Wetlands are an important part of the ecological system, providing a myriad of benefits for people, wildlife, and the environment. They also serve as “nature’s kidneys,” filtering out pollutants from surface water. A new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign finds that wetlands along the Mississippi River Basin effectively clean up nitrogen runoff from agricultural fields. The researchers also show this can lead to significant savings for local drinking water treatment facilities.

Most japonica rice varieties possess similar alleles for grain size, producing short and wide grains.

The gs9^ko allele has a widely applicable effect on grain appearance improvement. The increased leaf angle of the gs9^ko allele does not affect its improvement effect.

Kyoto, Japan -- Forests have been benefitting humanity since long before the health benefits of forest bathing were discovered. They are major carbon sinks that provide a wide range of ecosystem services, including timber and non-timber forest products, recreation, and climate regulation.

Accurately assessing forest biomass is essential for understanding carbon storage and supporting sustainable forest management, but forests are vast three-dimensional structures and therefore difficult to study. Until recently, even measuring the height of a single tree was a challenging task, let alone understanding the size of its canopy. Conventional ground-based tree surveys are labor-intensive and often difficult to conduct in remote or steep terrain, limiting their use in large-scale assessments. This has also restricted researchers' ability to develop accurate biomass estimation formulae.

However, new drone-based technologies such as LiDAR, or Light Detection and Ranging, are becoming increasingly accessible to researchers and have enabled more efficient measurement of tree structures and forest biomass. Emitting hundreds of thousands to millions of laser beams per second, LiDAR obtains three-dimensional information about the objects it scans.