The world is losing trees faster than ever. An area the size of Italy disappeared last year. Or did it? New research suggests three-quarters of those lost forests may already be regrowing. That hardly means we are out of the woods. Fighting climate change and protecting biodiversity still needs a global campaign to reforest the planet. But it does suggest that, given the chance, nature will do much of the work.

Over the course of a month, we’ve seen tropical cyclone activity in the Atlantic basin heat up quite a bit – most notably with the landfall of Hurricane Florence, which dumped historic amounts of rain on portions of the Carolinas.

The floodwaters that covered wide swaths of the Carolinas’ coastal plain are finally receding, more than two weeks after Hurricane Florence made landfall Sept. 14 near Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, and U.S. Geological Survey hydrographers are moving in rapidly to the areas where the flooding lingered longest.

Hurricane Sergio continued to look impressive on satellite imagery when NOAA’s GOES-West satellite viewed the storm in infrared light.

The Global Precipitation Measurement mission or GPM core satellite passed over Tropical Storm Kong-Rey and analyzed the rates in which rain was falling throughout the storm.

NASA’s Aqua satellite passed over the Central Atlantic Ocean and obtained infrared data on Leslie, now weakened to a large tropical storm.

Alaska’s land mass is equal to the size of one-fifth of the continental United States, yet stores about half of the country’s terrestrial – both upland and wetland –  carbon stores and fluxes. The carbon is not only stored in vegetation and soil, but also in vital freshwater ecosystems even though lakes and ponds, rivers, streams, and springs only cover a small amount of landmass in Alaska.

Species-rich subtropical forests can take up, on average, twice as much carbon as monocultures. This has been reported by an international research team in the professional journal SCIENCE. The study was carried out as part of a unique field experiment conducted under the direction of Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU), the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The experiment comprises forests grown specifically for this purpose in China; for the study, data from experimental plots with a total of over 150,000 trees were analysed. The researchers believe that the results speak in favour of using many different tree species during reforestation. Thus, both species conservation and climate protection can be promoted.

NASA’s IMERG combines data from many satellites to provide a look at rainfall occurring around the world. Those rainfall data were combined with visible imagery from NASA-NOAA’s Suomi NPP satellite to create a composite or fuller picture of Kong- Rey in the Northwestern Pacific Ocean as it weakened to a tropical storm.

NASA’s Terra satellite analyzed Hurricane Walaka in infrared light as continued to lash the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument in the Central Pacific Ocean.