Neonicotinoid pesticides are used widely, raising concerns about effects on organisms besides pests. Khanna and colleagues find that increased neonicotinoid use in the continental United States has reduced bird diversity, especially that of grassland and insectivorous birds.

See Li et al.

Solar-driven interfacial evaporation has potential for sustainable water sanitation, but controlling interfacial evaporators for solar tracking to ensure efficiency remains a challenge. Guo and colleagues create a black and super-wicking grooved surface that harnesses the sunlight and purifies water at an ultra-high level of efficiency.

See Singh et al.

Air pollution impacts health globally, but studying this effect is challenging because economic development worsens pollution while bettering health. Burke and colleagues focus on the health effects of distant Saharan dust, unlinked from economic activity, and find that it leads to a large rise in infant mortality.

See Heft-Neal et al.

Given the benefits of forests, there are growing efforts to restore lost ones. This study finds that between 1986 and 2011, Chile’s forest subsidies encouraged expansion of plantations with exotic trees at the expense of native forest, likely reducing biodiversity and not increasing aboveground carbon storage.

See Heilmayr et al.

Little is known about the long-term effects of natural disasters on mortality risks. Frankenberg and colleagues examined how mortality and individual-specific traumatic exposures during the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami affected mortality risks of survivors over the following ten years.

See Frankenberg et al.

Household carbon footprints reflect resource use and income level. Mi and colleagues find footprints for Chinese households generally converge with economic growth but convergence is highest in wealthy coastal regions.

See Mi et al.

Public confidence in the reliability of electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure is a barrier to adoption. With large-scale social data and machine learning, this study provides evidence on how well existing charging infrastructure is serving the needs of EV drivers across the United States.

See Asensio et al.

Heatwaves threaten biodiversity as heat stress hinders animal reproduction by killing sperm cells. Foster and colleagues found a heat-induced protein fingerprint in the spermatheca of honey bee queens that could be used as an indicator of heat stress as part of a biomonitoring program.

See McAfee et al.

Rising food demand and the rising land use and environmental ills of agriculture are clashing. Folberth and colleagues find that locating crops and applying fertilizers optimally could reduce required cropland globally by about half.

See Folberth et al.

Some countries have not implemented large-scale Marine Protected Areas for fear of losing significant fisheries revenue. Villaseñor-Derbez and colleagues find that transferable fishing rights and a biomass-based allocation rule can incentivize conservation within a market-based setting.

See Villaseñor-Derbez et al.

Prescribed burns can help reduce catastrophic impacts of wildfires. Miller and colleagues find that regulation, funding and human capacity are the main barriers to implement this approach more widely in California.

See Miller et al.

Restoring degraded landscapes for conservation purposes can involve transaction costs to acquire the land in the first place. McDonald-Madden and colleagues propose a framework for prioritizing uncontested lands that can provide ecosystem services without those costs.

See McDonald-Madden et al.