The trace element selenium is essential for human health and is required in a narrow dietary concentration range. Insufficient selenium intake has been estimated to affect up to 1 billion people worldwide. Dietary selenium availability is controlled by soil–plant interactions, but the mechanisms governing its broad-scale soil distributions are largely unknown. Using data-mining techniques, we modeled recent (1980–1999) distributions and identified climate–soil interactions as main controlling factors.

Large accumulations of rainfall over a precipitation event can impact human infrastructure. Unlike precipitation intensity distributions, probability distributions for accumulations at first drop slowly with increasing size. At a certain size—the cutoff scale—the behavior regime changes, and the probabilities drop rapidly. In current climate, every region is protected from excessively large accumulations by this cutoff scale, and human activities are adapted to this.

Climate change in Alaska is causing widespread environmental change that is damaging critical infrastructure. As climate change continues, infrastructure may become more vulnerable to damage, increasing risks to residents and resulting in large economic impacts. We quantified the potential economic damages to Alaska public infrastructure resulting from climate-driven changes in flooding, precipitation, near-surface permafrost thaw, and freeze–thaw cycles using high and low future climate scenarios. Additionally, we estimated coastal erosion losses for villages known to be at risk.

Exceedingly high levels of fine particulate matter (PM) occur frequently in China, but the mechanism of severe haze formation remains unclear. From atmospheric measurements in two Chinese megacities and laboratory experiments, we show that the oxidation of SO2 by NO2 occurs efficiently in aqueous media under two polluted conditions: first, during the formation of the 1952 London Fog via in-cloud oxidation; and second, on fine PM with NH3 neutralization during severe haze in China.

Millions of abandoned oil and gas wells exist across the United States and around the world. Our study analyzes historical and new field datasets to quantify the number of abandoned wells in Pennsylvania, individual and cumulative methane emissions, and the attributes that help explain these emissions.

Understanding the conflict potential of drought is critical for dealing effectively with the societal implications of climate change. Using new georeferenced ethnicity and conflict data for Asia and Africa since 1989, we present an actor-oriented analysis of growing-season drought and conflict involvement among ethnic groups. Results from naive models common in previous research suggest that drought generally has little impact.

Pathogens, and antipathogen behavioral strategies, affect myriad aspects of human behavior. Recent findings suggest that antipathogen strategies relate to political attitudes, with more ideologically conservative individuals reporting more disgust toward pathogen cues, and with higher parasite stress nations being, on average, more conservative. However, no research has yet adjudicated between two theoretical accounts proposed to explain these relationships between pathogens and politics.

Human management of ecological systems, including issues like fisheries, invasive species, and restoration, as well as others, often must be undertaken with limited information. This means that developing general principles and heuristic approaches is important. Here, I focus on one aspect, the importance of an explicit consideration of time, which arises because of the inherent limitations in the response of ecological systems. I focus mainly on simple systems and models, beginning with systems without density dependence, which are therefore linear.

The Amazonian tropical forests have been disappearing at a fast rate in the last 50 y due to deforestation to open areas for agriculture, posing high risks of irreversible changes to biodiversity and ecosystems. Climate change poses additional risks to the stability of the forests. Studies suggest “tipping points” not to be transgressed: 4° C of global warming or 40% of total deforested area. The regional development debate has focused on attempting to reconcile maximizing conservation with intensification of traditional agriculture.

Freshwater appropriation can have vast impacts, depending on management and scale of water use. Since 2000, foreign investors have contracted an area the size of the United Kingdom in Africa, leading to increased pressure on water resources. Here we couple site-specific water demand for the crops planted there to the efficiency of different irrigation systems, while relating these estimates to local water availability.