Researchers at Umeå University, Sweden, together with international partners have developed a new class of compounds that can both eliminate harmful bacteria and reduce their ability to cause infection. The findings could, in the longer term, contribute to addressing one of the most pressing global health challenges – antibiotic resistance. The study is published in the journal Science Advances.

Due to human development and climate change, tidal wetland areas have been shrinking globally. A new study using 40 years of satellite data shows that this loss has been accelerating in the U.S. and that this acceleration is being increasingly driven by extreme weather events.

This work was led by Xiucheng Yang, a former UConn postdoctoral researcher and current senior research fellow at the University of Victoria, and Zhe Zhu, an associate professor and director of Global Environmental Remote Sensing (GERS) Laboratory in the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment in the College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources (CAHNR). The study was published in the journal Nature Communications.

A large-scale study with data from Brazilian Cerrado streams found that about half of the field sampling effort preserved the ability of most habitat and biological indices to distinguish stream disturbance levels, while greatly reducing time and costs. Macroinvertebrate indices remained robust under reduced sampling, and only fish richness was more sensitive to lower effort. The findings suggest that faster, more cost-effective stream assessments could support biomonitoring programs in tropical regions with limited funding.

A new, consolidated checklist of diatoms—a major group of photosynthetic microalgae—has been compiled for the Salish Sea, northeast Pacific, by a team of Canadian scientists. Integrating historical records with new reports, this first comprehensive baseline establishes a foundation for assessing diatom diversity in the region. As primary producers at the base of marine food webs, diatoms are key indicators of environmental change, providing critical insight into the health and resilience of the Salish Sea bioregion. The checklist is now published in the open-access Biodiversity Data Journal.