As humans break up forests and fragment habitats, it’s not just species that are lost but also the way ecosystems work, a new study finds. A paper recently published in Ecology Letters compares how mammals are connected through food webs – meaning who eats who or what – in 127 protected areas across Africa. It’s the first study to compare food web similarity at a continental scale.

New evidence shows melt ponds in the northern parts of the Arctic may be biological sources of ice-nucleating particles, a key ingredient for cloud formation that has been largely overlooked.

As climate change intensifies and global food security faces pressures, accurate monitoring of crop phenology—especially sowing dates—has become critical for optimizing agricultural management and improving climate resilience. Winter wheat, a staple crop supporting nearly 40% of the global population, relies heavily on timely sowing to maximize yield potential. However, traditional monitoring methods such as field surveys are labor-intensive and unscalable, while existing remote sensing approaches suffer from soil background interference and static environmental data limitations.  

A large-scale experiment shows that warmth brings bees and wasps out of hibernation earlier – leaving some of them with poorer starting conditions. This is particularly true for species in cooler regions that emerge during spring.

The climate crisis seems to be altering gray whales’ access to food, leading them to change their migration paths and forage in San Francisco Bay — a busy shipping area with a narrow bottleneck both whales and boats must cross. Scientists surveying these whales suspect that many don’t survive to leave the bay: of the 114 individuals they identified, only four were seen in more than one year between 2018 and 2025, and 21 were found dead, giving a minimum mortality rate of 18%. Many deaths were caused by vessel strike injuries, while some others are due to starvation. 

A recent study published in National Science Review has revealed that atmospheric oxidation capacity at northern midlatitude regions is approaching a turning point, challenging prior assessments of hydroxyl radical (OH) increases or stability. Over the past 50–60 years, OH levels have remained near peak values. Future sustained reductions in nitrogen oxide (NO_x) emissions will lead to a decline in surface OH concentrations across the northern midlatitude regions, implying an increase in the atmospheric lifetime of pollutants and methane. This poses new challenges for regional air pollution control and climate change mitigation.

The real climate risks to Ireland from changes to the Atlantic currents that sustain our mild climate are obscured by exaggerated claims in media headlines and movies.

That’s according to Dr Gerard McCarthy, a Maynooth University (MU) oceanographer at the Irish Climate Analysis and Research UnitS (ICARUS) in the Department of Geography, who has led a new article for Nature Climate Change.

The latest paper is a retrospective on a landmark 2015 study led by Professor Stefan Rahmstorf, which identified long-term Atlantic cooling as a sign that the Atlantic Meridional Circulation (AMOC) was weakening.