Nature provides many benefits for human health. However, they also harbour zoonoses, diseases that usually circulate in animals and may be transmitted to humans. Many tick-borne pathogens, such as the causative agent of Lyme borreliosis, are transmitted by the bite of an infected tick.

Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) are soil microorganisms that establish symbiosis with more than 72% of land plants and have been reported to increase the production of bioactive compounds in various medicinal plants.

The summer Arctic sea ice is projected to disappear completely by the middle of the century in response to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, according to simulations conducted with the latest global climate models. The decrease in summer Arctic sea ice extent is marked by periods of rapid ice loss, which are expected to become more frequent in the coming decades.

The role of land use change on global climate has generally been linked to biogeochemistry, as terrestrial ecosystems are the most uncertain part of the global carbon budget. Land restoration and afforestation to sequester carbon has also received much attention recently as possible natural-based solutions to global warming. Yet, changing our use of the land has consequences beyond carbon.

Dr. Essam Heggy is a Planetary Scientist at the Viterbi School of Engineering in the University of Southern California and a ROSETTA Co-Investigator at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Heggy’s research interests in space and planetary geophysics aim to understand water and ice distributions in Earth's arid regions, Mars, the Moon, icy satellites, and near-Earth objects.