Virginia Tech

The land of forest-covered hills, mountain music and coal has a lesson for restoration: healthy forests require healthy soils. The forests of Appalachia, a region that extends from southern New York to Georgia, are considered to be among the most diverse temperate deciduous forests in the world...

April 22 marks the 45 th celebration of Earth Day, with its theme of “It’s our turn to lead.” The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) is a leader in its support of cutting-edge sustainable and organic agricultural research. The USDA estimated that 31...

Happy Poinsettia Day! Of the countless iconic holiday season images in American homes, perhaps the most popular and colorful of them started off as a humble bush from our neighbors to the south. The poinsettia was introduced to this country in the late 1820s by Joel Poinsett, the first American...

The shiny green one-half-inch-long, one-eighth-inch-wide emerald ash borer has destroyed tens of millions of ash trees in the U.S. since the beetle’s discovery in 2002 in Detroit. The real Ash trees comprise around seven percent of the trees in eastern U.S. forests. In urban areas, ash trees make up...

While many tuned in to watch the World Cup to see which team would become the globe’s soccer champs, others watched a competition of a different kind: one that named the earth’s best identifiers of slices of earth. College students from the United States competed with teams from nine other countries...