Scientists around the world have been studying the warming of waters in the Pacific Ocean known as El Nino(厄尔尼诺). The appearance of El Nino is known to affect the weather around the world. Scientists still do not completely understand it. Yet they now find they can use it to tell about the future in different areas of the world.

One example is the work of two scientists at Columbia University in New York, Mark Cane and Gordon Eshel. A scientist of Zimbabwe, Roger Buckland worked with them. They have found that when El Nino appears, Zimbabwe has little or no rain. This means corn crops in Zimbabwe are poor. The last El Nino was in 1991 to 1993. That was when southeastern Africa suffered a serious lack of rain.

The scientists wrote about their recent work in the publication Nature. Their computer program can tell when an El Nino will develop up to a year before it does. They suggest that this could provide an effective early warning system for southern Africa, and could prevent many people from starving.

The idea that humans are facing a global extinction of experience of nature is popular, but is it true? To give more light on this issue, the scientists measured how the average distance from an individual’s home to the nearest area with low human impact changed in the last decade.

The scientists found that humans currently live 9.7 kilometers away from a natural area on average, which is 7% further away than in the year 2000. Europe and East Asia have the highest average distance to natural areas, such as 22 kilometers in Germany and 16 kilometers in France. The scientists also showed that tree cover within cities has declined worldwide since 2000, suggesting that the possibility for the urban population to access green spaces is reducing as well.

The scientists also systematically searched for scientific publications assessing a trend in experiences of nature, finding that the number of studies assessing these trends was very low (the number is 18), most of which are about the US, Europe and Japan. This shows that more studies should investigate the claim about the extinction of nature experience, especially in Africa and Latin America. The 18 studies found by the scientists show a decline in visits to nature parks in the US and Japan, a decrease in camping activities in the US, and a decrease in the number of flower species observed by Japanese children. They also find signs of decline in the use of natural elements in novels, songs and cartoons.

Despite these examples of decline, other interactions are increasing. Watching wildlife documentaries or interacting with wild animals in videogames is, for example, more common than a few years ago. “New ways of digitally interacting with nature have certainly emerged or increased in recent years,” says Dr Gladys Barragan-Jason. “But several former studies show that these vicarious interactions have a lesser effect on our sense of connection with nature than exposure to nature, such as visiting nature parks.”

For animals that spend most of their lives high in the trees, gaps (缺口) in the forest might as well be the Grand Canyon (大峡谷). These gaps are especially hard on gibbons, a kind of monkey-like animals with long arms; although larger males can jump across some gaps, females and young can be cut off from food, companions, and even potential mates. Now, a new study suggests a couple of strong ropes could really help bridge the gap.

Gibbons are at risk of dying out across Southeast Asia, largely because of habitat loss. With just 30 individuals (个体) left, the Hainan gibbon is considered the rarest primate (灵长目动物) on Earth. All of these animals live on the Bawangling National Nature Reserve in Hainan, an island province in southern China. In July 2014, a typhoon caused landslides across the reserve, creating gaps in the forest canopy (树冠) that were difficult for these primates to cross.

To help reconnect the habitats, professional tree climbers set up an artificial “bridge” across a 15-meter-wide narrow valley, made of two mountaineering-grade ropes. Nearly 6 months later, the gibbons started to use the bridge to cross the gaps, researchers report today in Scientific Reports. The team documented 52 crossings in a group of eight gibbons, with most walking along one rope while holding on to the second rope for support, which the scientists named “handrailing”. The gibbons also shimmied beneath the ropes using all arms and legs to the opposite side.

Conservationists previously built artificial bridges to help other treebound animal species such as the Bornean orangutan and the Javan slow loris. But this is the first example of the rare Hainan gibbon using them. The rope bridges could be a short-term solution (解决办法) to reconnect separated habitats, the researchers argue, combined with efforts to provide enough natural forest cover.