Biodiversity

"Worldwide over the past 35 years, dams and land reclamation activities have converted 250,000 acres of estuary — an area roughly 17 times the size of Manhattan — to urban land or agricultural fields, with most land conversion and estuary loss in rapidly developing countries, a new study finds."

"They look a little like cockroaches and have bulging orange eyes, and trillions of them are about to erupt from the earth in much of the midwestern and eastern United States. The emergence of two groups of cicadas will assemble a chorus of the insects not seen in several hundred years, experts say."

"A prediction, several years in the making, came true on Monday when an alliance of nearly a dozen conservation groups filed suit against the United States Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Land Management, seeking to restore protections for gray wolves in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming arguing that the  states’ aggressive hunting policies imperils the populations."

"When it was time to outline their vision for managing America’s federal lands under a future Republican presidency, pro-Donald Trump conservatives turned to a man who has spent his career advocating for those very lands to be pawned off to states and private interests."

"A total eclipse isn’t just a spectacle in the sky. When the moon consumes the sun on April 8, day will plunge into twilight, the temperature will drop — and nature will take notice."

"This spring, as Russian missiles and drones continued to rain destruction upon Ukraine, a more hopeful symbol appeared in the skies about the embattled nation. The cranes had returned."

"During the last century, federal agencies have undertaken a campaign to destroy huge tracts of piñon pines and juniper trees in the arid reaches of the American West."

"A new count of the gray whale population along the West Coast shows “signs of recovery” five years after hundreds of them washed ashore and the population began declining, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric [Administration]."

"In March, Enviva, the world’s largest woody biomass producer for industrial energy, declared bankruptcy. That cataclysmic collapse triggered a rush of political and economic maneuvering in the U.S. (a key wood pellet producing nation), and in Europe (a primary industrial biomass energy user in converted coal plants)."

"Trillions of evolution’s bizarro wonders, red-eyed periodical cicadas that have pumps in their heads and jet-like muscles in their rears, are about to emerge in numbers not seen in decades and possibly centuries."