School of Information students are looking through the ‘lens of an information professional’ and using data to tackle urgent water-related issues in Michigan and around the globe. Partners in the school’s inaugural ‘theme year’ include representatives from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation will establish the Global Center for Understanding Climate Change Impacts on Transboundary Waters. Partners include Cornell University, the College of Menominee Nation, the Red Lake Nation, and more.

Targeting aquatic life and shoreline species in and around Douglas Lake in Northern Michigan, researchers and private citizens logged a total of 503 species during an intensive three-day initiative in July. And yes, that’s a bald eagle.

Jocelyn Anderson does not consider herself an expert birder. Not yet, at least. But one look at her website or Instagram account is like walking into an aviary chock full of birds from all corners of Michigan.

Bogs have a reputation as soggy, inhospitable places teeming with insects and unseen hazards. But to Bryan Pfeiffer, BS ’80, they are sacred spaces brimming with life lessons and slow rewards. The 65-year-old ‘boy explorer’ is a Vermont-based field biologist, photographer, and nature writer with a passion for dragonflies, birds, and butterflies.

No amount of air pollution is good for the brain, but wildfires and the emissions resulting from agriculture and farming in particular may pose especially toxic threats to cognitive health, according to U-M researchers in the School of Public Health. Given that the development of dementia could take a long time, researchers hope to provide evidence for policymakers to reduce exposures such emissions.

Discussions of valuable but threatened ocean ecosystems often focus on coral reefs or coastal mangrove forests. Seagrass meadows get a lot less attention, even though they provide wide-ranging services to society and store lots of climate-warming carbon. A new University of Michigan-led study shows that seagrass ecosystems deserve to be at the forefront of the global conservation agenda.

Did you know that over its lifetime, a tree can absorb more than a ton of carbon from the air and store it in wood and roots? Researchers now contend that mosses have the potential to store a massive amount of carbon in the soil beneath them, an important antidote to climate change.

The Extremely Large Telescope (or ELT) could change everything we know about the universe — including how the first galaxies were created and where life on other planets may exist. And U-M is the only U.S. university involved in helping develop it.