Sustainable Communities Program at NAU

No one expects to see trees that look like jewels in the high desert of Arizona. But that’s exactly what visitors find in the Petrified Forest National Park – ancient logs preserved for millennia by a process that transfigured them into rare and beautiful stones.

The mighty saguaro cactus is both a cultural and ecological icon.

If you find a bird feather – how can you tell which species it belongs to? An ornithologist in the Forensic Laboratory at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service pondered this question.

CO₂ levels topped a record high of 430 ppm in May. It’s bad news for ecosystems, but could mean wetter summers for some regions.

Rain comes when water molecules in the atmosphere clump together to form ice crystals or water droplets that are heavy enough to fall to the ground. But what causes that clumping to happen?

Across the vast landscapes of the Colorado Plateau, one resilient plant has profoundly shaped people and land for many centuries: Indian ricegrass.

Loggers worked nonstop during the Great Depression. One of the longest-standing logging communities was a place called Apex along the Grand Canyon Railway, north of Williams and near the Canyon’s South Rim.

A cactus no bigger than a paperclip grows across the rocky eastern slopes of the Kaibab Plateau. Its thin, long spines protrude from its rotund body like a plump hedgehog.

The Suckley’s cuckoo bumble bee has a unique life cycle. Like cuckoo birds, they lay their eggs in the nests of other species instead of rearing their own young.

Monarch Butterflies fly thousands of miles every year between their southern overwintering grounds as far north as Canada and back.