KMOV reporter Nathan Vickers talks to Heather Navarro, director of the Midwest Climate Collaborative, and Kim Medley, director of Tyson Research Center, about the impacts of urban heat islands.
LEC post-doc Matt Austin leads research team to examine the role of climate change to discover warmer and drier springs is a major contributor to Leavenworthia blooming earlier.
Research published in Outlook on Agriculture has shown that the population relative to available climate-suitable areas in Kenya has increased, posing a threat to the country’s economy and food security.
The Missouri Botanical Garden is known for its beautiful plants and flowers, but that’s not where you’ll find ecologist Matthew Austin.
Most days, you’ll find the post-doctoral fellow with Washington University’s Living Earth Collaborative combing the stacks, not of a library, but of the garden’s Herbarium, one of the world’s best research resources for all things plants.
Researchers discover elephant extinction could have major impact on atmospheric carbon levels.
Many people believe that climate change is pushing back the start of fall leaf color to later in the year. The general thinking is that the warmer conditions anticipated under climate change will mean that trees can “hang on” to their green, energy-producing leaves longer. But scientists do not actually see this happening across North American forests, according to LEC Biodiversity Fellow, Susanne S. Renner, an expert at Washington University in St. Louis.
Climate change is affecting how and when common blue violets reproduce, according to a study of preserved specimens of the flower published last month by the Missouri Botanical Garden and LEC postodotoral fellow, Matthew Austin.
Research from Matthew Austin, a postdoctoral fellow with the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University in St. Louis, found that climate change is affecting how the common blue violet, a common native flower, reproduce.
Many North American migratory birds are shrinking in size as temperatures have warmed over the past 40 years. But those with very big brains, relative to their body size, did not shrink as much as smaller-brained birds, according to new research from Washington University in St. Louis. The study is the first to identify a direct link between cognition and animal response to human-made climate change.
With funding support from LEC, researchers look at whether Ozark oases at Tyson Research Center — climate change refugia — could help species persist in spite of rising temperatures.
Andean forests have high potential to store carbon under climate change. The study — which draws upon two decades of data from 119 forest-monitoring plots in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Argentina — was produced by an international team of scientists including researchers supported by the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University in St. Louis. The lead author was Alvaro Duque from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia Sede Medellín.
“Climate change is altering when plants are blooming, and it’s disrupting the historic relationships between plants and their pollinators,” said Matthew Austin, an ecologist and biodiversity postdoctoral fellow with the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University in St. Louis. “But we know remarkably little about what effect that has on how plants interact with one another and the evolutionary consequences of altered plant-plant interactions.”
Biologist James Stroud, a postdoctoral research associate in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, discovered that the lizard community responded in an unexpected way: all of them could tolerate cold temperatures down to about 42 degrees Fahrenheit, regardless of their species’ previous ability to withstand cold.
Missouri Botanical Garden researchers are using the diverse landscape at Washington University’s Tyson Research Center in Eureka, Missouri to find what kind of landscapes can buffer plants against climate change.
Climate change is affecting the spread and severity of infectious diseases around the world. The research, led by Vanessa Ezenwa, a professor of ecology at the University of Georgia, and funded by the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University in St. Louis, describes how parasites can cause animals to produce more methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.
Marine scientists predict climate change might severely hinder efforts to protect populations of the endangered and iconic Nassau grouper by the end of this century.
The world’s tropical forests lost roughly 39 million acres of trees last year, an area roughly the size of Bangladesh, according to a report Wednesday by Global Forest Watch that used new satellite data from the University of Maryland. Global Forest Watch is part of the World Resources Institute, an environmental group.