Cattle grazing can promote cheatgrass dominance, study finds

Ranchers often argue that cattle grazing is the best way to combat cheatgrass, an aggressive invader that has taken over vast areas of the Great Basin, destroying the native sagebrush ecosystem and fueling huge wildfires.

What do we spend to preserve nature? $40 billion

Some say that you can’t put a price on precious natural resources. As of this week, you can.

Feds to study oil exploration's effects on marine life

Two federal agencies on Friday announced a major review of how seismic testing for oil and gas deposits affects marine mammals and fish in deep waters off the Gulf of Mexico.

U.S. to protect endangered loggerhead sea turtle habitat

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has two months to identify suitable in-water nesting and migratory habitat for endangered loggerhead sea turtles, according to a legal settlement filed this week.

Pesticides, parasites and poor forage hurting bee pollinators

Although honeybee loss slowed last year, it remains at dangerously high levels, according to a new federal report that concluded there was no single remedy for the colony collapse that has hit America’s hard-working crop pollinators.

Hours reduced at Mojave National Preserve's Kelso Depot

The Kelso Depot Visitor Center in Mojave National Preserve, the park’s popular historic site, is about to be affected by federal spending cuts.

The consensus seems to be: Let somebody else fix the delta

Confidential surveys of water officials, water users and others involved with the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta offer some telling insight on why the delta is stuck in a perpetual quagmire.

Hybrid cars to join U.S. government's fleet under new program

The U.S. Department of the Interior will become the first federal agency to take advantage of a new program to update its fleet of vehicles with gas-sipping hybrids.

Bay Area air pollution reaches Devils Postpile National Monument

That fresh, pine-scented mountain air that you happily breathe in the Sierra Nevada could be hazardous to your health.

Yosemite's Tioga Road to reopen May 11

Officials at Yosemite National Park say snow plows will begin clearing Tioga Road next week and hope to reopen the highway by May 11.

Feral cats killing endangered Hawaiian birds, study finds

Academic researchers and federal scientists have for the first time come up with direct evidence of feral cats killing endangered Hawaiian petrels. The study, by scientists from the University of Hawaii, the National Park Service and the U.S. Geological Survey, confirms what has been widely suspected, that wild cats are playing an important role in the population decline of the rare birds.

Two years ago researchers outfitted an electric Toyota RAV4 with a set of test instruments and drove back and forth near four Los Angeles County freeways between 4:30 a.m. and 6:30 a.m., sampling the air.

The number of gray wolves in the northern Rocky Mountain region declined about 7% last year, the first significant population drop in the region since wolves were reintroduced in 1995.

It took a lot of muscle to build the Whole Earth Building in Claremont, not to mention mud balls, sandbags and dirty hands.

What better way to celebrate National Park Week than to visit a national park?

California needs to strengthen regulation of hydraulic fracturing, according to a UC Berkeley Law School report that identified a number of shortcomings in state oversight of the controversial practice.   

Federal budget cutters are merging the two West Coast administrative regions of the National Marine Fisheries Service, a move that could leave California at a disadvantage.

Developments continue apace in the saga of the Drakes Bay Oyster Co. and its legal battle with the federal government.

Recent vandalism to rocks and walls at Rattlesnake Canyon has prompted officials at Joshua Tree National Park to close the popular trail temporarily to protect it from further damage.

When the World Trade Organization found last year that U.S. labeling requirements for dolphin-safe tuna put Mexican tuna fishermen at a trade disadvantage, marine advocates worried that the federal government would weaken its dolphin-safe standards.

Rainfall or snowfall dumped by the most intense storms could grow significantly heavier in most of the United States by the final decades of the century, according to a new climate change study.

Western land managers may have a new weapon in their frustrating – and so far losing – battle against invasive cheatgrass.

Want to know what the average electricity use is in your Los Angeles neighborhood and how it compares with other parts of town?

The news from a comprehensive national survey of river and stream health is not good: Only about a fifth of the length of America’s rivers and streams is in good biological condition, while 55% is in poor shape.

President Obama on Monday established five new national monuments, including one in Washington’s San Juan Islands and one in northern New Mexico.

This post has been corrected. See below for details.

The plight of bees is headed to a courtroom.

Researchers in Europe have confirmed scientifically what parents in traffic-congested Southern California have known anecdotally for years: Poor air quality associated with busy roads can cause asthma in children.

Judging by a new statewide poll, California lawmakers were smart to pull an $11.1-billion water bond off last fall’s ballot.

A new United Nations report estimates that roughly 3,000 great apes are taken from the wild every year as part of an illegal international trade that is growing increasingly sophisticated.

If you're a bird that likes to build mud nests in dangerous places, such as highway bridges and overpasses, how do you avoid fatal encounters with cars and trucks?

OR7, the peripatetic gray wolf who spent most of last year in California, has said goodbye to the Golden State -- at least for now.

It’s long been a quandary for researchers and wildlife enthusiasts: How can they observe sensitive species without displacing or disturbing them?

For a glimpse of the trail of destruction left by an invasive beetle in some of San Diego County's oak woodlands, take a look at the video prepared by UC Riverside researchers hunting for ways to stop the bug.

The boom in logging and fur trapping triggered by Gold Rush settlement of the Sierra Nevada has long been blamed for the steep decline in California’s population of fishers.

When UC Davis scientists collected air pollution particles in Fresno and then exposed laboratory mice to them, they found that one of the most toxic sources was the backyard grill.

Less than half of the 280 million metric tons of plastic produced each year ends up in the landfill.  A fair bit of the rest ends up littering the landscape, blown by the wind or washed down streams and rivers into the sea.

Stanford researchers have discovered that the introduction of Western religions is changing hunting patterns in the Amazon and affecting the region’s biodiversity.

Citing shrinking mountain snowpacks as a result of climate change, federal wildlife officials are proposing to list wolverines as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

Irrigation in California’s Central Valley pours so much water vapor into the atmosphere that it significantly drives up summer rainfall and runoff in the Southwest, according to a new study.

Can we eat our way to sustainability?

A group of conservation organizations and Bay Area water agencies is proposing a vastly scaled-down version of a new export system for the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, arguing that it would cost less and be more reliable than a plan supported by Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration.

Wonder what a walrus sounds like underwater? Or what sounds a West European hedgehog makes? Or an ostrich chick while still inside its shell?

NASA is preparing to launch the eighth observation satellite in the Landsat remote sensing program that has chronicled changes in the Earth’s land cover for four decades.

California plant life is unusually rich and diverse. The state has more than 5,500 native plant species, more than any other state. Roughly 40% of them are found nowhere else.

State fish and wildlife officials, although deeply skeptical about low numbers of great white sharks off the Pacific Coast, determined that there was sufficient scientific information to warrant a full review on whether the feared, toothy creature should be listed as threatened with extinction.

It’s not often that you hear someone stand up in front of a microphone and tell the world they have been wrong about a high-profile issue. But that’s exactly what Mark Lynas did last week at the Oxford Farming Conference in Oxford, England, when he renounced his long-held belief that genetically modified foods are dangerous and offered a full-throated defense of the technology as a means of feeding a growing population without devastating the environment. 

For centuries the giant squid has been the stuff of legend, but now, for the first time ever, scientists have collected footage of a giant squid, (Architeuthis), in its natural habitat, thousands of feet below the ocean's surface. 

As the tide drops, seawater in Ofu Lagoon gets cut off from the ocean swirling around American Samoa. Under the intense South Pacific sun, these shallow waters can reach 93 degrees -- temperatures that typically would make corals overheated, cause them to bleach bone white and die.

A federal judge has blocked plans to greatly expand a small Placer County ski resort on the western shore of Lake Tahoe after finding that the project’s environmental review was inadequate. 

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has once again revised critical habitat for the southwestern willow flycatcher, an endangered migratory bird that has been the subject of two decades of legal wrangling.

Ending a battle to preserve a historic piece of the Sierra Nevada crest, conservation groups recently finalized their purchase of the 3,000-acre Royal Gorge property on Donner Summit.

First came the polar bear. Now, the federal government has added two other marine mammals to the list of creatures threatened with extinction because of vanishing sea ice in a warming Arctic.

Make no mistake. Tigers have gone extinct in Afghanistan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Singapore, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, the islands of Bali and Java in Indonesia and possibly in Korea. 

Another climate change study is projecting declines in runoff in many parts of the West, a scenario that would put more pressure on the region’s water supplies.

Poverty and disease often come together. That much is well understood.

Secretary of State nominee John Kerry, with 20 years of concern about climate change, is expected to push the issue to center stage as a slow-motion crisis in need of a global solution.

After a decade of legal and regulatory fights, the Environmental Protection Agency has finalized how it will crack down on highly toxic pollution from industrial boilers and cement plants.

A 12,240-foot Eastern Sierra peak will be named after the late Andrea Lawrence, the Olympic ski champion and mountain conservationist.

A new report on residential construction places the Los Angeles region in some surprising company.

Field scientists and students who rough it in UC Irvine’s Steele/Burnand Anza Borrego Desert Research Center in eastern San Diego County will soon be settling into a new laboratory, apartment building and dormitory thanks to $2.8 million in Proposition 84 funds awarded by the California Wildlife Conservation Board.

The Obama administration on Wednesday announced its plan to allow oil and gas drilling in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, the first time a blueprint has been drawn up for the entire 23-million acre block on Alaska’s North Slope.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has decided to allow sea otters to roam freely down the Southern California coastline, abandoning its program to relocate the voracious shellfish eaters from waters reserved for fishermen.

Even though nearly half of the Malibu Creek watershed is undeveloped open space, the creek and its mouth, Malibu Lagoon, are far from pristine.

An eerie new disease is cropping up among raccoons in Northern California and Oregon: brain tumors that may be linked to a previously unidentified virus discovered by a team led by UC Davis veterinarians and researchers.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the most scrutinized of scientific bodies. Each report, each sentence and sometimes even a footnote can bring on a rousing online debate between scientists and the skeptics who love to bedevil them.

Paying out billions of dollars here and billions of dollars there has made the global insurance industry a believer in climate change, according to a new study that shows insurance companies are staunch advocates for reducing carbon emissions and minimizing the risk posed by increasingly severe weather events.

As part of a new study of future water shortages in the Colorado River Basin, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation solicited ideas on how to solve the looming gap between supply and demand.

D-CON kills rats and mice, the label reads. And, according to state and federal officials, it can kill hawks, owls, eagles, foxes, bobcats, mountain lions and other non-targeted wildlife too.

These days, there’s a lot of discussion of carbon footprints. A new study by the Pacific Institute focuses on another footprint, that of water.

The Mexican gray wolf—although listed as endangered—has languished in bureaucratic limbo with no plan to recover the species, according to a lawsuit filed Monday by the Center for Biological Diversity.

Ferrying a load of soybeans from Seattle to China in 2004, the engine of Malaysian freighter Selendang Ayu lost power and the vessel broke in half on rocks off Unalaska Island in the middle of the Alaskan archipelago.

Energy development on public lands and waters pumped more than $12 billion into federal coffers in 2012, $1 billion more than the previous year, according to the U.S. Department of the Interior.

The Union of Concerned Scientists has figured out how Americans can cut their oil consumption in half within 20 years.

A fast-changing Arctic broke records for loss of sea ice and spring snow cover this year, as well as summertime melt of the Greenland ice sheet, federal scientists reported Wednesday.

When a team of academic researchers blended wildfire data with satellite images from the Great Basin, they confirmed what public land managers and ranchers have seen on the ground for years: cheatgrass, an invasive grass accidentally introduced by settlers more than a century ago, is fueling bigger, more frequent wildfires in that empty stretch of the West.

A new study links even small reductions in fine particle air pollution to increased life expectancy.

After three years of analysis, a team of federal scientists has come up with a list of the greatest threats to the survival of reef-building corals.

To a casual observer, it looks like someone barnstorming several hundred feet above sparsely populated Central California terrain in a small plane.

Coal’s role in fueling power plants is expected to continue to shrink in coming years as old, polluting plants are taken out of operation and power companies turn to cheaper natural gas to generate electricity.

May gray. June gloom. Even fog in August, some wags call "Faugest."

The loss of ice covering Greenland and Antarctica has accelerated over the last 20 years, shrinking three times as much as in the 1990s and contributing substantially to sea level rise, according to a comprehensive new study of ice sheet loss conducted by 26 laboratories around the world.

Think of broccoli that you’ve got in the freezer. As long as it’s frozen, it will remain stable for years. As soon as you pull it out, it’ll go mushy and soon begin to unleash the stench of decay.

The cause of the death of a young mountain lion found by hikers last month in the Santa Monica Mountains remains a mystery after inconclusive laboratory tests.

Next June -- about the time hurricane season begins to ramp up -- the city of New Orleans will take over control of one of the most sophisticated flood-control systems in the world. That, and pick up the estimated $38-million annual tab.

Two BP employees and a former executive pleaded not guilty Wednesday to a variety of charges, including manslaughter and concealing information from Congress, in connection with the 2010 explosion of the oil drilling rig Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico.

BP, which has agreed to plead guilty to criminal charges in connection with the nation's worst offshore oil spill, was suspended from new government contracts on Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency announced.

The vast majority of couches tested as part of a new study contained chemical flame retardants, including toxic chemicals that have been linked to a variety of health problems.