Environmental sciences articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Control of mosquito populations using pesticides is important for malaria elimination, but effects of pesticides on humans aren’t well understood. Here, Prahl et al. show in a cohort of pregnant Ugandan women and their infants that household spraying with bendiocarb affects the fetal immune system and response to vaccination in infancy.

    • Mary Prahl
    • , Pamela Odorizzi
    •  & Margaret E. Feeney

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Amazonian Dark Earth is soil that has had mysteriously high fertility since ancient times, despite the fact that surrounding soils have very low nutrients. Here the authors’ use of isotope reconstructions indicate that these soils predate human settlement and could have alluvial and burning origins.

    • Lucas C. R. Silva
    • , Rodrigo Studart Corrêa
    •  & Roberto Ventura Santos

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Agricultural greenhouse gas emissions not only amplify the global climate crisis, but cause damage currently unaccounted for by food prices. Here the authors show the calculation of prices with internalized climate costs for food categories and production systems, revealing strong market distortions.

    • Maximilian Pieper
    • , Amelie Michalke
    •  & Tobias Gaugler

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Randomised controlled experiments are the gold standard for scientific inference, but environmental and social scientists often rely on different study designs. Here the authors analyse the use of six common study designs in the fields of biodiversity conservation and social intervention, and quantify the biases in their estimates.

    • Alec P. Christie
    • , David Abecasis
    •  & William J. Sutherland

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    Arctic research faces unprecedented disruptions due to COVID-19. This ‘pause’ gives an opportunity to reflect on the current state and the future of Arctic science and move towards a more resilient, thus equitable, coordinated, safe and locally-embedded Arctic research enterprise. Arctic science has been greatly affected by COVID-19. This comment looks forward to how Arctic science could be conducted in the future.

    • Andrey N. Petrov
    • , Larry D. Hinzman
    •  & Alona Yefimenko

  • Review Article
    | Open Access

    Large-scale meat production can have negative impacts on public health, the environment and animal welfare. In this Review, the authors consider plant-based and cell-based approaches to meat production and the challenges they face.

    • Natalie R. Rubio
    • , Ning Xiang
    •  & David L. Kaplan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Multiple co-occurring stressors may affect food webs in ways that are not predictable by studying individual stressors. Here the authors apply a network interaction model to a marine food web in the Arctic, finding that nonlinear interactions between stressors can more than double the risk of population collapse compared to simpler simulations.

    • K. R. Arrigo
    • , Gert L. van Dijken
    •  & R. M. Bailey

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Electrocatalytic processes are promising for automated and scalable synthesis of singlet oxygen, but they are energy- and chemical-intensive. Here the authors present a Janus electrocatalytic membrane that selectively produces singlet oxygen with low energy consumption and free of chemical precursors.

    • Yumeng Zhao
    • , Meng Sun
    •  & Menachem Elimelech

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Historically it has been maintained that soil organic carbon (SOC) is stabilized through interactions with mineral interfaces. Here the authors use cryo-electron microscopy and spectroscopy to show that SOC interactions can also occur between organic forms in patchy, disordered structure.

    • Angela R. Possinger
    • , Michael J. Zachman
    •  & Johannes Lehmann

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Human activities have accelerated soil erosion and landscape change in many areas. Here the authors show how rates of erosion, sediment transfer and alluvial sedimentation have increased by an order of magnitude across North America since European colonization, far exceeding the rates expected of natural processes.

    • David B. Kemp
    • , Peter M. Sadler
    •  & Veerle Vanacker

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Local human activities can lead to cross-border environmental impacts through the food–energy–water–CO2 nexus. Here, the authors report wide variations in environmental impacts of irrigated agriculture across counties within the North China Plain under different environmental and socioeconomic scenarios.

    • Zhenci Xu
    • , Xiuzhi Chen
    •  & Yunkai Li

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The extraction of metals from seawater is an area of great potential; especially for the extraction of uranium. Here, the authors report on the synthesis of a DNA based uranium adsorbent with high selectivity and demonstrate the potential for the DNA based extraction of high-value soluble minerals from seawater.

    • Yihui Yuan
    • , Tingting Liu
    •  & Ning Wang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Dust deposition brings iron that fuels ocean productivity, a connection impacting climate over geological time. Here the authors use sediment cores to show that in contrast to dynamics today, during the last glacial maximum westerly winds shuttled dust from Australia and South America around Antarctica and into the South Pacific.

    • Torben Struve
    • , Katharina Pahnke
    •  & Gisela Winckler

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The global supply chain and demand for export goods can lead to relocated emissions. Goods produced in China for foreign markets have lead to an increase of domestic non-methane volatile organic compounds emissions by 3.5 million tons in 2013 resulting in potentially an estimated 16,889 premature deaths annually.

    • Jiamin Ou
    • , Zhijiong Huang
    •  & Dabo Guan

  • Perspective
    | Open Access

    Reducing soil degradation and improving soil management could make an important contribute to climate change mitigation. Here the authors discuss opportunities and challenges towards implementing a global climate mitigation strategy focused on carbon sequestration in agricultural soils, and propose a framework for guiding region- and soil-specific management options.

    • W. Amelung
    • , D. Bossio
    •  & A. Chabbi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Replacement of local crops with alternative varieties adapted to future conditions may improve food security under climate change. Here the authors apply landscape genomics and ensemble climate modelling to pearl millet in West Africa, supporting the potential of transfrontier assisted seed exchange.

    • Bénédicte Rhoné
    • , Dimitri Defrance
    •  & Yves Vigouroux

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The COVID-19 pandemic has stopped many human activities, which has had significant impact on emissions of greenhouse gases. Here, the authors present daily estimates of country-level CO2 emissions for different economic sectors and show that there has been a 8.8% decrease in global CO2 emissions in the first half of 2020.

    • Zhu Liu
    • , Philippe Ciais
    •  & Hans Joachim Schellnhuber

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Unconventional oil and gas production has increased drastically in the US, but its environmental impacts are not well known. Here, the authors show that these wells can be associated with elevated levels of airborne particle radioactivity in downwind locations.

    • Longxiang Li
    • , Annelise J. Blomberg
    •  & Petros Koutrakis

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Climate warming is advancing spring leaf unfolding, but it is also reducing the cold periods that many trees require to break winter dormancy. Here, the authors show that 7 of 12 current chilling models fail to account for the correct relationship between chilling accumulation and heat requirement, leading to substantial overestimates of the advance of spring phenology under climate change.

    • Huanjiong Wang
    • , Chaoyang Wu
    •  & Quansheng Ge

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Coastal river delta regions are particularly impacted by the effects of climate change, yet though these regions are densely inhabited, robust estimates of population are lacking. Here the authors use global datasets to predict the number of people and regions most threatened by flooding and extreme weather.

    • Douglas A. Edmonds
    • , Rebecca L. Caldwell
    •  & Sacha M. O. Siani

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How to best allocate limited resources for conserving imperilled species is a difficult challenge. Here the authors analyse data on over 2000 threatened species from USA, Australia, and New Zealand, finding that on average half of the budget is allocated to research and monitoring. Species with higher budget allocation to research and monitoring tend to have poorer recovery outcomes.

    • Rachel T. Buxton
    • , Stephanie Avery-Gomm
    •  & Joseph R. Bennett

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Exposure to extreme events is a major concern in coastal regions where human populations and stressed ecosystems are at risk to such phenomena. Here the authors show a marine heatwave on the continental shelf resulted from a novel set of compounding effects due to a tropical storm followed by an atmospheric heatwave.

    • B. Dzwonkowski
    • , J. Coogan
    •  & T. Lee

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Due to legislative shortfalls, species of global conservation concern can still be captured in commercial fisheries. Here the authors show that 91 threatened species are reported in catch/landing databases, 13 of which are traded internationally despite their conservation concern.

    • Leslie A. Roberson
    • , Reg A. Watson
    •  & Carissa J. Klein

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Salvage logging has become a common practice to gain economic returns from naturally disturbed forests, but it could have considerable negative effects on biodiversity. Here the authors use a recently developed statistical method to estimate that ca. 75% of the naturally disturbed forest should be left unlogged to maintain 90% of the species unique to the area.

    • Simon Thorn
    • , Anne Chao
    •  & Alexandro B. Leverkus

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The early Eocene was characterized by exceptionally high global temperatures and no polar ice. Here, clumped isotope paleothermometry of glendonite calcite from the Danish Basin shows that these were formed in waters below 5 °C, indicating that regionalised cool episodes punctuated the background warmth of the early Eocene.

    • Madeleine L. Vickers
    • , Sabine K. Lengger
    •  & Christoph Korte

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Permafrost locks away the largest reservoir of mercury on the planet, but climate warming threatens to thaw these systems. Here the authors use models to show that unconstrained fossil fuel burning will dramatically increase the amount of mercury released into future ecosystems.

    • Kevin Schaefer
    • , Yasin Elshorbany
    •  & Elsie M. Sunderland

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Mapping ecological variables using machine-learning algorithms based on remote-sensing data has become a widespread practice in ecology. Here, the authors use forest biomass mapping as a study case to show that the most common model validation approach, which ignores data spatial structure, leads to overoptimistic assessment of model predictive power.

    • Pierre Ploton
    • , Frédéric Mortier
    •  & Raphaël Pélissier

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Ecosystem Based Management measures developed to prevent overfishing could be particularly important under climate change. Here the authors combine climate and fish stock modelling to show that EBM cap implementation reduces climate-driven fishery declines under RCP 4.5 and 8.5 before midcentury. However, there are thermal tipping points beyond which potential collapses are predicted.

    • K. K. Holsman
    • , A. C. Haynie
    •  & A. E. Punt

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The methane emissions from natural gas vehicles (NGVs) are unclear. Here the authors report high methane emissions from heavy-duty NGVs, and by using a scenario analysis show that strictly implementing the upcoming China VI standard could reduce GHG emissions by 509 Mt CO2eq for 2020-2030.

    • Da Pan
    • , Lei Tao
    •  & Mark A. Zondlo

  • Article
    | Open Access

    “How iodine-bearing molecules contribute to atmospheric aerosol formation is not well understood. Here, the authors provide a new gas-to-particle conversion mechanism and show that clustering of iodine oxides is an essential component of this process while previously proposed iodic acid does not play a large role.”

    • Juan Carlos Gómez Martín
    • , Thomas R. Lewis
    •  & Alfonso Saiz-Lopez

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Conversion of natural ecosystems to cropland is a threat to most native wildlife. Here the authors quantify the impact of recent cropland expansion on the habitat of representative pollinator, bird, plant species across the conterminous United States, showing diminished crop yield returns at the cost of important habitat losses.

    • Tyler J. Lark
    • , Seth A. Spawn
    •  & Holly K. Gibbs

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Renewable energy production is necessary to mitigate climate change, however, generating the required technologies and infrastructure will demand huge production increases of many metals. Here, the authors map mining areas and assess spatial coincidence with biodiversity conservation sites, and show that new mining threats to biodiversity may surpass those averted by climate change mitigation.

    • Laura J. Sonter
    • , Marie C. Dade
    •  & Rick K. Valenta

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Global resources of heavy Rare Earth Elements (REE) are dominantly sourced from Chinese regolith-hosted ion-adsorption deposits, yet the adsorption mechanisms remain unclear. Here, the authors find that heavy REE are adsorbed as easily leachable 8-coordinated outer-sphere hydrated complexes, dominantly onto kaolinite, in clays from both China and Madagascar.

    • Anouk M. Borst
    • , Martin P. Smith
    •  & Kalotina Geraki

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Global largest agricultural ammonia (NH3) emissions in China have caused severe damage to both ecosystem and human health, yet no policy is formulated to reduce NH3 emissions. Here, the authors show that halving agricultural NH3 emissions with feasible technical mitigation options in China generates far more societal benefits than abatement costs.

    • Xiuming Zhang
    • , Baojing Gu
    •  & Deli Chen

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    Weather may marginally affect COVID-19 dynamics, but misconceptions about the way that climate and weather drive exposure and transmission have adversely shaped risk perceptions for both policymakers and citizens. Future scientific work on this politically-fraught topic needs a more careful approach.

    • Colin J. Carlson
    • , Ana C. R. Gomez
    •  & Sadie J. Ryan

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    The Montreal Protocol has begun to heal the Antarctic ozone hole and avoided more global warming than any other treaty. Still, recent research shows that new unexpected emissions of several chlorofluorocarbons, carbon tetrachloride, and hydrofluorocarbons, are undermining the Protocol’s success. It is time for policymakers to plug the holes in the ozone hole treaty.

    • Susan Solomon
    • , Joseph Alcamo
    •  & A. R. Ravishankara

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Mangroves and the carbon they store are threatened by deforestation, but the efficacy of policies to protect them is unknown. Here the authors assess changes in mangrove carbon stocks between 1996 and 2016 and show less loss than previous methods estimated, indicating conservation has had a positive effect.

    • Daniel R. Richards
    • , Benjamin S. Thompson
    •  & Lahiru Wijedasa

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The risks posed by plastic contamination of the ocean cannot be assessed as their amount and location remain largely unknown. Here the authors show that large quantities of microplastics exist below the ocean surface over the entire Atlantic in quantities greater than previously estimated.

    • Katsiaryna Pabortsava
    •  & Richard S. Lampitt

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In anoxic environments, soluble hexavalent uranium is reduced and immobilized, however, the underlying molecular-scale reduction mechanism remains unknown. Here, the authors find that U reduction can occur on the surface of magnetite via transient U nanowire structures which collapse into ordered UO2 nanoclusters, which may have implications for understanding nuclear waste evolution and remediation of uranium contamination.

    • Zezhen Pan
    • , Barbora Bártová
    •  & Rizlan Bernier-Latmani

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Ocean warming could enable the release of methane related to hydrate dissociation from the ocean floor, a process thought to have triggered abrupt climate changes in Earth history. Here the authors detect this process in action, observing a massive release of methane from a site in the South Atlantic Ocean.

    • Marcelo Ketzer
    • , Daniel Praeg
    •  & José A. Cupertino

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Anthropogenic stressors affect many aspects of marine organismal health. Here, the authors expose surgeonfish to temperature and pesticide stressors and show that the stressors, separately and in combination, have adverse effects on thyroid signaling, which disrupts several sensory systems and important predation defenses.

    • Marc Besson
    • , William E. Feeney
    •  & David Lecchini

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Selective reduction of carbon dioxide to high-value products is key for advancing carbon capture and utilization technologies. Here the authors prepare a copper catalyst for electrocatalytic conversion of carbon dioxide to C2+ products with enhanced selectivity that is attributed to a high density of surface defects.

    • Taehee Kim
    •  & G. Tayhas R. Palmore

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