The Latest Breaking News from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada

Our ability to predict extreme weather from thunderstorms, like the recent catastrophic flash floods in Texas, is unsettlingly poor, even in the hours leading up to the event. Improvements in understanding, detecting and predicting extreme thunderstorms — and increasing community resilience to them — are badly needed.

More than a decade since the start of the longest ocean warming event ever recorded, scientists are still working to understand the extent of its impacts. This unprecedented heat wave, nicknamed “The Blob,” stretched thousands of kilometres over North America’s western coastal waters, affecting everything from the smallest plankton to…

For more than six months a year, Quebec’s boreal forest is covered in a thick blanket of snow. While this is essential for the balance of our ecosystems, for the people living downstream from forested watersheds the snow can be like a sword of Damocles hanging over their heads.

Forests and other natural carbon reservoirs play an important role in slowing and potentially reversing the effects of climate change.

Hotter summers, drier forests, rising waters: climate change is not just a threat to our future, it’s hurting our world right now.

Wetlands across the globe have long served as natural repositories for humanity’s toxic legacy, absorbing and retaining hundreds to thousands of years’ worth of pollution.

The word “zoo” is complicated and can have different meanings to different people. For some, a zoo is an organization committed to animal well-being and wildlife conservation that offers its visitors a fun and educational experience. To others, it is a place where people pay to see exotic animals in…

The log drive is an integral part of Québec culture. Specifically, log driving refers to the use of waterways to float and transport logs from harvesting sites to sawmills or ports where they are exported.

While it is true that individual trees are immobile, as a species they can actually move and migrate as well as birds do! However, this takes place over a much different time frame.