Nature edits

Just for the record, here are some more great pieces in Nature that I edited this year...

Rewilding Argentina: how to bring jaguars and capabaras back to the jungle, and get tourists to pay for it. (March)

Cement and Steel: nine steps to zero   This piece lays out the best ways to whittle down emissions from some of our dirtiest (and most vital) industries. (March)

Make units of measure 'machine readable'. Amusingly, many scientists use sloppy units of measure, such as calling 'kilocalories' just 'calories' for short, or using the same letter (m) to mean two different things. How are computers meant to make sense of this? Some researchers are now intent on sorting this out. (May)

Floating solar power could help fight climate change — let’s get it right Are we running out of room to put solar panels, and are reservoirs the best spot to put them? Maybe. But more research is needed on the environmental side-effects. (June)

Scaling up small fisheries: better for people and the planet. (June)

Time to end coal: different regions will need different incentives to move away from coal for good. (July)

Huge volcanic eruptions: time to prepare. The probability of a massive, magnitude 7 or greater volcanic eruption this century is 1 in 6: a roll of the dice, and much greater than the chance of an asteroid smacking the planet. What should we be doing to prepare? (August)

Avert Bangladesh's water crisis with open science and better data. Many countries are running dry because of heavy aquifer pumping by agriculture. Bangladesh faces additional problems from natural arsenic and sea level rise. What can be done? (October)

Make 'aerosol aware' climate models. Global climate models include measures of aerosols (black soot and other air pollutants), showing that the planet would be 0.5C warmer today if not for their presence in the air thus far. But aerosol emission levels are changing fast, and local models often fail to account for them. That could vastly underestimate the risks of flooding in places like Pakistan. (November)

Biodiversity loss and climate extremes: there are more links between these than you think. A degraded forest is more likely to die during drought; wildfire aerosols can change the climate; stressed plants are less good at taking ozone from the air...  mapping out these links is an important part of predicting our future. (November)