ecology

“When you trample it, you’re resetting a clock that’s been going for a long time back to zero,” says Finger-Higgens, whose latest findings on biocrust degradation were published last month in PNAS. “And so now the system has to repair…

By mid-afternoon, the team had seemingly painted fire onto the land, burning exactly where and what they wanted. The mature pines’ lower trunks were singed black, and the ground beneath them was charred and cleared of most of the tangled…

The team’s test plots also host some of Jordan’s rarest flora. In Marka, that includes saplings of Pistacia lentiscus, the wild pistachio tree—there are only about 50 left in the wild in Jordan—and Celtis australis, sometimes called a…

Around a hundred miles to the south of Chileno Valley Road, another group of volunteers—the Alma Bridge Newt Patrol—have been painstakingly documenting more than 5,000 newts a year that perish while crossing a 4-mile stretch of road in…