1 . Researcher Ruijia Hu said wildlife habitat in crowded places like south went Ohio is becoming increasingly fragmented (分散) as forests give way to new construction. Eventually, this could make trouble to an animal with specific habitat needs like Ohio’s pileated (红冠) woodpecker.

Pileated woodpeckers have the nickname carpenter birds for their never-ending natural woodworking. They peck out holes in trees for their nests every year, creating lots of valuable homes for animals like fox squirrels and owls. “They make new nests every year. They won’t reuse old ones,” Hu said. “Other animals depend on them.”

Pileated woodpeckers are private birds that are more often heard than seen. Studying them can be especially difficult. So Hu turned to citizen science for help. To identify where woodpeckers have been seen, she used eight years of sightings collected by birders and logged into the website eBird, a free online tool and app that anyone can use to record their observations and locations. She overlaid these sightings with remote sensing data and found that corridors along rivers and creeks with abundant mature trees and deadwood helped the birds adjust to their increasingly fragmented urban landscape.

“With fragmented forests, many habitats that were once suitable for wildlife are broken up,” Hu sa id. “Wildlife is unable to find habitat big enough to meet their survival needs. And even if there are suitable habitats, the distance between them can be too great. Wildlife corridors link up these habitat patches. Since wildlife can travel and migrate from one patch to another, the probability of finding food and shelter is higher.”

“There are so many species in urban areas that we don’t pay attention to, especially when they’re not considered vulnerable,” Hu said. “With development chipping away at more forest in this crowded county, the tipping point (临界点) could come quickly and unexpectedly. You can’t fix it overnight. It’s not just about planting more trees. The birds need mature forest, so it could take 30 to 50 years to replace their habitat. At least we can protect these riverside forest corridors and see that existing trees reach maturity.”

2 . Tima Abudhi is a 55-year-old mother of five. When growing up, she remembers watching her neighbors _________ at the mangrove forests (红树林) around her village on Pate Island, on Kenya’s east coast, to build houses or to sell as wood.

As the mangroves _________, so did the fish that live among their roots --- a _________ for the fishing village of Kizingitini. The threat to their livelihoods and homes _________ Abudhi and other women to start replanting the mangroves, often spending all day at the _________, taking time away from caring for their families and _________ their small businesses. Protecting the mangroves over the past few decades has _________ their incomes, but they felt it was a matter of urgency, Abudhi said.

“Replanting the mangroves is not _________. We have to go early in the morning to get the seedlings (幼苗) and then come to the beach and plant them until evening, just before the tides _________ again. We couldn't make __________ time for our businesses,” she said.

Today, the women of Kizingitini no longer have to __________ to both make a living and conserve the mangroves, thanks to a loan scheme that helps them keep food on the table so they can __________ to continue planting. “This has led to increased __________ of women in conservation and community development, as well as reduced __________ inequality,” said Abudhi.

Mangrove forests can __________ flooding and are considered key to controlling climate change and protecting people against warming-linked disasters.

3 . In 2013, my husband Robin took a new job in Ghana. We relocated from London, where I worked as a photographer, to the capital, Accra.Robin worked,but my visa didn’t permit me to, and I was left homesick and lacking_______.With few people around, I turned to_______.I photographed horses and considered the outdoors the place where I felt most_______.

In September 2018,after one bad thunderstorm,I found a bird,barely a month old,on the ground. He was_______by his flock(群).His eyes were shut, too young to_______alone. I placed him in a cardboard box and stayed up all night, researching how to_______him.I spoke to an expert who said it would take 12 weeks to prepare him for the_______.

For the next 84 days, the_______bird lived on me. He would fly alongside me. As he learned to fly, he’d make short_______from my hand, to my shoulder, and then settled on my hair.I________ named him because I had to________myself that he needed to return to the wild. In return for putting his life back on course, he________me by giving me purpose. Three months later, he was ________ enough and flying farther from me. It was time for him to go. Then on a clear day when his flock returned,Robin and I took him out and the little bird flew away with them.

________him taught me how to live in the present. Last year,I joined local conservation efforts. That, along with the________that any little creature can make a difference, is what he left me.

5 . While it throws out about 90 pounds of food per person every year, Japan doesn’t rank at the top of the world’s list of wasteful nations. Still, what’s thrown away represents a serious problem for an island nation with limited landfill space and a goal of greater sustainability. Reinvention can offer an alternative. A Japanese company is taking vegetable peels, cooking oil and other used foodstuffs and making entirely different products.

Concrete is the most widely used construction material in the world, and its key element, cement, is a major polluter of greenhouse emissions. So what if a more sustainable alterative were possible by making cement with food waste, which also would help reduce greenhouse emissions from landfills where that waste would otherwise be thrown away? That’s the idea behind Fabula, a Tokyo-based start-up.

Researchers at Fabula created a recipe to make food concrete by drying leftovers and pressing them into a mold (模具) at a high temperature. The company, founded by researchers at the University of Tokyo, began with items commonly thrown away like cabbage and orange peels but found that almost any food item can be used. It now takes mostly coffee grounds and tea leaves to make its cement. The product’s durability depends on the components.

Fabula is currently producing made-to-order household items, such as coasters and dishes, while awaiting its patent. The goal is to make furniture and larger structures once the technology is able to make the cement more durable. Food production companies that can’t avoid generating waste during their processes have reached out to work with the company. “We hope to become a matching service between companies that have food waste and companies who want to build things out of such materials,” said Takuma Oishi, Fabula’s chief commercial officer.

Since the cement is 100 percent eatable, it could create opportunities during disaster response when temporary structures need to be built quickly. The people inside might even turn to them for food. If the technology advances enough, Oishi suggested, someday we may be able “to eat the homes or furniture when necessary”.

9 . As the world seeks to slow the pace of climate change and preserve wildlife, trees undoubtedly hold a major part of the answer. Yet the mass destruction of trees--deforestation-continues, sacrificing （牺牲）the long-term benefits of standing trees for short-term gain.

    1    Since humans started cutting down forests, 46 percent of trees have been logged. About 17 percent of the Amazonian rainforest has been destroyed over the past 50 years, and losses recently have been on the rise.

So, what are the factors leading to deforestation? Farming, animal raising, mining, and drilling combined account for more than half of all deforestation.    2    Plus logging operations, which provide the world^? s wood and paper products, cut down countless trees each year. Some loggers acting illegally even build roads to access more and more remote forests--which leads to further deforestation.

    3    Some 250 million people living in forests depend on them for survival and income—many of them among the world's rural poor. Eighty percent of Earth's land animals live in forests and deforestation threatens many species.    4    The South American rainforest, for example, influences regional and perhaps even global water cycles, which is key to the water supply in Brazilian cities and neighboring countries.

Luckily, a movement is under way to preserve existing forest ecosystems and restore lost tree cover. Organizations and activists are working to fight illegal mining and logging. As consumers, it makes sense to look for sustainably produced sources.     5    

10 . The rechargeable lithium-ion (锂离子) battery market is worth more than ＄50 billion. Lithium-ion batteries, whose demand continues to go up day by day, are used in a wide range of electronic devices. They are made of four main components, and cathode (阴极) is one of them. The cathode’s active material type is what determines the capacity of a battery.

A recent study, led by Wang Yan, a material scientist of Worcester Polytechnic Institute, finds that lithium-ion batteries made with recycled cathodes work better than those with new cathodes.

“The battery industry is expected to grow sharply in the next decade. This high demand has led companies to go to extremes, like increasing deep-sea mining, to gain access to the minerals used in lithium-ion batteries,” Wang said. “Mining minerals will have environmental impacts. Recycling spent lithium-ion batteries offers a way out.”

But until now, the prospect of using recycled materials in lithium-ion batteries has some manufacturers (制造商) worrying that it could impact performance. Thus, lithium-ion batteries are still not widely recycled. Aware of decreasing resources and environmental impact, Wang and other researchers set out to find a way to make recycling lithium-ion batteries economically practical. Through experiments, they could recover more than 90% of the key metals from spent batteries. These recovered metals became the basis of the new recycled battery’s cathode’s active material.

In tests between Wang’s team’s recycled batteries and brand-new batteries of the same composition, the recycled batteries outperform the new ones in their ability to maintain capacity. It took 11,600 charge cycles for recycled cathode batteries to lose 30 percent of their original capacity. That was about 50 percent better than the 7,600 observed cycles for new cathode batteries, the team reported. Those thousands of extra cycles could translate into years of better battery performance, even after repeated use and recharging.