Runoff of agricultural nutrients and sediments has led to re-eutrophication of lakes and impaired stream health in the Great Lakes Basin since around 2000 following earlier success in protecting water quality. Substantial investment in conservation actions has had insufficient impact, due in part to a limited basis for understanding the likely environmental outcomes of those investments. This article introduces a special section focusing on promoting investment that produces environmental outcomes as opposed to investing in conservation actions with unknown effects.

Most excess deaths that occur during extreme hot weather events do not have natural heat recorded as an underlying or contributing cause. This study aims to identify the specific individuals who died because of hot weather using only secondary data. A novel approach was developed in which the expected number of deaths was repeatedly sampled from all deaths that occurred during a hot weather event, and compared with deaths during a control period. The deaths were compared with respect to five factors known to be associated with hot weather mortality.

A major factor for the population decline of Native Americans after European contact has been attributed to infectious disease susceptibility. To investigate whether a pre-existing genetic component contributed to this phenomenon, here we analyse 50 exomes of a continuous population from the Northwest Coast of North America, dating from before and after European contact.

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Extreme large-scale North American cold events are associated with strong undulations in the tropospheric jet stream which bring cold polar air southward over the continent. Here we propose that these jet undulations are associated with the North American part of the Circumglobal Teleconnection Pattern—a pair of zonally oriented waves of zonal wave number 5 which are in zonal quadrature with each other. While the Pacific/North American pattern is associated with the first circumglobal wave pattern, North American extreme cold events are associated with the second pattern.

Worldwide riverine thermal pollution patterns were investigated by combining mean annual heat rejection rates from power plants with once-through cooling systems with the global hydrological-water temperature model variable infiltration capacity (VIC)-RBM. The model simulates both streamflow and water temperature on 0.5° × 0.5° spatial resolution worldwide and by capturing their effect, identifies multiple thermal pollution hotspots.

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