A new study published in Biochar presents a practical and regulation-compliant design for producing biochar on farms that could dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture while permanently removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Few pests eat away at farm profitability as much as soybean cyst nematode (SCN). Causing at least $1.5 billion in yield losses annually, it’s soybean’s single biggest threat. Unfortunately, soybean’s most effective tool, genetic resistance, is starting to fail. 

Almost all plants live in close symbiosis with so-called mycorrhizal fungi – an important symbiosis for absorbing essential nutrients. In their new study, a team led by ecologist Christina Kaiser from the Centre for Microbiology and Environmental Systems Science (CeMESS) at the University of Vienna has now discovered that this mycorrhizal symbiosis is very sensitive to imbalances of certain nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium) in the soil. The data comes from a 70-year long-term study and therefore provides particularly valuable insights, enabling scientists to make a significant contribution to sustainable agriculture. The results have recently been published in the renowned journal The New Phytologist.

Indigenous peoples have used forest thinning to protect against wildfires for millennia. These traditional methods – including cultural burning – have often been neglected in modern times, which is thought to have contributed to wildfires in the US and elsewhere. Now, researchers have shown for the first time in a regional hotspot for wildfire risk and drought risk that forest thinning with modern tools has an additional benefit: it increases the snowpack in winter by 16 to 30%, thus recovering lost water and helping to safeguard its supply for natural and human needs.

A newly proposed biochemical cycle explains the function of photorespiration in plants, long thought to be a 'wasteful' energy consuming process. 

A new study found that agrivoltaics can increase or reduce yields and profits depending on the crop and where such agrivoltaic systems are deployed.

A new accounting of nitrogen pollution in the Mississippi-Atchafalaya River Basin reveals a significant decline in recent decades, suggesting positive momentum for water quality goals in local watersheds and the Gulf. Surprisingly, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign-led study doesn’t credit the change to reduced fertilizer application, but instead to cleaner air and more efficient nitrogen uptake by modern corn hybrids. 

Pesticides can harm aquatic ecosystems and human health, so scientists need to understand how they move from farm fields into streams. A management tool commonly implemented is riparian buffers — strips of vegetation, like shrubs or grasses, bordering streams — that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) advises can reduce the amount of nutrients, sediment and pesticides getting into waterways. But it’s unclear how effective buffers actually are at stopping pesticides from entering streams, according to a multidisciplinary team led by Penn State researchers. To find out, the researchers conducted a study on a small agricultural stream, finding that adding buffers likely reduces the amount of specific pesticides from reaching the stream, but not others.

A new paper by researchers from the University of South Florida and Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission may assist resource managers who make tough decisions about the lengths of fishing seasons for species including Gag Grouper. A statistical model created by the researchers offered more accurate harvest predictions and explicit estimates of the probability of exceeding quotas for the 2025 Gag Grouper season.