natural,” she said. “Now with this work, we can pinpoint anthropogenic lead and when they left a mark in the region.”

The study was published recently in the journal Communications Earth & Environment. 

Millions of people rely on the glaciers in the Tibetan Plateau for life-sustaining water, but as global warming causes glaciers to retreat, those communities are put in jeopardy due to reduced water levels. What’s more, as glaciers continue to melt, the pollutants preserved inside them will also escape, said Sierra-Hernandez. 

“Depending on the amount of pollution there is in the environment, it sinks into these glaciers,” she said. “If a glacier melts, that source of pollution can leak into nearby rivers.” 

While small quantities of lead do originate from beneath the Earth’s crust, the bigger issue is lead put into the environment through human activity, she said. Prolonged exposure to the heavy metal can be toxic to humans, both when ingested or inhaled through contaminated food, water or air. It has been known to lead to a wide variety of health issues, including cancer, cardiovascular disease and fertility issues. 

With more accurate data on what constitutes a natural lead baseline, researchers can get a better handle on how drastically humans have affected the environment and better prepare for these consequences, according to the research. 

What also sets this study apart, said Sierra-Hernandez, is that the instruments and models the research team used were sensitive enough to discern the type of pollution the lead came from. They found that up until 2007, Chinese gasoline was the main source of the lead before those emissions decreased and emissions from coal and lead-zinc ores increased. 

Overall, their work emphasizes a huge change in lead sources during the last few centuries, and offers a glimpse into how local pollution distributes globally, even to faraway glacial regions. 

It’s an issue that likely won’t be solved by one country alone, noted the study. “Politicians need to be conscious enough to see that lead is still a concern and make policies that avoid emitting more of it, whether it’s from sources of coal or gasoline,” said Sierra-Hernandez.

Additionally, since lead isotopes can act like a fingerprint for unique chemical signatures,  researchers can use them to track and investigate sources of pollution, opening a path for similar studies to analyze and compare polluted ice core samples from other glaciers around the world, said Sierra-Hernandez. 

“Future studies can build on this study to compare modern and ancient pollution trends and better identify sources due to human activities,” she said. “It’s important to do more lead isotope studies. It’s hard and it’s time-consuming, but there’s so much to learn.”

Other co-authors include Elizabeth M. Griffith and Lonnie G. Thompson from Ohio State as well as Franco Marcantonio from Texas A&M University.

Their findings revealed that due to frequent disturbances like wildfires that raze down vegetation and persistent drought and deforestation that starve both the land and wildlife, the resilience of many plant communities in southern boreal forests — or their ability to recover after these events — significantly decreased over time. This may affect the Arctic carbon budget, foreshadowing a future where the region is likely to become a carbon source instead of remaining a carbon sink due to its limited capacity to absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide in the coming decades.  

This is because Arctic and boreal regions have warmed several times faster than other places around the globe and further warming is expected in the near future, said Yue Zhang, lead author of the study and a graduate student in earth sciences at The Ohio State University.

“When we talk about the response of forests to climate change, most of the time we’re thinking about the tropical rainforest,” said Zhang. “But remote boreal forests are really important in terms of their vast extent, large carbon storage and potential to mitigate climate change.”

The study was recently published in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

To better understand how the region’s ecosystem changed because of increased warming, researchers used historical data from NASA’s Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) program to remotely sense subtle changes in greenness in Alaska and western Canada between 2000 and 2019. They were able to estimate the time-varying speed of vegetation recovery from small fluctuations or large losses, even in areas where large losses have not happened yet. 

The study found that while plant resilience in the southern boreal forests notably decreased, even in regions with greening trends, resilience was thought to have increased in most of the Arctic tundra. Besides fires, other factors like heat and drought could have contributed to declines in plant resilience in the south, and changes in nutrient availability could have helped vegetation thrive in the rest of the Arctic.

While the release of food may benefit plant growth and resilience, the reality is that the rising temperatures that make this possible could also cause Arctic permafrost to melt more quickly than it already is, releasing from the ground as much carbon as 35 million cars emit in a year and hastening the arrival of climate tipping points.

It is uncertain now how much of the carbon will be absorbed by plants and how much will contribute to further warming, said Zhang. 

“That’s pretty concerning, because while greening may indicate that productivity and carbon uptake in these regions is increasing now, resilience decline indicates that it may not be sustainable in the longer term,” she said. 

According to the study, these shifts are indications that the entire ecosystem is in danger, as a large fraction of southern boreal forests is losing its stability, potentially leading to widespread forest loss and biome shifts.

Greening regions that experience resilience decline at the same time might also signal that the region is struggling to take a few last deep breaths before significant forest loss, said Yanlan Liu, senior author of the study and an assistant professor of earth sciences at Ohio State. This means that while the region could absorb significant amounts of carbon in the short term, scientists expect that if resilience continues to decline, the Arctic boreal ecosystem may not be as effective in mitigating climate in the long term as previously thought.

“Temperature records show this region is warming up to two to four times faster than the global average,” said Liu. “This is a hot spot of vegetation change where studying it can tell us about the ecosystem stability and what it’s capable of tolerating before it transitions into an alternative state through pervasive forest loss.”

The study further revealed that warm and dry areas with high elevation and dense vegetation cover were among the hotspots of resilience decline. Yet because many climate models currently lack consensus on how vegetation change and carbon dynamics contribute to the other, this team’s work will help enhance such models by informing scientists of where vegetation changes are likely to occur.

Ultimately, said Zhang, their method revealed more nuanced changes in the health of the region’s vegetation, beyond previously reported greening and browning trends. This method also provides researchers a tool to identify potential vegetation loss in other regions in the coming decades. 

With plans to continue trying to accurately predict ecosystem changes, researchers note their results warrant more field investigations aimed at better characterizing and understanding the resilience of the region. 

“Scientists need to learn to quantify climate-induced risks through diverse lenses,” said Liu. “On top of satellite remote sensing, we need more ground observations to help us identify ways to leverage these findings to inform future resources and risk management strategies.”

The study was supported by NASA and the Ohio Supercomputer Center. Co-authors include Kaiguang Zhao from Ohio State, Jonathan Wang from the University of Utah, and Logan T. Berner and Scott J. Goetz from Northern Arizona University. 

A phenomenon that typically occurs every two to seven years, El Niño causes much warmer than average ocean temperatures in the eastern Pacific, significantly affecting weather around the globe.  

The Quelccaya Ice Cap (QIC) in the Peruvian Andes has been shown to be sensitive to these climate shifts, but the extent to which El Niño contributes to its continued shrinkage has, to date, been unclear. 

Now, using images captured by NASA Landsat satellites over the past four decades, researchers have confirmed that the regional warming periodically caused by El Niño has indeed resulted in a drastic reduction of its snow-covered area. The study, led by Kara Lamantia, a graduate student at the Byrd Polar and Research Climate Center at The Ohio State University, found that between 1985 and 2022, the QIC lost about 58% of its snow cover and about 37% of its total area. 

“Our research gives us a look into a glacier’s health,” said Lamantia. “The Quelccaya glacier becomes greatly out of equilibrium during these short-term climate anomalies.”

The study, published today (October 8, 2024) in the journal The Cryosphere, is the first to automate the process of snow-covered area detection on the QIC. Normally, this detection is only possible through extensive field measurements or manually hand-tracing satellite images that are clear enough to detail the visual boundary between snow and ice. 

Yet an algorithm this team developed processes images using near-infrared imagery, a method that utilizes wavelengths outside our visible spectrum. “By creating a threshold for the different reflectance between snow and ice cover, we can gather a consistent and much more reliable measurement,” said Lamantia. 

Glaciers and ice caps gain mass by accumulating ice and snow and lose it when none is received, or more ice is lost than gained. By measuring the ratio of snow-covered area to the total area, researchers can quantify whether the QIC is gaining mass, losing it, or maintaining a steady state. 

The study revealed that during El Niños, the ratio drops significantly away from the average, indicating a drastic reduction in the snow-covered area. 

This extreme change in its ratio may be attributed to the wide differences between the dry and wet seasons in southern Peru, said Lamantia.

“All of the snowfall happens during the wet season, but during an El Niño, southern Peru experiences warmer and drier conditions than average so it stays dry throughout the wet season,” she said. “That means that the snow cover will continue to decline and there might be quite a bit less snowfall to replace it.”

As climate change rapidly alters the Earth’s environment, it’s expected that El Niños are likely to be longer-lived and stronger, a factor that will accelerate ice loss. This raises the possibility of the QIC’s snow cover failing to recover during La Niñas, or periods when the oceans should be cool.

“The ice cap as a whole is on a very consistent linear decline from anthropogenic warming,” said Lamantia. “It may not matter how strong future La Niñas are, as the freezing line continues to rise and snow cover shrinks, Quelccaya will likely continue to decline.”

If this carries on, some projections suggest that snow cover on the QIC could disappear by 2080, relegating it to a wasting ice field, much like Kilimanjaro. By the end of the century, the study notes, the ice cap could be no more.

It’s difficult to discern how other short-term weather events might impact glacier vulnerability, which is something similar studies may aim to model in the future. What scientists do know is that ice loss puts high-mountain communities that depend on them in jeopardy, as snow loss can quickly diminish key water supplies. 

The damage already done to the oceans and atmosphere is not something we can reverse tomorrow, Lamantia said. Using the data collected about their complex interactions, researchers may have a better chance at monitoring and mitigating the planet’s climate woes.

“The general consensus is we can expect that the likely increased intensity and duration of El Niños will cause more complications for the QIC,” said Lamantia. “We need to start being clever about how we use and conserve our water resources.”

This study was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation and the Volo Foundation. Other co-authors were Lonnie Thompson and Bryan Mark from Ohio State and Laura J. Larocca of Arizona State University. 

For decades, the Guliya Glacier, located above 20,000 feet in the far northwestern Tibetan Plateau, has been one of the richest archives available to scientists to investigate large-scale paleoclimate shifts. Now, by analyzing recovered ice core samples from the glacier, microbiologists have reconstructed pieces of virus DNA that were left within them and identified nearly 1,700 viral species, of which about three-fourths are newly discovered. 

Drilling into prehistoric ice doesn’t have health implications for modern humans, because these long-dormant viruses likely infected other dominant microbes rather than animals or humans, but researchers found that their adaptations significantly influenced their hosts’ ability to survive in extreme conditions during variations in Earth’s climate cycles.

“Before this work, how viruses linked to large-scale changes in Earth’s climate had remained largely uninvestigated,“ said ZhiPing Zhong, lead author of the study and a research associate at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center at The Ohio State University. “Glacial ice is so precious, and we often don’t have the large amounts of material required for virus and microbe research.”

As unprecedented warming continues to hasten glacier melt, the race to collect these ice cores before they disappear for good has only served to increase their scientific value. For instance, the layers of ice researchers examined in this paper provided pristine snapshots of how viruses behaved during three cold-to-warm periods over the last 41,000 years.

The study was published today in Nature Geoscience. 

Of the various types of new viruses reported, the most distinct viral community the team observed dates to about 11,500 years ago, a time during which a major climate transition from the cold Last Glacial Stage to the warm Holocene occurred. 

This suggests that microorganisms were reacting to climate changes as global temperatures shifted from cool to warm, but it is still too early to say for certain, said Zhong. “This at least indicates the potential connection between viruses and climate change,” he said.  

Using advanced sequencing technologies to get a closer look at their genetic signatures, the team’s results also showed that although most of the viruses found in the glacier were unique to Guliya, about one-fourth overlapped with known organisms from other areas of the world. “That means some of them were potentially transported from areas like the Middle East or even the Arctic,” said Zhong.  

Taking the time to better understand how viruses evolved during intense climatic eras offers vital insights into predicting how modern viruses are likely to react to and engage with future ecosystem warming, researchers say. Moreover, because organisms found in ice cores expand the diversity of information researchers can learn about those periods, finding and sequencing new swaths of ancient viral DNA could lead to an explosion of both new mysteries and new conclusions. 

“To me, this science is a new tool that can answer basic climate questions that we couldn’t have answered otherwise,” said Lonnie Thompson, co-author of the study and a professor in earth sciences at Ohio State.

Sharpening these techniques on Earth will likely provide scientists with fresh tools to broaden the search for life in outer space environments, aiding efforts to find microbes in the ice fields on Mars or underneath the icy shells of other planetary bodies, said Thompson. 

Investigators looking to make further viral and climate connections here on Earth could also benefit from upcoming advances in technology as well as diverse scientific approaches to research, the study notes. Yet, the authors asserted, the clock is ticking: These techniques must be implemented before warming compromises the glacial ice needed to preserve and further explore Earth’s rich history. 

“I'm optimistic about what can be done here, because if we work together, these techniques have much potential to help us start tackling a large array of scientific issues,” said Thompson. 

Matthew Sullivan, co-author of the study and a professor of microbiology and civil, environmental and geodetic engineering at Ohio State, said the study’s success can be attributed to how well the interdisciplinary approach taken by Ohio State’s Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center and the Center of Microbiome Science has helped incubate new science.

“This kind of opportunity represents several disciplines coming together, each with their own scientific languages as a barrier to proceed,” he said. “But getting to study ancient viruses and microbes in ice with this team is a testament to the support we had to explore new interfaces.”

The study was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute and their Community Sequencing Program. 

Other co-authors include Ellen Mosley-Thompson, Olivier Zablocki, Yueh-Fen Li and Virginia Rich of Ohio State, as well as James Van Etten of the University of Nebraska. 

Despite feeling like a stationary mass, most solid ground is undergoing a process of deformation, sinking and rising in response to many environmental factors. In Antarctica, melting glacial ice means less weight on the bedrock below, allowing it to rise. How the rising earth interacts with the overlying ice sheet to affect sea level rise is not well-studied, said Terry Wilson, co-author of the study and a senior research scientist at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center at The Ohio State University. 

In the new study, Wilson’s colleagues at McGill University developed a model to predict how these interactions could impact global sea level, finding that if humans can lower greenhouse gas emissions and global warming is slowed, upward shifts in the solid earth could reduce Antarctica’s contribution to sea level rise by about 40%, significantly bolstering the best case scenarios for global sea level rise. In this low-emissions scenario, land uplift slows the flow of ice from land to ocean, allowing for more of the ice sheet to be preserved. 

Conversely, if humans are unable to lower carbon emissions in time, ice retreat will outpace uplift, pushing ocean water away from Antarctica and amplifying sea level rise. These events could significantly worsen the most dire models of projected sea level rise along populated coastlines, said Wilson. 

“Our measurements show that the solid earth that forms the base of the Antarctic ice sheet is changing shape surprisingly quickly,“ said Wilson. “The land uplift from reduced ice on the surface is happening in decades, rather than over thousands of years.” 

The study was published today in Science Advances. 

To arrive at these conclusions, the team developed a 3D model of the Earth’s interior using geophysical field measurements from the Antarctic Network (ANET) of the Polar Earth Observing Network (POLENET) project. The mission is focused on studying the changing polar regions by collecting GPS and seismic data from an array of autonomous systems across Antarctica.

Researchers then performed a number of simulations to capture many possible evolutions of Antarctica’s ice sheet and the extent of global sea level rise Earth may experience until the year 2500, according to those parameters.  

 “We can project what difference it actually will make if we all contribute to a low-emission scenario now, versus what’s come to be called ‘business as usual’ emissions,” said Wilson, who is also the lead investigator of the ANET-POLENET project. 

She attributes the model’s unprecedented level of detail to how deftly it incorporates data from Antarctica. GPS stations monitor how the land is moving and seismometers measure how fast seismic waves from earthquakes travel through the earth, yielding important insight into where the land uplift will be fast or slow. 

Surprisingly, according to some of the team’s GPS observations processed by researchers at Ohio State, Wilson said, the Antarctic Ice Sheet is currently experiencing a solid earth uplift of about 5 centimeters per year, about 5 times the rate that North America experiences.  

Another significant aspect of the study is how the changes in Antarctica under different carbon emissions scenarios will impact coastlines around the world. Because sea level change will not be uniform, the study notes that nearly 700 million people around the world living in coastal regions will be most impacted by rising seas due to Antarctic ice loss.

Since some regions, such as small island nations, will be more vulnerable than others, mitigating environmental conditions like atmospheric and ocean warming is a vital issue for society, said Wilson. 

“Many people are now more aware they’re experiencing the effects of climate change,” she said. “This work reinforces that our actions as individuals, nations and globally can make a difference in what kind of Earth our offspring will experience in their lifetimes.”

The study results highlight how complex the relationship between the solid earth and the processes that happen atop it is, as well as the importance of continuing to gather enough data to make prompt and accurate predictions about what the next few centuries of our planet will look like. 

“There’s a lot of uncertainty in every model and every prediction that you make,” said Wilson. “But to document how fast our world is changing, it’s very important to continue advancing our ability to make predictions that are more certain, which is the only path that will allow us to tend to our future in a meaningful way.”

Wilson completed the study with colleagues from McGill University, Pennsylvania State University, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Columbia University, Washington University, Colorado State University and the Union of Concerned Scientists. This study was supported by the U.S National Science Foundation and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. 

The study, recently published in the journal Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, suggests that the genetic variation of two species, the Brazilian sibilator frog and the granular toad, both amphibians native to northeastern Brazil, were shaped by different processes.  

Results showed that the genetic variation in the sibilator frog was shaped mostly by population demographic events in response to habitat changes that occurred over the last 100,000 years.   In contrast, genetic diversity in the granular toad was mostly shaped by contemporary landscape factors – toads that are relatively more isolated, either by geographic distance or inhospitable habitat, were more likely to be genetically different.

While previous investigations have explored the effects of historical demographic and landscape factors on genetic diversity of these amphibians, they were conducted with separate sets of data for these factors, making it difficult to discern which was the most important. Now, researchers involved with this paper are the first to use artificial intelligence to consider how both processes shape genetic diversity equally, rather than making manual assumptions about which may have been more vital. 

“Prior to this work, we had to ask questions independently because you couldn't investigate both influences in the same framework,” said Bryan Carstens, co-author of the study and a professor in evolution, ecology and organismal biology at The Ohio State University. “What AI allows us to do is to simulate processes that are both happening ecologically in the present and during deep-time evolutionary events and compare those findings to the actual data that we collect from these frogs.”   

Due to the sheer amount of data that’s become available to geneticists and other wildlife biologists over the past few decades, it can be challenging for researchers to identify specific factors that might be important in certain experiments, said Carstens. But by integrating large swaths of information into simulations that can account for those elements in a single analysis, it’s possible to get a much more complete chronicle of a species’ development. 

“It takes a long time to build and train our AI models, but we wanted one l that could capture the range of potential variation in the species’ histories in a way that was as faithful as we could be to what we knew about the biology of the system,” said Carstens. 

For example, while the species this study investigated dwell in the same region, there are many differences in their natural histories. Despite both their eggs and larvae being fully aquatic, the sibulator frog reproduces continuously throughout the wet season and in underground chambers, while the granular toad’s reproductive events happen explosively because they are dependent on heavy rainfall. 

Combined with their machine learning approach, the researchers’ simulation determined their model scenarios were 100% supported regarding historical explanations for the sibilator frog’s expansion, and over 99% supported for those of the granular toad. 

One of the reasons their model is so accurate is due to its ability to account for recent demographic events, including measuring how events like human development or habitat change may have affected animal genetic diversity over a long period of time. 

But even when using AI, researchers have to be careful to avoid deceptive patterns in their results, said Carstens. 

“No analysis that we do is going to capture every single factor that has been important to these species over millions of years,” he said. “So we have to allow for a range of possibilities without making it so broad that essentially any model would be able to fit the data.”

That said, as technological strides allow researchers to answer niche ecological questions and test new hypotheses, their work is a precursor to creating an upgraded machine learning framework that could be applied to unique investigations of other species, said Carstens. 

“We’re likely to continue using different combinations of these AI tools in different ways to try to understand evolutionary history,” said Carstens. “And as we keep learning, the tools we’re using will change, and they’ll evolve to be even better.”

Emanuel M. Fonseca, who earned his doctorate from Ohio State in 2022, was a co-author. The study was supported by the Ohio Supercomputer Center, the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior in Brazil.

Zooplankton, aquatic microorganisms that reside in nearly all bodies of water, are extremely sensitive to changes in their ecosystem. This hypersensitivity makes them important bioindicators of water quality, and studying how they interact with their environment can provide researchers with detailed snapshots of a region’s present ecological condition. 

By taking a new look at more than two decades of plankton monitoring data, researchers at The Ohio State University found that in western Lake Erie, zooplankton communities are undergoing a substantial change in the timing of certain events in their life cycles. 

Using data collected from previous studies, the team examined the behavior patterns of four common types of zooplankton populations in Lake Erie between 1995 and 2022. Their analysis showed that due to factors like rising temperatures, the presence of invasive species and the availability of high-quality food, the period when zooplankton concentrations are at their highest now varies by as much as three weeks in the summer months.  

“Warming is making natural events happen earlier, as we can see across basically all ecosystems,” said Jim Hood, lead author of the study and an associate professor in evolution, ecology and organismal biology at Ohio State. “These systems are really complex, and any disruption is likely to have unseen negative effects.”

Even in lakes, zooplankton play a central role in the local freshwater food web, from determining which types of algae thrive to helping sustain local fish populations, said Hood. Yet as the research notes, early warming can often advance the emergence of spring plankton while delaying fall populations, which can have a big impact. Because of their vital place in the food chain, major changes in plankton behavior could cause damage to other top-down and bottom-up processes that rely on them.  

The study, recently published in the journal Limnology and Oceanography Letters, marks one of  the first times scientists have tried to unpack the complexity of these dynamics in Lake Erie and the Great Lakes region. 

Some of the most dominant changes observed in the timing of zooplankton emergence were caused by temperature variation as well as an invasive phytoplankton species called B. longimanus, which was likely carried over from Europe by shipping boats, said Hood. 

“It’s this invasive predator and the increase in harmful algae blooms that are really altering the timing of zooplankton concentrations,” he said. “In some cases, they’re causing them to move in earlier, in some cases, they’re moving them in later.” 

Though Lake Erie has been plagued by harmful algal blooms for decades, warmer temperatures during the summer cause the organisms to grow thicker and faster. Because large blooms release toxins that endanger the health of humans and other animals and threaten important utility infrastructures, environmental scientists have been steadily working toward ways of addressing the multiple causes of their excess growth. 

“It’s not just climate change,” said Hood. “All of the things humans are doing to these systems, like bringing in invasive species, are creating a complex series of interactions that are going to influence big things that people care about, like harmful algal blooms and fisheries.”

This study’s analysis period took place between May and September of each year when the four zooplankton species whose behavioral patterns being surveyed were especially abundant. Though they all had different diets and life histories, they surprisingly each had varying reactions to B. longimanus and its effects on the ecosystem, revealing that the mechanisms that drive the timing of certain plankton behaviors are more sophisticated than they seem, said Hood. 

“It was really noteworthy how these four taxa that we focused on all had different responses to this invasive species, which really highlights the need for more research on them,” he said. 

Hood and co-author Jenna Bailey suggested that further research should aim to extend monitoring in temperate lakes to learn how winter conditions influence zooplankton life cycles, offering insight into other freshwater ecology issues related to climate change. 

“It’s difficult to predict the effects human activity has on our ecosystems,” said Hood. “But we need to step back and understand how all of these things that we’re doing are interacting with one another and incorporate that into our management.”

This study was supported by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources’ Division of Wildlife, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The field of imageomics aims to help explore fundamental questions about biological processes on Earth by combining images of living organisms with computer-enabled analysis and discovery. 

Wei-Lun Chao, an investigator at The Ohio State University’s Imageomics Institute and a distinguished assistant professor of engineering inclusive excellence in computer science and engineering at Ohio State, gave an in-depth presentation about the latest research advances in the field last month at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. 

Chao and two other presenters described how imageomics could transform society’s understanding of the biological and ecological world by turning research questions into computable problems. Chao’s presentation focused on imageomics’ potential application for micro to macro-level problems.

“Nowadays we have many rapid advances in machine learning and computer vision techniques,” said Chao. “If we use them appropriately, they could really help scientists solve critical but laborious problems.” 

While some research problems might take years or decades to solve manually, imageomics researchers suggest that with the aid of machine and computer vision techniques – such as pattern recognition and multi-modal alignment – the rate and efficiency of next-generation scientific discoveries could be expanded exponentially. 

“If we can incorporate the biological knowledge that people have collected over decades and centuries into machine learning techniques, we can help improve their capabilities in terms of interpretability and scientific discovery,” said Chao. 

One of the ways Chao and his colleagues are working toward this goal is by creating foundation models in imageomics that will leverage data from all kinds of sources to enable various tasks. Another way is to develop machine learning models capable of identifying and even discovering traits to make it easier for computers to recognize and classify objects in images, which is what Chao’s team did. 

“Traditional methods for image classification with trait detection require a huge amount of human annotation, but our method doesn’t,” said Chao. “We were inspired to develop our algorithm through how biologists and ecologists look for traits to differentiate various species of biological organisms.”

Conventional machine learning-based image classifiers have achieved a great level of accuracy by analyzing an image as a whole, and then labeling it a certain object category. However, Chao’s team takes a more proactive approach: Their method teaches the algorithm to actively look for traits like colors and patterns in any image that are specific to an object’s class – such as its animal species – while it’s being analyzed. 

This way, imageomics can offer biologists a much more detailed account of what is and isn’t revealed in the image, paving the way to quicker and more accurate visual analysis. Most excitingly, Chao said, it was shown to be able to handle recognition tasks for very challenging fine-grained species to identify, like butterfly mimicries, whose appearance is characterized by fine detail and variety in their wing patterns and coloring. 

The ease with which the algorithm can be used could potentially also allow imageomics to be integrated into a variety of other diverse purposes, ranging from climate to material science research, he said.

Chao said that one of the most challenging parts of fostering imageomics research is integrating different parts of scientific culture to collect enough data and form novel scientific hypotheses from them. 

It’s one of the reasons why collaboration between different types of scientists and disciplines is such an integral part of the field, he said. Imageomics research will continue to evolve, but for now, Chao is enthusiastic about its potential to allow for the natural world to be seen and understood in brand-new, interdisciplinary ways. 

“What we really want is for AI to have strong integration with scientific knowledge, and I would say imageomics is a great starting point towards that,” he said. 

Chao’s AAAS presentation, titled “An Imageomics Perspective of Machine Learning and Computer Vision: Micro to Global,” was part of the session “Imageomics: Powering Machine Learning for Understanding Biological Traits.”

By analyzing nearly 1,000 sets of metagenomic DNA data from 15 different habitats, ranging from various lakes to the inside of a cow’s stomach, researchers found that microbial viruses carry special genetic elements for controlling methane processes, called auxiliary metabolic genes (AMGs). Depending on where the organisms dwell, the number of these genes can vary, suggesting that viruses’ potential impact on the environment also varies based on their habitat. 

This discovery adds a vital piece to better understanding how methane interacts and moves within different ecosystems, said ZhiPing Zhong, lead author of the study and a research associate at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center at The Ohio State University. 

“It’s important to understand how microorganisms drive methane processes,” said Zhong, also a microbiologist whose research examines how microbes evolve in diverse environments. “Microbial contributions to methane metabolic processes have been studied for decades, but research into the viral field is still largely under-investigated and we want to learn more.” 

The study was published today in Nature Communications.

Viruses have helped foster all of Earth’s ecological, biogeochemical and evolutionary processes, but it’s only relatively recently that scientists have begun exploring their ties to climate change. For example, methane is the second-biggest driver of greenhouse gas emissions after carbon dioxide, but is largely produced by unicellular organisms called archaea. 

“Viruses are the most abundant biological entity on earth,” said Matthew Sullivan, co-author of the study and a professor of microbiology at the Center of Microbiome Science at Ohio State. “Here, we expanded what we know about their impacts by adding methane cycling genes to the long list of virus-encoded metabolic genes. Our team sought to answer how much of the ‘microbial metabolism’ viruses are actually manipulating during infection.”

Though the vital role microbes play in accelerating atmospheric warming is now well-recognized, little is known about how methane metabolism-related genes encoded by the viruses that infect these microbes influence their methane production, said Zhong. Solving this mystery is what led Zhong and his colleagues to spend nearly a decade collecting and analyzing microbial and viral DNA samples from unique microbial reservoirs. 

One of the most important places the team chose to study is Vrana Lake, part of a protected nature reserve in Croatia. Inside the methane-rich lake sediment, researchers found an abundance of microbial genes that affect methane production and oxidation. Additionally, they discovered diverse viral communities and uncovered 13 types of AMGs that help regulate the metabolisms of their host. Despite this, there isn’t any evidence that these viruses directly encode methane metabolism genes themselves, suggesting that viruses’ potential impact on the methane cycling varies by their habitat, said Zhong.

Overall, the study revealed that a higher number of methane metabolism AMGs are more likely to be found inside host-associated environments like the inside of a cow’s stomach, whereas fewer of these genes were found in environmental habitats, such as in lake sediment. Since cows and other livestock are also responsible for generating about 40% of global methane emissions, their work suggests the complex relationship between viruses, living beings and the environment as a whole may be more intricately tied together than scientists once thought.  

“These findings suggest that global impacts from viruses are underestimated, and deserve more attention,” said Zhong. 

Though it’s unclear whether human activities might have affected the evolution of these viruses, the team expects new insights gleaned from this work will raise awareness about the power of  infectious agents to inhabit all life on Earth. Still, to keep learning more about these viruses’ inner mechanisms, further experiments will be needed to understand more about their contributions to Earth’s methane cycle, said Zhong, especially as scientists work toward ways to mitigate microbially driven methane emission. 

“This work is a beginning step for grasping the viral impacts of climate change,” he said. ‘We still have lots more to learn.”

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Croatian Science Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the European Union and the U.S. Department of Energy. Co-authors include Jingjie Du of Ohio State, as well as Stephan Kostlbacher and Petra Pjevac from the University of Vienna, and Sandi Orlić from the Ruđer Bošković Institute. 

Their findings, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, reveal that by combining direct air carbon dioxide capture technologies (DACC) and geothermal energy, large-scale carbon dioxide (CO₂) removal systems could potentially be supplied with enough energy to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and safely store it underground. 

Emitted when humans burn fossil fuels for things like heat, electricity and transportation, carbon dioxide accounts for the majority of greenhouse gases emitted by human activities in the atmosphere. Because this accumulation is one of the main drivers of climate change, efforts to address the excess have focused on methods for extracting carbon dioxide, either at the original source of emission or directly from the air. 

“Carbon removal technologies are especially helpful in mitigating climate change because we can capture types of emissions that would be hard to cap in other ways,” said Martina Leveni, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral scholar in civil, environmental and geodetic engineering at The Ohio State University. “So we thought, could we combine technologies that could be beneficial to one another to meet this goal more efficiently?” 

Typical DACC methods can be expensive and require energy to operate, adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, said Leveni. But she set out to investigate if it was possible to integrate the recycled carbon dioxide into the system to make it more efficient.

Called Direct Air CO₂ Capture with  CO₂ Utilization and Storage (DACCUS), Leveni’s proposed method uses the natural heat stored beneath the Earth’s surface within deep saline aquifers – underground geologic formations containing sedimentary rock and saltwater – to continuously produce renewable energy for DACC systems. The carbon dioxide captured from the air is isolated in these geologic formations, and part of it can be circulated to extract the geothermal heat. This circulation brings the heat to the surface, where it can either be used directly or converted to electricity to power the system. 

Such a system requires a lot of energy, which can often mean more pollution. But it’s an issue their work accounts for, said Jeff Bielicki, co-author of the study and an associate professor in civil, environmental and geodetic engineering and the John Glenn College of Public Affairs at Ohio State. 

Geothermal energy in general has a very small carbon footprint, and this particular approach is even lower because it uses carbon dioxide, Bielicki said.  

To demonstrate the potential of their system, the researchers developed a case study of how it might work in the U.S. Gulf Coast region. They determined that DACCUS could be deployed there to great success, due to it being well-known for having ample geothermal resources.  

“The Gulf Coast also has the right geology to safely put carbon dioxide underground and a decent enough heat flux that its geothermal energy could be sufficient to use,” said Bielicki. “These characteristics are very favorable.”

In order for their system to work, the geothermal heat extraction system first has to be primed, much like a car engine. That takes about five years of storing carbon from point sources, such as factories that emit carbon dioxide, before a DACCUS facility begins extracting the greenhouse gas from the air. Assuming their system could be operational by 2025, the study suggests its method could start removing carbon by 2030. The researchers estimate there could be as many as 25 DACCUS systems set up in just one of the 27 geologic formations in the Gulf Coast by 2050. 

Nevertheless, this study offers hope for our climate future by emphasizing the importance of fusing new ideas and concepts together to better reach a faraway goal, said Leveni. The study suggests that if implemented, this team’s work could even help society meet the current goal of limiting Earth’s warming, while averting some of the worst consequences of climate change. 

“New technologies can enable one another, and in integrating them, we can tackle climate change,” said Leveni. “There’s a lot of work to be done to take into account technological readiness and the policies needed to make that research happen.” 

The study was supported by the Sloan Foundation and The Ohio State LEGACY Postdoctoral Scholars Program.

To do this, researchers at The Ohio State University are testing the use of Synthetic Aperture Radar, or SAR, to help with wildfire detection.

For many ecosystems, fires are vital tools that help to clear away plant waste, provide safer habitats for smaller species and burn off disease. Yet as Earth continues to experience warmer, drier conditions, the likelihood and severity of large, uncontrolled fire incidents that result in widespread environmental damage has steadily increased. 

Between 2020 and 2023, wildfires across the U.S. burned over 25 million acres of land. At the same time, millions of people who reside near these at-risk areas are likely impacted by plumes of wildfire smoke, heightened flooding risks and property damage. 

These effects underscore the need for better detection systems, said Dustin Horton, lead author of a new study on the subject and a doctoral student in electrical and computer engineering at Ohio State. His work revolves around improving traditional strategies for sensing large blazes and improving wildfire-related land management policies. 

“There's a variety of prediction models that the government and different agencies use to predict and assess what an area might look like each wildfire season,” said Horton. “But a lot of those programs in recent history rely on a variety of remote sensing methods, such as optical sensors that have a lot of inherent disadvantages.”

For example, systems that use optical sensors to study targets, like LiDAR, can be occluded by wildfire smoke or other atmospheric changes like clouds or light from the sun. Other passive sensors can be less useful at night. Ultimately, these limitations diminish their effectiveness at collecting accurate measurements during a quickly evolving situation, and such setbacks could have disastrous effects on agencies aiming to gauge the number of resources or emergency service personnel needed to safely handle a large fire, said Horton. 

The research was presented in a poster session today (Dec. 15, 2023) at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. The poster suggests that one technique that could be used to supplement wildfire prediction models like the National Fire Danger Rating System, which allows users to estimate the next few days of fire danger in a given region, is to combine them with SAR. 

Unlike optical or satellite infrared sensors, SAR utilizes radar to create high-resolution two-dimensional or three-dimensional reconstructions of terrain, making it an especially effective device for environmental mapping research. Additionally, since SAR remote sensing technologies can operate successfully during the day, night and inclement atmospheric events, it provides scientists the ability to finely measure an area’s surface geophysical, hydrological and meteorological properties at key spatial distances with ease, said Horton. 

During the presentation, researchers noted that using SAR as an alternative wildfire sensing method also holds much potential for tracking the entire life-cycle and aftermath of a wildfire, as well as discerning and monitoring other factors that may contribute to creating flame-prone areas, such as the level of soil moisture in the region or various kinds of nearby vegetation.

The study concluded by noting how useful aerial SAR-based platforms could be to studying wildfires and other Earth processes across greater scales in the future. One such endeavor, planned to launch in early 2024, is the NISAR mission, a joint collaboration between NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). The mission’s objective will be to map the entire Earth in an effort to provide the public with refined data about the effects of climate change on the planet’s crust. 

Horton said that his team hopes to use the data the mission collects to continue building on their own wildfire-prediction algorithms, but will continue testing SAR as a next-generation wildfire assessment tool. In the meantime, Horton said that much of the responsibility for better understanding and stopping wildfires lies in combining both new technologies and tried-and-true fire services. 

“Scientists can now identify areas with conditions where everything is perfect for a burn, all the models say it will and sometimes it just doesn’t,” said Horton. “Because the whole wildfire process is extremely complex, a lot of the heavy lifting still relies on the mitigation work of firefighters.” 

Co-authors of the poster include Joel Johnson and Mohammad Al-Khaldi of Ohio State, Ismail Baris of the German Aerospace Center (DLR), Jeonghwan Park of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the Global Science and Technology Inc., and Rajat Bindlish of Goddard Earth Sciences Technology and Research. 

Invented nearly a century ago, per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances, also known as “forever chemicals,” were once widely used to create products such as cookware, waterproof clothing and personal care items. Today, scientists understand that exposure to PFAS can cause a number of human health issues such as birth defects and cancer. But because the bonds inside these chemicals don’t break down easily, they’re notoriously difficult to remove from the environment.

Such difficulties have led researchers at The Ohio State University to study how ultrasonic degradation, a process that uses sound to degrade substances by cleaving apart the molecules that make them up, might work against different types and  concentrations of these chemicals.

By conducting experiments on lab-made mixtures containing three differently sized compounds of fluorotelomer sulfonates – PFAS compounds typically found in firefighting foams – their results showed that over a period of three hours, the smaller compounds degraded much faster than the larger ones. This is in contrast to many other PFAS treatment methods in which smaller PFAS are actually more challenging to treat.

“We showed that the challenging smaller compounds can be treated, and more effectively than the larger compounds,” said co-author of the study Linda Weavers, a professor of civil, environmental and geodetic engineering at The Ohio State University. “That’s what makes this technology potentially really valuable.”

The research was published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry A.

One of only a few studies to probe into how ultrasound might be used to rid our surroundings of toxic PFAS chemicals, this paper is an extension of previous research of Weavers’ that determined that the same technology could also degrade pharmaceuticals in municipal tap and wastewater.

“PFAS compounds are unique because many of the destruction technologies that we use in environmental engineering for other hard-to-remove compounds don’t work for them,” Weavers said. “So we really need to be developing an array of technologies to figure out which ones might be useful in different applications.”

Unlike other traditional destruction methods that attempt to break down PFAS by reacting them with oxidizing chemicals, ultrasound works to purify these substances by emitting sound at a frequency much lower than typically used for medical imaging, said Weavers. Ultrasound’s low-pitched pressure wave compresses and pulls apart the solution, which then creates pockets of vapor called cavitation bubbles.

“As the bubbles collapse, they gain so much momentum and energy that it compresses and over-compresses, heating up the bubble,” said Weavers.

Much like powerful combustion chambers, the temperatures inside these tiny bubbles can reach up to 10,000 Kelvin, and it’s this heat that breaks down the stable carbon-fluorine bonds that PFAS are made of and renders the byproducts essentially harmless. Unfortunately, this degradation method can be costly and extremely energy intensive, but with few other options, it may be something the public needs to consider investing in to protect groundwater for drinking and other uses, said Weavers.

While manufacturing industries are starting to move away from making use of PFAS, regulatory agencies are working to heighten public awareness about how to avoid them. Earlier this year, the U.S Environmental Protection Agency proposed the National Primary Drinking Water Regulation (NPDWR), which would require public water systems to monitor for certain PFAS, notify the public of these levels and take measures to reduce them if they’re over a certain limit.

Because ultrasound is so effective at cleaning PFAS from solutions, the study concludes that scientists and government agencies should consider using it in future treatment technology development as well as along with other combined-treatment approaches.

Though Weavers’ research is not ready to be scaled up to aid in larger anti-contamination efforts, the study does note that their work could be the opening move toward creating small, high-energy water filtration devices for public use inside the home.

“Our research revolves around trying to think about how you scale to something bigger and what you need to make it work,” said Weavers. “These compounds are found everywhere, so as we learn more about them, understanding how they can degrade and break down is important for furthering the science.”

Other co-authors are William P. Fagan and Shannon R. Thayer, both of Ohio State.

Thompson, a distinguished university professor of earth sciences at The Ohio State University and senior research scientist at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center, has spent his five-decade career on expeditions to some of the highest and most remote places imaginable, drilling ice cores to illuminate ancient histories that only glaciers hold.  

It’s for this reason that “Canary,” a new documentary opening in limited release tomorrow (Sept. 15, 2023), calls Thompson “the closest living thing to Indiana Jones.” Set against the backdrop of the Peruvian Andes’ now-melting Quelccaya Ice Cap, the film follows the highs and lows of Thompson’s race to save these vital ice masses around the world from global warming.  

“I’ve been working in Quelccaya for 50 years and I have never seen it in such bad shape,” he said. “It’s heartbreaking to see such a magnificent ice cap fall apart, but this is true throughout the Himalayas, on Kilimanjaro in Africa, and Greenland – if there’s ice in today’s world, it’s melting.”

The nearly two-hour film holds a second layer of personal significance to Thompson, who grew up believing he’d be destined to spend his life toiling in West Virginia’s coal mines. It was named “Canary” from the way miners used to carry canaries down into the mining tunnels because they were sensitive enough to detect carbon monoxide or other toxic gas changes in the air. If the canary fell unconscious or died, the miners would be cautioned enough to retreat before tragedy could strike. 

Now, just as songbirds once sounded the alarm to impending disaster in mines, so too can the well-being of glaciers warn us of a future climate catastrophe, said Thompson.

“Glaciers are our canary in the coal mine,” he said. “They are an early warning system for the Earth and they’re all retreating at an accelerating rate.”

Opening up in New Guinea, the film crew follows Thompson’s team on a number of perilous research missions throughout the years as researchers drill ice cores from mountains once thought to be too high for humans to ever conquer. “Everybody has mountains, and those mountains are different. But overcoming those mountains takes the same type of persistence and dedication and hard work,” said Thompson. 

Once ice cores are collected, these specimens are whisked away to the Byrd Center’s freezers for cold storage, where thousands of meters of ice samples are stored and preserved so scientists can study what the chemistry, gases, dust, viruses and bacteria that lie within them can reveal about Earth’s complex environmental past. Though the documentary emphasizes that the rapid disappearance of glaciers is inevitable – likely within the 21st century – having The Byrd Center’s vast collection can go a long way to informing climate research for years after humanity loses the glaciers, said Thompson. 

“Preserving that archive is one of our chief missions for the next generation because those will be the only samples that we have,” he said. “We’re measuring things that we couldn’t do a decade ago, and I can only think about what we might be able to measure in 20 years that we wouldn’t be able to without these records.” 

Intertwined with describing the challenges of standing on the frontlines of climate change is the film’s account of how Thompson’s relationship with his work changed after he was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. 

“I was, at one stage, given less a than 10% chance of survival, but I did survive,” he said. “It gave me a new perspective on how fleeting life can be and a better feel for how difficult the climate issue is when you’re dealing with people’s lives.”

As for the legacy he’ll one day leave behind, Thompson said getting the story right on the silver screen will touch far more hearts than would have been possible before, because he believes that climate change won’t be solved just by writing scientific papers or from inside a lab, but by remarkable people who will use the research to  change our trajectory. 

“Humans didn’t leave the Stone Age because we ran out of stones. We found a better way,” said Thompson. “And we will not leave the fossil fuel age when we use all the fossil fuels, but because we’re going to find better ways to utilize the other technologies we have.”

The Gateway Film Center will host premieres of Canary at 1:30 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 15, and 7 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 17. These showings will include an introduction and post-screening Q&A with Thompson and Ellen Mosely-Thompson, a distinguished university professor in geography at Ohio State. Additional screenings will be held throughout the week. The film will then have a one-night-only special nationwide screening on Sept. 20.

Researchers at The Ohio State University developed impacts-based thresholds for drought in Ohio, looking specifically at how corn yield and streamflow were affected by various drought indicators, such as notable changes in soil moisture, crops, and even livestock losses in the state.

The results suggest this impacts-based approach could give Ohio farmers earlier and more accurate notice when drought conditions are approaching, said Steven Quiring, co-author of the study and a professor of geography at Ohio State.

“We want to better understand what steps should be taken so that Ohio can better prepare for and also monitor the onset of drought conditions because a lot of the best ways to respond to drought is taking action early,” said Quiring. Moreover, with a more precise early warning system, agriculture producers might be able to save time and money by implementing water restrictions, or by switching to different or more drought-resistant crops.

The study was published in the Journal of Hydrometeorology. 

The Ohio State researchers compared how their method performed at predicting droughts with data from the U.S Drought Monitor (USDM). 

The problem with the USDM is that it uses fixed drought thresholds, or guidelines that use the same parameters to measure changes in all seasons and climate regions of the country. Unfortunately, this one-size-fits-all approach can cause monitoring plans to inaccurately gauge local weather conditions and how they impact those in certain communities, Quiring said.

By analyzing data from four drought indices commonly used in previous studies to monitor drought intensity across the United States, researchers were able to show that fixed thresholds tend to indicate milder drought conditions in Ohio than are indicated by the impacts-based thresholds identified in their study. 

It’s why Quiring and his team want to use the impacts-based method to revamp those thresholds to better reflect drought conditions in Ohio, a move that starts by updating The Ohio Emergency Management Agency’s state drought plan. 

To accomplish their goal, the researchers investigated how data from the four indices impacted streamflow, or how much water discharges over a designated point in a fixed period of time, and Ohio’s total corn yield, mainly because the crop covers an extensive area within the state, and nearly every county grows it. 

Identifying agricultural drought thresholds that are specific to Ohio is important, said Quiring. Because the impacts of drought can vary from region to region, using the same drought thresholds in California as in Ohio is absurd, he said. Additionally, the types of drought that occur can differ. Ohio, for example, in particular is prone to “flash droughts” — shortages caused by warm weather that can happen quickly over a few days or weeks. 

“These rapid-onset droughts can be particularly challenging for the agricultural community because they arrive quickly and conditions can rapidly go from normal to drier than normal,” said Quiring. “All of a sudden soil moisture is depleted, the crops are stressed and yield losses and impacts on the ecosystem occur.”  

The last time severe drought caused major losses in the United States was in 2012 when a record-breaking heat wave resulted in $34.2 billion in economic losses, 123 direct deaths and a 26% decrease in total corn crop yield across the country. 

As large areas of the country dried out, Ohio’s corn yield dropped from about 160 bushels per acre to 120 bushels per acre within a year. While such considerable losses have not happened since, according to the State Climate Office of Ohio, some areas of the state have experienced abnormally dry drought conditions this year.  

What’s more, the researchers’ impacts-based method of drought monitoring also takes into account how climate change can worsen flash drought events.

“One of the impacts that we found to be counterintuitive in Ohio is that with climate change, we do expect more rainfall overall, but we also expect to see more droughts because there are longer periods of time where no rain occurs,” said Quiring. 

The results of this study suggest that following guidelines that aren’t specific to a region’s issues can end up either systematically underestimating the impacts of severe drought conditions in some locations or overestimating them in others, Quiring said. 

While it’ll be some time before Quiring’s team can get their research incorporated into the next edition of the state drought plan, the study emphasizes that its methods could easily be applied to other regions beyond Ohio where long-term streamflow and crop yield data are readily available. Optimistically, it could help to improve drought monitoring worldwide and provide useful information to future agriculture producers and decision-makers, said Quiring. 

“This work is actually timely because it will provide a basis for decision-making in Ohio, rather than using research that’s been done in other parts of the country,” said Quiring. “Hopefully we can give better guidance to those who are making decisions on the ground.”

This study was supported by the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS). Co-authors were Ning Zhang and Zhiying Li, who were both at Ohio State when the study was conducted. Zhang is now at the University of California, Davis and Li is at Indiana University.  

The research, recently published in the Journal of Glaciology, is the first large-scale study of its kind to compare ice shelf thickness data from ice-penetrating radar measurements to thickness data estimated from contemporary surface elevation measurements.

By juxtaposing vast datasets of 20 of the 300 total separate ice shelf systems that surround about 75% of the Antarctic ice sheet, researchers from The Ohio State University found that on average, the Antarctic ice shelves are nearly 6% thinner than previous studies had assumed, a difference of about 17 meters. This may seem like a small shift in scale, but typical ice shelves can be anywhere from 50 to 600 meters thick. 

The study concludes that while prior assumptions about the ice shelves’ thickness were correct on a large scale, their accuracy varied greatly on a small scale, such as for individual structures like valleys or crevasses that are either too narrow or too small to be measured accurately. 

Yet as ice shelves play a large role in stabilizing the Antarctic ice sheet as well as Earth’s complex climate system, getting an accurate estimation of their size is essential for calculating how their melt could contribute to sea level rise, said Allison Chartrand, lead author of the study and recent doctoral graduate of the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center. 

“Because the Antarctic ice sheet is so big, a 1% misestimation in how fast it’s melting could mean inches or feet of sea level rise that we’re not accounting for,” she said. “So it’s really important to be as accurate as we can.”

Even the most minute changes to Antarctica’s ice shelves could pose a significant threat to coastal communities, Chartrand said, as a few inches of significantly displaced ice shelf could cause thicker ice to flow into the ocean and potentially cause some coastlines to retreat several feet.  

According to Chartrand, she and her co-author, Ian Howat, a glaciologist and a Distinguished University Scholar in earth sciences at Ohio State, first began to investigate ice shelf thickness when examining basal channels – channels in which warmer ocean water melts grooves into the bottom of the ice shelf, accelerating mass loss – during a previous study.

One of the largest discrepancies the study found was that the assumptions used to estimate ice shelf thickness in previous research sometimes exaggerated ice shelf thickness in some areas, and at other times understated it. 

While many of these inconsistencies don’t take away much from the big picture, individually, these snapshots are vastly out of focus, said Chartrand. “In comparing the thickness estimate with the radar estimate, we saw that the numbers we had on basal channels and other features like them could be different by up to hundreds of meters, which meant that we could potentially be underestimating or overestimating rates of change,” she said. 

Overall, the study concludes that more abundant and accurate data is needed to enable better predictions of ice shelf loss in Antarctica, as the ultimate goal of their work is to improve observations of the processes that contribute to sea level rise, said Chartrand. 

“What this research really shows is that we need to be a lot more careful about the assumptions we make to estimate the ice shelf thickness, and about how we account for uncertainties and what they mean for the final result,” she said. 

While their work also seeks to inspire others to probe into older datasets, Chartrand hopes that using the past to study the future changes in our environment spurs the development of more advanced technologies, ones that might be able to offer greater aid in the task of assessing the ups and downs of Antarctica’s ever-shifting landscape.

“There’s potential for new discoveries even with data collected anywhere from two to 15 years ago, so we know that a lot still hasn’t been fully explored,” said Chartrand. 

This study was supported by NASA and the National Science Foundation.

Previous estimates predicted that arctic shrubs — stubby, dense bushes that cover much of the tundra region — would eventually conquer about 39% of the non-shrub area in the Arctic. But a new analysis suggests the flora will only be able to expand into 25% of the area’s tundra by the year 2100, said Yanlan Liu, lead author of the study and an assistant professor of earth sciences at the Ohio State University.

The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, examined patterns of shrub growth in the past and then applied an array of environmental variables, including precipitation, elevation and days when the temperature was above 5 degrees Celsius, to determine what may happen in the future. 

Researchers concluded that while shrub expansion has been positively correlated to environmental suitability — the probability of a species’ survival in a certain location — for the past few decades, that isn’t the case anymore.  

Instead, changes in shrub expansion can now mostly be attributed to both fire and seed dispersal, or when these shrub seeds are carried to non-shrub areas by gravity, animals, wind, or even ocean currents and ice floes. 

“Dispersal and fire are much more important than other environmental conditions, in that even if a given place is warm enough, shrubs won’t necessarily grow in that region,” Liu said. “Instead, it’s limited by whether seeds can arrive at that location, or whether the seed bed or the soil condition is nutritious enough to sustain shrub growth.” 

Liu added that while fire may cause seed and seedling death in the short term, wildfires also improve soil nutrient availability and facilitate germination. 

But since the Arctic region is warming up twice as fast as the global average, scientists have been able to detect a marked change in vegetation distribution over the course of several decades. Whereas previous studies typically relied on observational studies and field models to assess this growth, Liu’s team used high-resolution satellite imagery from NASA’s Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) data products to observe shrub expansion across Alaska and much of western Canada between 1984 and 2014. 

Based on this data, they estimated shrub expansion in the year 2040, 2070 and 2100. The study concluded that the observed pattern of shrub spread would not follow warming patterns in the future, and that previous models had, in fact, overestimated future shrub growth. This discrepancy could only be explained by considering factors like seed dispersal and fire, Liu said. 

It’s especially important to keep track and predict arctic shrub expansion because its growth alters the global energy and carbon budget, or how much solar energy and carbon dioxide gets absorbed in Earth’s surface, she added. But Liu said her research opens up brand new avenues to explore how plant life proliferates in other locations around the world. 

“This study is the very first step to look at large-scale shrub expansion in Arctic-Boreal regions at a high resolution,” said Liu. “Our data-driven analysis explains what happened, but the next step is to explain why.” 

Going forward, Liu plans to use dynamic vegetation models to simulate how vegetation distribution and structure will look in the future, and then combine the observations to make those projections more accurate.

This research was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy. Co-authors were William J. Riley, Trevor F. Keenan, Zelalem A. Mekonnen, Jennifer A. Holm, Qing Zhu & Margaret S. Torn of University of California, Berkeley.