Nitrous oxide is one of the main greenhouse gases emitted during biological wastewater treatment. This long-term multi-meta-omics analysis of a wastewater treatment plant identifies the main causes of nitrous oxide emissions and actionable mitigation strategies.

Shrinking and shape-shifting do not inherently provide thermoregulatory benefits in a warming world. Neutral plasticity or relaxed selection on small body size may better explain why birds are adjusting form under climate change.

Native plants inhabiting the Mediterranean drylands display highly diverse water-use traits. This paper shows that coexisting plant species within the same community exhibit contrasting water use strategies, revealing strong coordination and tradeoffs between above and below ground water-use traits.

Science is often characterized as advancing through the discovery of rare and improbable events. For almost 200 years the Galápagos islands have supplied many such ‘black swans’, both zoological and botanical.

Climate change is exacerbating the severity of drought for life on land, especially for drying-sensitive species such as anurans (frogs and toads). Evaporative water loss rates for anurans are expected to double in areas with increased aridity. Increased drought severity combined with climate warming will likely reduce activity time for anurans owing to physiological limits.

Our extensive, multi-year regional study reveals that prolonged exposure to heavy wildfire smoke results in significant and persistent reductions in non-structural carbohydrates in trees, and that these effects continue for months following the fires (including into the dormancy period and next season’s bloom). Furthermore, trees that are subjected to high levels of smoke exhibit substantial yield reductions in the following year.

Although generally presented otherwise organic agriculture (OA) is much less productive per unit area of land than conventional agriculture (CA) for two reasons. First, because the yields of individual crops grown in OA are generally less than those in CA. Second, because the reliance in OA on organic fertilizer,i.e. plant and animal manures, requires that additional land grown to legumes to provide nitrogen (N) must be included in the calculation of relative productivity. Compared with the commonly used crop-yield ratios of OA/CA productivity of 0.75–0.81, new analyses of the relative food productivity of various crop- and crop-livestock systems presented here report lower values in the range 0.30–0.74 with many less than 0.5. The OA/CA system ratios are higher in less favourable areas and lower in productive areas more suited to crop intensification. The implications for food security and nature conservation place OA at a disadvantage because transformation to OA would require substantial expansion of agricultural land,e.g. an OA/CA ratio of 0.5, would require a doubling of area under OA to maintain equal production. By contrast, higher yields in CA reduce the demand for land in agriculture and consequently can conserve land for nature.

The concept that planting trees will help mitigate climate change by storing CO₂ is too simplistic, ignoring the large effect that plants have on the water cycle. Careful restoration of native plant ecosystems can rebalance that cycle, further mitigating climate change while also reducing flood and drought extremes.