Agriculture and conservation share common ground after Klamath dam removals, study finds
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Updates every hour. Last Updated: 24-Oct-2026 03:16 ET (24-Oct-2026 07:16 GMT/UTC)
A new study of the largest dam removal project in United States history on the Klamath River in Oregon and California is offering new insight into a long-running water conflict by finding that farmers and conservation groups share priorities that may help guide decision-making on future river restoration projects.
A new article (https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biag047) in the journal BioScience argues that the stewardship practices of Indigenous Peoples and other place-based knowledge holders have been systematically underrepresented in both conservation research and international policy along with the knowledge holders and practitioner themselves—and that correcting this imbalance is essential to more effective and equitable biodiversity governance.
The Precourt Institute for Energy’s new Sustainable Mobility Center seeks to fundamentally rethink how people and goods move across land, sea, and air.
The inefficiency of current transportation systems underscores the urgent need for a coordinated, systems-level redesign rather than a simple fuel swap.
Research will be organized around five pillars: energy systems, infrastructure, economics and policy, safety, and interdisciplinary design.
Intensive agriculture poses a significant threat to global biodiversity. However, one aspect of biodiversity in farmland is little studied: algae. Most people have seen algae growing in streams, lakes or the sea. However, algae have also adapted to survive in dryer, harsher conditions on land. In fact, soil algae are thought to be responsible for about 6% of the vegetation production on Earth. This led a research team at the universities of Göttingen and Kassel to investigate the algae in the surface soils of farmland. Their pilot study revealed more than 100 different algae, likely to be made up of hundreds of individual species. Unlike most other microbes, these algae showed seasonal variation in their communities. These are the first steps towards understanding the factors that determine the diversity of these important microorganisms. The results were published in the Journal Frontiers in Microbiology.