Air pollution is a major environmental challenge of this century. In a recent Journal of Environmental Sciences review paper, scientists from the Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, have highlighted potential technologies for direct purification of air pollutants in the environment, including photocatalysis and ambient non-photocatalytic approaches. They also propose the novel concept of an ‘Environmental Catalytic City.’

Rural and primarily agricultural economies are the most susceptible to climate change and armed conflict. Climate-driven weather events add pressure to an already fragile system, affecting the socioeconomic conditions on which health depends, especially in ethnically divided or areas with scarce resources.

Plankton are tiny and highly diverse marine organisms that can act as indicators for the health and biodiversity of ecosystems in the face of factors such as climate change. In one of the largest studies of its kind, researchers used a technique called ultrastructure expansion microscopy to extensively study the cellular structure of over 200 planktonic marine microbes. The study, recently published in the journal Cell, was part of a plug-in project for the EMBL-led Traversing European Coastlines (TREC) expedition, and takes the first steps towards a planetary atlas of plankton.

Land use is at the heart of the many emergencies facing our world today: climate change, biodiversity loss, social injustice and food insecurity. These – exacerbated by unsustainable practices such as industrial agriculture – combine to create simultaneous and interconnected crises. To overcome these challenges, large parts of the Earth's surface must meet several demands at the same time – from species conservation and food production to human well-being. This is where multifunctional landscapes come in, because they can meet many ecological, social and economic goals at once. Researchers at the Universities of Göttingen and Kassel have evaluated how using land in such ways can support nature conservation and ecosystem restoration. Their review article shows ways to redesign land use and nature conservation using integrated approaches. This was published in Nature Reviews Biodiversity.

A new long-term field study demonstrates that combining organic manure with synthetic fertilizer can enhance soil quality, maintain high crop yields, and dramatically reduce harmful nitrous oxide emissions—one of the most potent greenhouse gases contributing to climate change.

The project will combine natural records around the Eastern Hemisphere tropics to better understand monsoon rainfall patterns across Asia, Indonesia and Australia over the last millennium — and how they might look in the future under a changing climate.

A team of scientists, including researchers at Binghamton University, State University of New York, has received funding from the National Science Foundation’s P4Climate to investigating how moisture-driven processes may have contributed to Antarctic ice sheet growth during the Miocene Climatic Optimum, considered an analog for future warming scenarios and studied by geoscientists to understand how abiotic and biotic Earth systems will operate in warmer-than-present climates. 

A team led by the Institut de Ciències del Mar (ICM-CSIC) has described a sustained and unprecedented decrease in the abundance of marine viruses in the northwestern Mediterranean over the last two decades. The finding, published in the journal ISME Communications, is based on the longest-known time series data on marine viruses to date, from the Blanes Bay Microbial Observatory (BBMO) in Girona.