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  The University of Notre Dame will become the new home base of the Global Adaptation Index, a tool showing which countries are best prepared to deal with droughts, storms and other natural disasters that may be caused by climate change. Known as GAIN, the index ranks countries annually based on how...

  The Global Adaptation Index (GAIN)—the world’s leading Index showing which countries are best prepared to deal with the droughts, super-storms and other natural disasters that climate change can cause—is moving to the University of Notre Dame. GAIN, which ranks countries annually based on how vulnerable they are to climate change and how...

  Nitesh Chawla, lead on ECI's Transportation Networks program and co-lead on the Climate Change Adaptation program, co-authored a book on data analysis for sustainable development. The book presents powerful techniques from mathematical optimization, data mining, machine learning, knowledge discovery, etc. and also explains how these methods collect and analyze large quantities...

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  Jessica Hellmann, associate professor of biological sciences, accepted an invitation to become an associate editor for the ecology domain in the journal, Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene. Elementa is a new, nonprofit, open access journal that was developed based on the concept that basic knowledge can foster sustainable solutions for society.

    The University of Notre Dame will host “Climate Change and the Common Good,” a national conference addressing the multifaceted challenges presented by our changing climate, on April 8-10 (Monday-Wednesday). The event will engage nationally recognized scientists, ethicists and strategists in conversation with students, faculty, administrators and members of...

  A new study shows immense increases in shipping are likely over the North Pole and Arctic Ocean in the coming years, alerting scientists who study invasive species. “Invasive species are one of those things that once the genie is out of the bottle, it’s hard to put her back in,”...

Tundra fires are important because they have the potential to switch regions from being climate-cooling – thanks to their reflective white surface – to climate-warming. With this in mind, Adrian Rocha at the University of Notre Dame, US, and colleagues have sought to estimate how the carbon footprint of Alaskan...

Bringing her latest research into the classroom, Debra Javeline, associate professor in the University of Notre Dame’s Department of Political Science, is helping undergraduate students make a connection between politics and biology. Javeline’s new course, “The Politics of Adapting to Climate Change,” was born of the work she is doing...

Ten University of Notre Dame faculty members have been named fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in honor of their efforts toward advancing science applications that are deemed scientifically or socially distinguished. AAAS, founded in 1848 as a nonprofit association, is the world’s largest scientific...

As global temperatures rise, urban areas are facing challenges in keeping their infrastructure and their residents cool. Chicago is tackling that problem with a green design makeover. This report is part of the PBS NewsHour Coping with Climate Change series. Dr. Joseph Fernando, investigator on the ECI Climate Change Adaptation...

The traditional Irish Blessing as interpreted by Notre Dame faculty, students and alumni across the globe. …

Managed relocation—the act of purposely relocating a threatened species, population, or genotype to an area that is foreign to its natural history—is a controversial response to the threat of extinction resulting from climate change. An article in the August 2012 issue of BioScience by Mark W. Schwartz and his colleagues...

Hellmann says she thinks it is unfortunate that climate change has become politicized. Regardless of political orientation, we all inhabit the same planet.

LiveScience's ScienceLives article featuring Jessica Hellmann, University of Notre Dame.

Conservation biologist Jessica Hellman studies the effects of climate change at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. She was inspired by her one-year fellowship from the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program in Stanford, California to do something that few scientific laboratories do — create a mission and vision statement for...

Editor's Note: The following is an edited and expanded excerpt from Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World by Emma Marris. Copyright  © 2011 Emma Marris.

In a recent submission to Planet Forward, Jessica Hellmann discussed her efforts to encourage "assisted migration" in some bug populations threatened by the rapidly changing climate. Hellmann constructed climate-controlled biospheres in a laboratory environment -- a test tube planet, with chambers representing everything from deserts to marshes and temperate forests....

NBC's Changing Planet ran a report on the adaptation of butterflies due to climate change. Watch the six minute segment below or see the original story at on NBC's website. …

Jessica Hellmann, associate professor of biological sciences and a national authority on climate change adaptation at the University of Notre Dame, has been named a Leopold Leadership Fellow. The Leopold Leadership Program is the nation’s premier competitive fellowship for outstanding environmental scientists who are also actively engaged in outreach to...

Pitcher’s thistle, whose fuzzy leaves and creamy pink puffs once thrived in the sand dunes along several of the Great Lakes, was driven by development, drought and weevils into virtual extinction from the shores of Lake Michigan decades ago. But in the 1990s, seeds collected from different parts of the...

After three decades of warming not seen in more than 1,000 years, spring arrives earlier around the world. As species shift their ranges toward the cooler poles or higher elevations, the season brings unexpected arrivals of migrating birds and mistimed hatchings of insects and flowerings of trees.