Groundwater

by Bill Schlesinger Deep underfoot in most regions of the world is a zone where the fractures in bedrock are filled with water—known as groundwater–constituting the water table.  Globally, the…

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Big Fish – Little Fish

by Bill Schlesinger A tradition in fisheries management is to throw back the little fellows, so they can grow up, and keep the big ones.  Who doesn’t like displaying the…

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Beautiful Clean Coal

by Bill Schlesinger “We have ended the war on beautiful clean coal,” Donald S. Trump, State of the Union 2018. So, it is recorded for history, Donald Trump’s misunderstandings of…

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Ammonia as a fuel

by Bill Schlesinger It is not often that environmental scientists get to weigh-in on a new technology before it is implemented.  Usually we end up complaining about the aftermath.  But,…

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Wildfires and Air Quality

by Bill Schlesinger A couple of years ago, being a weather-hobbyist, I added a particle sensor (Purple Air PA-II) to our rooftop weather station to measure the ambient concentration of…

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The Invisible Birds

by Bill Schlesinger The number of species in a given area, what is often called alpha diversity or species richness, sounds like it would be easy to measure.  Make a…

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A Requiem for Roundup?

by Bill Schlesinger Glyphosate is the most widely used herbicide in the United States with applications ranging between 250 and 300 million pounds per year during the past 10 years,…

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The Downsizing of Nature?

by Bill Schlesinger In the mid-1800s, a German biologist, Carl Bergmann noticed a tendency for the individuals of bird and mammal species to be larger at higher latitudes, and he…

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Nature’s plant hardiness zones

by Bill Schlesinger Most seed catalogs tell amateur gardeners what to plant each spring by including a map of plant hardiness zones.  Developed by the USDA, these maps show where…

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