The forest of today will not be the forests of tomorrow. Rising temperatures, trees being cut down, development and climate-change-caused disasters are changing the very makeup of the Earth’s forests, new research published in Science finds.

Older, bigger trees are being lost at an alarming rate, making the planet’s forests shorter and younger. The change is being driven at different rates by different causes in different places, the study’s authors say, but the consequences will be global.

Old growth forests absorb and store massive amounts of climate-warming CO₂. They provide habitats for rare and endangered species and promote rich biodiversity. Researchers found that the world lost roughly one-third of its old growth forests between 1900 and 2015. In North America and Europe, they found that tree mortality has doubled in the past 40 years.

“Warming temperatures, wildfires, logging and insect outbreaks were among the many causes of the decline,” says Nate McDowell, the study’s lead author. “What’s perhaps more concerning is that the trajectory of all these disturbances is generally increasing over time and is expected to continue increasing in the future.” he says.

McDowell’s focus is on how trees are affected by rising temperatures, arguably the biggest driver of forest change. To get a broader understanding of how forests are changing globally, he brought in more than 20 other researchers in different fields. Together, they examined more than 160 previous studies about tree mortality and its global causes, applying current satellite data and modeling to create a look at the Earth’s changing forests to date.

“It’s not a shock, but it’s very sad,” says Kristina, an ecologist and leader of the ForestGEO Ecosystems &Climate Program who helped with the research. “We as a human society are hitting these forests so rapidly with so many different changes that they can’t keep up.” she says.

The number of fish caught just outside a recently expanded marine (海洋) protected area in Hawaii has risen. It is a sign that quadrupling (四倍) the size of the reserve in 2016 may have shored fish populations in the region.

When the Marine National Monument around Hawaii was enlarged to 1,510,000 square kilometers, marine conservationists around the world rejoiced.

Fishers may have felt differently, however, as fishing inside the area is not allowed. Yet by creating a space for dwindling tuna populations to recover, supporters argued, the reserve would benefit fisheries as well.

As populations inside the reserve boundaries steadily increased, they predicted, the fish would spill (溢出) over into the surrounding areas, increasing the amount of tuna available to catch.

Proving that is tricky, however, as tuna can’t be counted directly. Their numbers may rise or fall for a variety of reasons other than the expansion of a reserve. But the new study, published in Science this week, strongly suggests the number of fish caught just outside the MPA is higher now than it used to be.

Alan Friedlander, chief scientist for the National Geographic Society’s Pristine Seas project, calls the study a “very careful and strict test of spillover from marine protected areas.”

Importantly, says John Lynham, an environmental economist at the University of Hawaii and one of the study’s authors, the increase in tuna catches near the reserve held up even when looking at the average numbers caught by particular fishers. This shows the effect is not due to more effective crews now fishing local waters, he explains. To account for effort, catch numbers were divided by the ever-increasing number of fishing hooks in the area.

Lynham and colleagues found the catch per hook increased over the 10 years of the study. Fishers were catching on average six more yellowfin and five more bigeye tuna per year after the expansion than before.

“That last one, especially, was a surprise,” says Lynham, “because it is economically much more important, and there were fewer indications of an increase.”

Racket, din clamor, noise, whatever you want to call it, unwanted sound is America’s most widespread nuisance. But noise is more than just a nuisance. It constitutes a real and present danger to people’s health. Day and night, at home, at work, and at play, noise can produce serious physical and psychological stress. No one is immune to this stress. Though we seem to adjust to noise by ignoring it, the ear, in fact, never closes and the body still responds—sometimes with extreme tension, as to a strange sound in the night.

The annoyance we feel when faced with noise is the most common outward symptom of the stress building up inside us. Indeed, because irritability is so apparent, legislators have made public annoyance the basis of many noise abatement programs. The more subtle and more serious health hazards associated with stress caused by noise traditionally have been given much less attention. Nevertheless, when we are annoyed or made irritable by noise, we should consider these symptoms fair warning that other thing may be happening to us, some of which may be damaging to our health.

Of many health hazards to noise, hearing loss is the most clearly observable and measurable by health professionals. The other hazards are harder to pin down. For many of us, there may be a risk that exposure to the stress of noise increases probability of disease and infection. The people more likely to be affected may experience noise as a complicating factor in heart problems and other diseases. Noise that causes annoyance and irritability in health persons may have serious consequences for these already ill in mind or body.

Noise affects us throughout our lives. For example, there are indications of effects on the unborn child when mothers are exposed to industrial and environmental noise. During infancy and childhood, youngsters exposed to high noise levels may have trouble falling asleep and obtaining necessary amounts of rest.

Why, then, is there not greater alarm about these dangers? Perhaps it is because the link between noise and many disabilities or diseases has not yet been conclusively demonstrated. Perhaps it is because we tend to dismiss annoyance as a price to pay for living in the modern world. It may also be because we still think of hearing loss as only an occupational hazard.