Public parks and the pandemic: How park usage has been affected by COVID-19 policies.

Public parks serve an important societal function as recreational spaces for diverse communities of people, with well documented physical and mental health benefits. As such, parks may be crucial for how people have handled effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly the increasingly limited recreational opportunities, widespread financial uncertainty, and consequent heightened anxiety. Despite the documented benefits of parks, however, many states have instituted park shutdown orders due to fears that public parks could facilitate SARS-CoV-2 transmission.

Conservation value of small reserves.

The importance of large reserves has been long maintained in the scientific literature, often leading to dismissal of the conservation potential of small reserves. However, over half the global protected-area inventory is composed of protected areas that are <100 ha, and the median size of added protected area is decreasing. Studies of the conservation value of small reserves and fragments of natural area are relatively uncommon in the literature.

The interaction of temperature and precipitation determines productivity and diversity in a bunchgrass prairie ecosystem.

Over the past century at the National Bison Range, temperature has increased by 0.6 °C, and annual precipitation has decreased by 26%, despite increases in May-June precipitation over the past 35 years. Limited experimental work to date has explored plant responses produced by the interaction of changes in both temperature and precipitation, and of the existing studies, none have focused on the endangered bunchgrass ecosystem.