The USDA announced Alley Pond Park in Queens, New York City, as the newest addition to the Forest Service's Northern Research Station's "Smart Forest" network, which provides real-time access, at a single point of entry website, to environmental sensor data such as soil temperature and the timing of cyclical changes in trees and plants. https://smartforests.org

Earth
The National Aspergillosis centre in Manchester, England warns that working around rotting organic matter, such as compost heaps and piles of leaves, without respiratory protection can cause a condition that may result in irreparable and sometimes fatal damage to the lungs and sinuses, especially in those who have asthma or a weak immune system. nationalaspergillosiscentre.org.uk

 

Even though the West Coast has already seen El Ni????(R)????o-like storms, the last prediction by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (an updated forecast was scheduled for Jan. 8) put the chance of the event this winter at 65 percent. But at press time, the Australia Bureau of Meteorology called the prospect increasingly likely. Since El Ni????(R)????o is a reoccurring phenomenon, a team of researchers led by the University of Wisconsin's Zhengyu Liu is studying what has influenced El Ni????(R)????os over the last 21,000 years in order to understand its future and to prepare land management professionals for the consequences. elnino.noaa.gov

Water
Researchers from Stanford and the University of Minnesota plan to study the large amounts of available data about the Capital Region watershed in St. Paul, Minn., to determine the best practices in stormwater management so that these practices can be applied to areas where the data is harder to come by. news.stanford.edu

Propane-powered lawn mowers are a tangible option but not so for mowers powered by natural gas, which can be up to one-sixth the cost of propane, but must be stored at much higher pressure; making the tanks to hold natural gas larger and heavier. Scientists, including a team led by Rice bioengineer Michael Deem, are exploring the potential of combining the gas with synthetic molecules so that it can be stored at low pressure and at room temperature. news.rice.edu

Air
Concern is being voiced by the American Lung Association about the air pollution, and accompanying health implications, created by the sizable number of leaf blowers emitting carbon dioxide and stirring up mold and spores. A study showed that gas-powered consumer-grade leaf blowers emit more pollutants than a Ford F-150 truck. www.lung.org

As reported in LC/DBM in March 2014, the development of solar-powered, or rather solar-charged, landscape equipment is in its early stages because of the inefficiency of this technology. But since then, steps forward have been made:

Fire
In most solar cells, an absorbed particle of sunlight creates just one potential free electron that generates electricity. Researchers at the University of Oregon showed how each particle can potentially create multiple packets of energy called excitons, which can generate multiple free electrons resulting in more electrical current. uonews.uoregon.edu

A new technology created by researchers from Caltech advanced the prospect of photovoltaic cells that harness energy that is now being lost because today's cells "can only absorb and use a small fraction" of the sunlight that hits them.

The upper limit for the efficiency of solar cells is reported to be around 33 percent. In a recent study from Lund University in Sweden, researchers used new technology to study extremely fast processes in solar cells, which might raise that limit to over 40 percent, a substantial improvement according to the study's authors. www.lu.se