South Coast scientists: To improve bay health, start at the source
Miles of rivers and tributaries, including New Bedford’s Buttonwood Brook, empty into Buzzards Bay. Researchers, advocates, and city and town officials are working together to clean them up.
Peering over the edge of a stone bridge, Francesca LoPresti cast a bucket into the Mattapoisett River. She pulled it up slowly and grabbed a syringe, filling it with the clouded water. She then squirted the water back out onto the river below, the stream forming a clean, unbroken arc.
“This is scientific,” she assured with a laugh. “We have to get a clean sample, so we rinse out the first take.”
LoPresti is a fellow with the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Falmouth. For the past week, she and her colleagues at the Buzzards Bay Coalition had been visiting the rivers and streams that make up the Buzzards Bay watershed, collecting water samples and testing them for contaminants.
Continue reading on The New Bedford Light.
At COP 30, the Brazilian Presidency announced that it will present two Roadmaps to advance the new global goals set by governments in 2023: halting and reversing deforestation, and transitioning away from fossil fuels. The Presidency has called for civil society inputs for both Roadmaps, and Woodwell experts have prepared an input for the Deforestation Roadmap.
Woodwell’s input related to the process of developing the Roadmap highlights, in particular, that:
- The Deforestation Roadmap should focus on key priority opportunities, be specific about what actions should be taken and by whom, define clear milestones, and prioritize conservation of existing forests and halting forest loss and degradation;
- The Presidency should harmonize the two Roadmaps, and ensure that the Fossil Fuel Roadmap (also known as TAFF) does not encourage energy sector solutions that undermine forest goals, such as policies that promote electricity generation from wood pellets; and
- The Presidency should ensure that the Roadmap is a living and relevant document at least through its target year of 2030. Such continuity could be achieved, for example, through partnerships with the COP31 and COP32 Presidencies.
Woodwell’s input related to substantive content of the Roadmap highlights six types of action to address barriers to halting and reversing deforestation and degradation, i.e.:
- Actions that drive the systematic incorporation of the costs and risks of deforestation and forest degradation into economic and financial decision-making processes in order to shift public investment and private financial flows away from activities that cause forest loss and towards investment in maintaining forest resilience;
- Actions that address fire as a driver of forest degradation, shifting from reactive suppression towards and integrated approach that combines prevention, risk assessment, preparedness, response, and recovery, and explicitly recognises the socio-ecological and cultural context in which fires occur;
- Actions that accelerate implementation of commitments to recognize Indigenous rights and tenure and increase access to finance;
- Actions that increase financial flows and price signals that incentivize forest conservation, including accelerated implementation of payments for ecosystems services schemes, high-integrity forest carbon markets, and the Tropical Forest Forever Facility;
- Actions that integrate policy and planning across sectors that affect forests, including agriculture, extractive industry, infrastructure, and energy, as well as into structures that govern global trade and finance, such as sovereign debt management; and
- Actions that enable countries to generate, maintain and integrate multiple types of data and information that are necessary to enable the efficient and effective targeting of forest-related interventions and finance.
The quality, legitimacy and continuity of the Roadmaps will depend on the expertise and buy-in of government and stakeholders. Woodwell looks forward to the Presidency’s first Roadmap proposal in the coming weeks and will stay engaged to ensure that the Roadmaps are built on the latest available science and best practices.
The Trump administration wants to take an ax to the East’s last great forests
The fight over the roadless rule has long focused on the West, but its repeal could fragment some of the last pristine forests in the eastern United States.
When most people think about national forests, they imagine vast Western landscapes: Alaska, the Rockies, the Pacific Northwest. But millions of acres of federal woodlands dot the eastern half of the country, too. These great swaths of vibrant ecosystems have long been free of roads, protected by a policy called, appropriately enough, the “roadless rule.”
That may soon change.
How a retired cranberry bog helped change the game for wetland restoration
Glorianna Davenport looks out at hundreds of acres of protected wetlands that were once her family’s cranberry farms. In her hands are laminated pictures of striking red cranberry bogs fed by razor-straight water channels. It’s hard to believe the land where she stands — full of sinuous streams, wildlife, moss and tall trees — once looked so different.
The land’s transformation, documented through a network of cameras and sensors, offers a playbook for wetland restoration as cranberry farms see slimmer profits from New England to Wisconsin because of climate change and other factors. The crop requires cold winters and plenty of water, but warmer temperatures and longer droughts are challenging harvest seasons.
The return of river herring
Every spring, river herring migrate from the ocean to freshwater rivers to spawn. Before Europeans arrived in this region, millions of fish could be seen in herring runs. But pollution, dams, and overfishing drastically reduced the number.
Over the past two decades, conservation groups, local towns, the state and Mashpee Tribal leaders have worked to restore river habitat. The herring are making a slow comeback. So much so that for the first time, people who are not members of a tribe are allowed to take herring from a run in Harwich.
Chaotic March weather has a surprising secret
Seemingly unrelated weather systems illustrate how connected we are by larger patterns that move around in our atmosphere. Meanwhile, “weather whiplash” could be evidence of the warming climate.
As its final days wind down, weather in March 2026 has been one for the record books. It showed why old sayings endure and rivaled college basketball for “March Madness.”
True to the proverb, the month came “in like a lion,” and later echoed Shakespeare’s warning to “beware the ides of March.”
Relentless, record-breaking heat persisted in the West. Powerful storms and bouts of polar air blew through the Central and Eastern U.S., bringing extreme swings in temperature within hours. Hawaii endured flooding rains in a string of kona lows.
It may come as a surprise, but these weather systems also illustrate how connected we are by larger patterns that move around in our atmosphere.
Continue reading on USA Today.
Beneath the frozen surface: How AI is uncovering the secrets of permafrost
Beneath the surface of the Arctic, frozen ground holds clues about our planet’s past and its critical information about its future. Known as permafrost, this ground remains below 0°C for at least two years at a time and stores massive amounts of ice, organic carbon, and environmental history accumulated over thousands of years. But understanding how permafrost is changing throughout the Arctic landscape is no small task.
These regions span millions of square kilometers, and the datasets used to study them (from satellite imagery to high-resolution terrain maps) are often too large for most researchers to access or explore. Now, researchers working with the Permafrost Discovery Gateway, a platform hosted by the Arctic Data Center at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), are using artificial intelligence to change that. In collaboration with Google.org, the gateway combines satellite imagery, high-performance computing, and machine learning, opening a new window into Arctic change. One that anyone with an internet browser can explore!
Statement on public availability of scientific information and scientific evidence on climate change
The American Meteorological Society and the scientific societies listed below are surprised and concerned with the decision by the Federal Judiciary Center (FJC) to remove the climate science chapter from the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, Fourth Edition and the subsequent letter of February 19, 2026 from 21 attorneys general to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM).
Read more on the American Meteorological Society.
