Planet Earth online
Planet Earth online is the free, companion website to the award-winning
magazine Planet Earth published and funded by the Natural Environment Research Council
(NERC). You can subscribe to the quarterly magazine online, or browse through
all of the stories on this website.
Planet Earth covers news from across the environmental sciences - whether
research is funded directly by NERC or is carried out by NERC's research and collaborative centres.
It also covers the work of partner organisations, such as through
the £1bn "Living with Environmental Change" programme.
Contributing to Planet Earth online
All articles are commissioned by the editor. We are interested in your ideas but please do not send unsolicited articles. Discuss them with the editor first.
For more information or if you would like to contribute or have a story please contact us.
Accessibility
We have aimed to make Planet Earth online easy to use and as compliant with current accessibility recommendations as is practicable.
Your browser can be set to resize the text - please refer to the browser software's help pages for instructions.
We use Cascading Style Sheets for design. Your browser may allow you to turn off our style sheets, or apply one of your own.
Access keys
We have followed Government guidelines in adopting some of the Cabinet Office's standard list of access keys:
S - skip to main content
1 - home page
4 - search
9 - contact us/feedback
JavaScript
Planet Earth online requires your browser to have JavaScript enabled if it is to offer you the full range of features. If JavaScript is disabled (or you're using a browsing device that doesn't support JavaScript) you will not be able to view videos, listen to podcasts, apply filters or move through pages of information, although the eight most recent stories in each section will still be available to you.
Reporting problems
If you have any difficulty viewing the content of this site we would really appreciate it if you can send us details of the problem so we can try to address it. Please contact us via our feedback form.
Privacy policy
Cookies
When you visit our website we want to make the experience straight forward, useful and reliable. To deliver this effectively this sometimes involves placing small amounts of information on your device. These include small files known as cookies. They cannot be used to identify you personally.
Cookies allow you to personalise web pages, log in to certain areas of a web site, monitor the pages you visit or enable/disable certain application features.
You can manage these small files yourself and learn more about them through:
Internet browser cookies - what they are and how to manage them
Most browsers allow you to turn off the cookie function so that web sites cannot store any information on your computer. This will restrict the functionality Planet Earth online can offer.
Our use of cookies
Cookie for highlighting new content
We use a cookie to store your last visited date so we can highlight any content added since.
| Name | Content | Expires |
| LastVisit | Date and time of current and last visit as well as the session Id you were using | 1 Year |
Cookies for improving service
We use tracking information mainly to see which browser types and operating systems people are using to access Planet Earth online. This enables us to create an application that works with many different browsers, improving the service we can offer.
| Name |
Content |
Expires |
| _utma | Randomly generated number | 2 years |
| _utmb | Randomly generated number | 30 minutes |
| _utmc | Randomly generated number | when user exits browser |
| _utmz | Randomly generated number and info on how the site was reached
(e.g. directly or via a link, organic search or paid search) | 6 months |
More details on these cookies can be found on the Google Code pages.
Cookie for user settings
This website is written using an application framework called Microsoft ASP.NET. This uses a cookie to record user actions, such as table sorting, as you navigate the website.
| Name |
Content |
Expires |
| ASP.NET_SessionId | Randomly generated number | when user exits browser |
For further details on the cookies set by Microsoft ASP.NET, please refer to the Microsoft Website.
