"Two areas of Alaska's Cook Inlet will be designated as critical habitat for the endangered Cook Inlet beluga whale, NOAA's Fisheries Service, Alaska Regional Office announced [April 8]."

"A federal judge on Saturday rejected a plan negotiated between the government and wildlife advocates to remove most wolves in the Northern Rockies from the Endangered Species List."

"A lot of dead dolphins continue to wash ashore along the Gulf Coast and now a lot of sea turtles — most of them rare Kemp's ridleys — are washing up dead too, federal officials said Thursday."

"Two years ago some University of South Florida researchers began studying the effects of the most widely used fungicide in the country to see if it might kill more than just fungus. Turns out it's also a pretty effective frog-icide."

Questions are mounting about the possible role of a new family of pesticides, the neonicotinoides, in the "colony collapse disorder" that is decimating commercial honeybees. Will EPA reconsider its approval of those pesticides?

"Last year's record-breaking drought across the Amazon Basin has turned nearly a million square miles of green rainforest to brown, finds a new mapping study based on NASA satellite data."

"Ants and termites have a significant positive impact on crop yields in dryland agriculture, according to a paper published in the journal 'Nature Communications' by scientists at CSIRO and the University of Sydney."

"There's nothing new about studying animal sounds; ...  But Bryan Pijanowski is now asking his colleagues to take a huge step back and, metaphorically speaking, listen not just to the trees, but to the forest."

"Vegetation change underway in northern forests as a result of climate change creates feedback loop that prompts more warming, scientists say."

"A Naval training exercise that included an underwater blast off San Diego's coast has been linked to at least three dolphin deaths earlier this month, prompting a probe into whether the military violated the federal law that protects marine mammals."