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 amount of water in this zone, known as the phreatic ...
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 biggest fish at the dock? This policy is so ingrained ...
What’s Out; What’s in for 2024
by Bill Schlesinger OUT / IN What’s Out; What’s in for 2024What’s Out What’s in___________________________________________________Blemished Potatoes Groundwater depletionCarbon Sequestration ...
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 science, along with his cavalier plot of the trajectory of ...
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, there is a new suggestion on the horizon—using ammonia as ...
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 particles that are less than 2.5 microns (um) in diameter ...
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 thorough survey of an area in question and add up ...
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, largely on corn and soybean in the Midwest. The producers ...
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 postulated that this reduced the surface-area to body volume and ...
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 certain species are likely to grow best. Those that flourish ...