Nicknamed the “Earth’s lungs” for its dense oxygen producing forests, the Amazon can absorb 132 billion tons of the planet’s carbon. However, more than 30,000 square miles of the Amazon have been lost since the 1970s. Deforestation, clearing land for agriculture, and climate change fueled wildfires have severely taken its toll on the region, where about 10,000 acres of forest (almost the size of California) has been destroyed every day since 1988. 

However, there is still time to save it—and now scientists may have a “secret weapon” that could not only help reforest the Amazon, but other depleted forests around the world. And it comes from soil deep in the region’s past.

[Related: Brazil’s presidential election is a win for the Amazon—and the planet.]

From roughly 450 BCE and 950 CE, the people living along today’s Amazonia transformed the originally poor soil over many human generations. The soils were enriched with charcoal from low-intensity fires for cooking and burning refuse, animal bones, broken pottery, compost, and manure. The fertile result of these processes is Amazonian dark earth (ADE), or terra preta. The exceptionally fertile black soil is rich in nutrients and stable organic matter derived from charcoal. According to a study published May 5 in the journal Frontiers in Soil Science, it now may help reforest the same area where it was created. 

“Here we show that the use of ADEs can enhance the growth of pasture and trees due  to their high levels of nutrients, as well as to the presence of beneficial bacteria and archaea in the soil microbial community,” co-author Luís Felipe Zagatto, a graduate student at the Center for Nuclear Energy in Agriculture at São Paulo University in Brazil said in a statement. “This means that knowledge of the ‘ingredients’ that make ADEs so very fertile could be applied to help speed up ecological restoration projects.”

The team’s primary aim was to study how ADEs, or ultimately soils with a microbiome that has been artificially composed to imitate them, could boost reforestation. To do this, they conducted controlled experiments in a lab to mimic the ecological succession that happens in the soil when pasture in deforested areas is actively restored to its forest state. 

They sampled ADE from the Caldeirão Experimental Research Station in the Brazilian state of Amazonas. The control soil in the experiments was from the Luiz de Queiróz Superior School of Agriculture in the state of São Paulo. They filled 36 pots with about 6.6 pounds of soil inside a greenhouse with an average temperature of 94ºF to anticipate global warming beyond current average temperatures in Amazonia (between 71 and 82ºF).

One third of the pots only received the control soil, while another third received a 4 to 1 mixture of the control soil and ADE, and the final third has 100 percent ADE. They planted seeds of palisade grass, a common forage for Brazilian livestock, to imitate pasture. The seedlings were allowed to grow for 60 days before the grass was cut so that only the roots remained in the soil. 

Each of the three soils were then replanted with tree seeds of either a colonizing species called Ambay pumpwood, Peltophorum dubium, or with cedro blanco.

[Related: The Amazon is on the brink of a climate change tipping point.]

The seeds were allowed to germinate and then grow for 90 days and then the team measured their height, dry mass, and extension of the roots. They also quantified the changes in the soil’s pH, microbial diversity, texture, and concentration of organic matter–potassium, calcium, magnesium, aluminum, sulfur, boron, copper, iron, and zinc–over the course of the experiment. 

At the beginning, ADEs showed greater amounts of nutrients than control soil, roughly 30 times more phosphorus and three to five times more of each of the other measured nutrients, except manganese. The ADE also had a higher pH and had more sand and silt in it, but less clay. 

Following the experiment, the control soils contained less nutrients than they had at the start, which reflects take-up by the plants. However, the 100 percent ADE soils remained richer than control soils, while nutrient levels were intermediate in the 20 percent ADE soils.

The 20 percent and 100 percent ADE soils also supported a greater biodiversity of both  bacteria and archaea than control soils.

“Microbes transform chemical soil particles into nutrients that can be taken up by plants. Our data showed that ADE contains microorganisms that are better at this transformation of soils, thus providing more resources for plant development,” co-author and University of São Paulo molecular biologist Anderson Santos de Freitas said in a statement.  “For example, ADE soils contained more beneficial taxa of the bacterial families Paenibacillaceae, Planococcaceae, Micromonosporaceae, and Hyphomicroblaceae.”

Additionally, adding ADE to soil improved the growth and development of plants. The dry mass of palisade grass was increased 3.4 times in the 20 percent ADE soil and 8.1 times in 100 percent ADE compared to in control soil. 

These results were enough to convince the team that ADE can boost plant growth, but it does come with some caution. 

“ADE has taken thousands of years to accumulate and would take an equal time to regenerate in nature if used,” co-author and  University of São Paulo molecular biologist Siu Mui Tsai said in a statement. “Our recommendations aren’t to utilize ADE itself, but rather to copy its characteristics, particularly its microorganisms, for use in future ecological restoration projects.”

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This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Driving north on state Highway 66 through the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in central Montana, it’s easy to miss a small herd of bison lounging just off the road behind an 8-foot fence. Each winter, heavy snows drive bison out of Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park – the only place in the U.S. where they have lived continuously since prehistoric times – and into Montana, where they are either killed or shipped off to tribal lands to avoid conflict with cattle ranchers.

In the winter of 2022-2023 alone, over 1,500 bison have been “removed,” about 25% of Yellowstone’s entire population. The bison at Fort Belknap are refugees that have been trucked 300 miles to the reservation from past Yellowstone winter culls.

Although bison are the U.S. national mammal, they exist in small and fragmented populations across the West. The federal government is working to restore healthy wild bison populations, relying heavily on sovereign tribal lands to house them.

Indeed, tribal lands are the great wildlife refuges of the prairie. Fort Belknap is the only place in Montana where bison, critically endangered black-footed ferrets and swift foxes, which occupy about 40% of their historic range, all have been restored.

But Indigenous communities can’t and shouldn’t be solely responsible for restoring wildlife. As an ecologist who studies prairie ecosystems, I believe that conserving grassland wildlife in the U.S. Great Plains and elsewhere will require public and private organizations to work together to create new, larger protected areas where these species can roam.

Rethinking how protected areas are made

At a global scale, conservationists have done a remarkable job of conserving land, creating over 6,000 terrestrial protected areas per year over the past decade. But small has become the norm. The average size of newly created protected areas over that time frame is 23 square miles (60 square kilometers), down from 119 square miles (308 square kilometers) during the 1970s.

Creating large new protected areas is hard. As the human population grows, fewer and fewer places are available to be set aside for conservation. But conserving large areas is important because it makes it possible to restore critical ecological processes like migration and to sustain populations of endangered wildlife like bison that need room to roam.

Creating an extensive protected area in the Great Plains is particularly difficult because this area was largely passed over when the U.S. national park system was created. But it’s becoming clear that it is possible to create large protected areas through nontraditional methods.

Consider American Prairie, a nonprofit that is working to stitch together public and tribal lands to create a Connecticut-sized protected area for grassland wildlife in Montana. Since 2004, American Prairie has made 37 land purchases and amassed a habitat base of 460,000 acres (about 720 square miles, or 1,865 square kilometers).

Similarly, in Australia, nonprofits are making staggering progress in conserving land while government agencies struggle with funding cuts and bureaucratic hurdles. Today, Australia is second only to the U.S. in its amount of land managed privately for conservation.

Big ideas make room for smaller actions

Having worked to conserve wildlife in this region for over 20 years, I have seen firsthand that by setting a sweeping goal of connecting 3.2 million acres (5,000 square miles, or 13,000 square kilometers), American Prairie has reframed the scale at which conservation success is measured in the Great Plains. By raising the bar for land protection, they have made other conservation organizations seem more moderate and created new opportunities for those groups.

One leading beneficiary is The Nature Conservancy, which owns the 60,000-acre Matador Ranch within the American Prairie focal area. When the conservancy first purchased the property, local ranchers were skeptical. But that skepticism has turned to support because the conservancy isn’t trying to create a protected area.

Instead, it uses the ranch as a grassbank – a place where ranchers can graze cattle at a low cost, and in return, pledge to follow wildlife-friendly practices on their own land, such as altering fences to allow migratory pronghorn to slip underneath. Via the grassbank, ranchers are now using these wildlife conservation techniques on an additional 240,000 acres of private property.

Other moderate conservation organizations are also working with ranchers. For example, this year the Bezos Earth Fund has contributed heavily to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation’s annual grants program, helping to make a record $US16 million available to reward ranchers for taking wildlife-friendly actions.

A collective model for achieving a large-scale protected area in the region has taken shape. American Prairie provides the vision and acts to link large tracts of protected land for restoring wildlife. Other organizations work with surrounding landowners to increase tolerance toward wildlife so those animals can move about more freely.

Instead of aiming to create a single polygon of protected land on a map, this new approach seeks to assemble a large protected area with diverse owners who all benefit from participating. Rather than excluding people, it integrates local communities to achieve large-scale conservation.

A global pathway to 30×30

This Montana example is not unique. In a recent study, colleagues and I found that when conservationists propose creating very large protected areas, they transform conservation discussions and draw in other organizations that together can achieve big results.

Many recent successes started with a single actor leading the charge. Perhaps the most notable example is the recently created Cook Islands Marine Park, also known as Marae Moana, which covers 735,000 square miles (1.9 million square kilometers) in the South Pacific. The reserve’s origin can be traced back to Kevin Iro, an outspoken former professional rugby player and member of the islands’ tourism board.

While some individual conservation organizations have found that this strategy works, global, national and local policymakers are not setting comparable large-scale targets as they discuss how to meet an ambitious worldwide goal of protecting 30% of the planet for wildlife by 2030. The 30×30 target was adopted by 190 countries at an international conference in 2022 on saving biodiversity.

Critics argue that large protected areas are too complicated to create and too expensive to maintain, or that they exclude local communities. However, new models show that there is a sustainable and inclusive way to move forward.

In my view, 30×30 policymakers should act boldly and include large protected area targets in current policies. Past experience shows that failing to do so will mean that future protected areas become smaller and smaller and ultimately fail to address Earth’s biodiversity crisis.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Looking at poop can tell us a lot. Poop offers a window into all sorts of hidden worlds: bird microbiomes, clam habitats, recovering coral forests, and more. 

Excrement can also tell us about how and when animals went extinct thousands of years ago. A study published April 26 in the journal Quaternary Research looked at the fungal spores in the dung of the large animals, such as 20-foot-tall ground sloths and 1,000 pound armadillo-looking animals called armored glyptodonts, that roamed the Colombian Andes in South America during the Pleistocene. 

[Related: Ancient poop proves that humans have always loved beer and cheese.]

They found that the animals became extinct in not one, but two waves. The megafauna in this study first became locally extinct at Pantano de Monquentiva, a valley in Colombia surrounded by hills and near a bog, about 23,000 years ago and then again in the same area about 11,000 years ago. 

Spores of coprophilous fungi pass through the guts of these megafauna during their life cycle. The presence of these spores in sediment samples provides evidence that these long-extinct animals lived in a certain place and time. 

The team used samples found in a peat bog in Pantano de Monquentiva, about 37 miles from Bogota, Colombia. The findings offer a window back in time to better understand how the disappearance of large animals could transform ecosystems like they did all those millennia ago. 

“We know that large animals such as elephants play a vital role in regulating ecosystems, for example by eating and trampling vegetation,” Dunia H. Urrego, co-author and University of Exeter biologist and geographer, said in a statement. “By analyzing samples of fungal spores, as well as pollen and charcoal, we were able to track the extinction of large animals, and the consequences of this extinction for plant abundance and fire activity.

The team found that the Monquentiva ecosystem changed dramatically when the megafauna disappeared, with different plant species thriving and increased wildfires. The analysis of the fungal spores didn’t tell exactly which large animals were present, but it’s possible that the animals were either the giant sloth and armadillo, or even macrauchenids and toxodonts, two peculiar extinct animals reminiscent of today’s camels and rhinoceroses.

[Related: Our bravest ancestors may have hunted giant sloths.]

The study also found that when all of this plentiful megafauna disappeared, it had major effects on the ecosystem. Roughly 5,000 years after their disappearance, the megafauna began to live again. This reprieve was short lived, and they all went extinct in a second wave of extinction 11,000 years ago. While the team does not know the direct causes of this, a number of factors like plant extinctions, climate changes, increased hunting by humans, and even a meteorite spike are potential causes.

“After the megafauna vanished, plant species at Monquentiva transitioned, with more woody and palatable plants (those favored by grazing animals), and the loss of plants that depend on seed dispersal by animals,” co-author and geographer also at the University of Exeter Felix Pym said in a statement.  “Wildfires became more common after the megafauna extinctions – presumably because flammable plants were no longer being eaten or trampled upon. 

With the planet’s current biodiversity crisis in mind, the study points to the importance of conserving local plants and watching fire activity before the value humans gain from nature completely disappears. 

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Soil is one of the most crucial, if not underrated, elements of daily life—it’s essential for growing the food and resources we rely on, combats drought, protects against flooding, and can sequester carbon dioxide for years to come. But, the dirt beneath our feet is constantly under threat due to rising temperatures and biodiversity loss thanks to climate change. And despite how simple we may think soil is, it’s pretty hard to know what’s really going on deep in the ground from the surface.

Scientists in Italy, however, think they may have a robotic solution—a seed-inspired robot. Scientists at the Bioinspired Soft Robotics (BSR) Lab, a part of the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT-Italian Institute of Technology) in Genoa, have developed the first 4D printed seed-inspired soft robot, which they claim can help act as sensors for monitoring pollutants, CO2 levels, temperature and humidity in soil. They published their findings earlier this year in Advanced Science. The research is part of the EU-funded I-Seed project aimed at making robots that can detect environmental changes in air and soil. 

What they’ve got here is an artificial seed inspired by the structure of a South African geranium, or the Pelargonium appendiculatum. The seeds of the tuberous, hairy-leafed plant have the ability to change shape in response to how humid their environment is. When the time comes for the seeds to leave the plant, they detach and can move independently to “penetrate” soil fractures, according to the study. This almost looks like crawling and burning action, which is due its helical shape changing according to changes in the environment. In a way. The curly seeds can find a home for themselves simply by expanding and shrinking due to changes in water content of the air.

[Related: This heat-seeking robot looks and moves like a vine.]

The team at IIT-BSR mimicked these seeds by combining 3D printing and electrospinning, using materials that also absorb and expand when exposed to humidity. Using fused deposition modeling, the authors printed a substrate layer of polycaprolactone, a biodegradable thermoplastic polyester activated using oxygen plasma to increase water-attracting abilities. Next, they added electrospun hygroscopic fibers made of a polyethylene oxide shell and a cellulose nanocrystal core. 

When tested in a soil sample, the robot was able to shimmy about, adapt its shape to cracks, and burrow into holes in the ground much like the natural seed. Not to mention, it was capable of lifting about 100 times its own weight. First author Luca Cecchini, a PhD student at IIT, said in a statement that the biodegradable and energy-autonomous robots could be used as “wireless, battery-free tools for surface soil exploration and monitoring.”

“With this latest research,” Barbara Mazzolai, associate director for robotics of the IIT and coordinator of the I-Seed Project, said in the statement, “we have further proved that it is possible to create innovative solutions that not only have the objective of monitoring the well-being of our planet, but that do so without altering it.”

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This article is from Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems.

Kit saw the ocean for the first time on an iron-skied February afternoon. My wife and I had spent the last three years in eastern Washington State, a region landlocked by 600 kilometers of forests, sagebrush, and wheat fields. For most of that time, we’d cohabited with Kit, an affectionate piebald mutt we’d adopted from a local shelter. Now we were moving to another inland environment—Colorado—via a circuitous road trip that took us through San Francisco. Our brief time in California, we realized, might be Kit’s first and last chance to lay her protuberant eyes upon the sea.

We drove to an ocean beach that some literal-minded city father had named Ocean Beach. I walked Kit onto the damp sand and watched her scrape at the stuff, as though trying to find its bottom. I unclipped her leash and Kit began to saunter, then run, one step ahead of the frothy surf, like a sandpiper. The wind pinned her floppy ears against her head, and she flung herself down to roll ecstatically in some dead washed-up thing. She looked happy; she looked free; she looked right.

In that, Kit wasn’t alone: most dogs love the beach. But the beach doesn’t love our dogs. A growing body of literature suggests that Canis lupus familiaris has become a significant force of disturbance along the world’s shorelines—not just the packs of feral dogs who roam some less regulated shores, but the domestic pooches whose well-meaning owners, like me, turn them loose for a romp in the sand. Dogs have been known to maul seal pups, outcompete eagles for dead fish, and dig up turtle nests. They save their worst harms for shorebirds, killing chicks, crushing eggs, and forcing migrating birds to burn more calories than they can spare. “Man’s best friend,” researchers concluded in 2011 with typical scientific understatement, “may not be wildlife’s best steward.”

In response to these harms, coastal managers have implemented leash laws, seasonal restrictions, and even outright dog bans. But limiting when and where our mutts can move invites controversy. After politicians enacted a partial dog ban on one Australian beach, aggrieved pet owners claimed that they’d become “criminals in [their] own backyards.” Others gripe that even strict laws are rarely enforced: in San Diego, where beach dogs are subject to a passel of regulations, vigilantes seem to take perverse pleasure in videotaping scofflaws. While our pets are the nominal causes of these conflicts, however, the real culprits aren’t Akitas and Airedales, but us—and our mastiff-sized blind spots around our furry family members. The dogs, of course, are just being dogs.

When we think about destructive pets, cats come first to mind. Whether feral or free-range, cats are swift, silent assassins, responsible for the deaths of up to four billion birds and 22 billion mammals each year in the United States alone. Dogs, by contrast, seem more goofy than lethal, hilariously distant from their wolfish origins. (Does a Shih Tzu really strike terror in any other animal?) In The World Without Us, author Alan Weisman postulated that, should humankind abruptly disappear, cats would fare just fine. Dogs, however, would vanish alongside their people, unable to survive without their twice-daily bowls of kibble.

Yet dogs, the world’s most abundant carnivores, exert immense impacts in their own right. In Mongolia, they kill antelopes and gazelles; in New Zealand, they’ve hampered the recovery of imperiled kiwis. Australian researchers have shown they scare off enough animals to “cause a depauperate local bird fauna.” In Russia’s Lake Baikal, they once transmitted a deadly virus to freshwater seals.

In 2019, on a reporting trip to Tasmania, Australia, I heard a firsthand account that exemplified the dangers of dogs. One evening, I met up with the founder of a group devoted to safeguarding the colonies of little blue penguins that nest along the state’s north coast. As we watched penguins—stout as bowling pins, feathered in glossy indigo, plump with sardines—waddle ashore after several days at sea, the advocate outlined the measures he’d taken to protect his beloved birds. He had erected fencing along a coastal highway to keep them from wandering into traffic and cleaned hundreds of the birds after a tanker ran aground and befouled the beach with oil. Yet he felt powerless to save penguins from the domestic dogs that occasionally escaped their owners, wandered down to the beach, and, on stumbling upon such vulnerable prey, instinctively began to slaughter. (Even friendly dogs can kill: penguins are so easily stressed that “playing” with them can induce cardiac arrest.) The year I visited, six separate dog attacks on four colonies had claimed the lives of more than 250 penguins.

“We don’t have dog attacks in Tasmania—we have dog massacres,” the group’s leader, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal from local dog owners, told me. “It takes two to 10 minutes for a dog to kill 40 or 50 penguins.”

Granted, little blue penguins are uniquely easy victims; not even the fastest greyhound is likely to catch an adult gull or dunlin. But the mere presence of dogs is enough to send birds into flight: after all, what’s a poodle but an unusually curly-haired fox, coyote, or wolf? In Chile, scientists have observed dogs pursuing whimbrels, a graceful shorebird that probes mudflats with a long, curved bill. On Mediterranean beaches, dog walkers flush plovers from their nests far more often than humans alone, exposing eggs to predators and thermal stress.

“Certain dog owners seem not just to allow it, but to take their dogs to the beach so that they can chase birds,” says David Newstead, bird program director at the Texas-based nonprofit Coastal Bend Bays and Estuaries Program. “These are otherwise conservation-minded people.”

Hounding birds on the beach seems like a benign behavior, or even a wholesome form of play: picture a euphoric golden retriever, tongue lolling and paws kicking up sand, merrily dispersing a flock of terns into a summer sky. Yet even a few brief flights can have big impacts. On the Gulf Coast beaches where Newstead works, many shorebirds are migrants—red knots, piping plovers, sanderlings—who have come to Texas to refuel during epic transcontinental journeys. They spend their days alternately resting and gorging on marine invertebrates, a cycle that’s critical to building the energy stores that migration requires. Dogs disrupt this loafing and feeding, leaving birds less equipped to complete their voyages.

“Every time you’re forcing birds to fly down the beach, the gas tank is going toward empty,” Newstead says. “If they can’t take in more energy than they’re expending on that beach, they’re eventually going to leave. It’s functional habitat loss.” When Newstead gently reprimands dog owners, he appeals to analogy and sympathy: imagine you’ve just gotten home from work and want nothing more than to chill on the couch with a beer—and then a pack of barking dogs tears into the house and chases you outside, over and over again. “Sometimes they grudgingly put their dog back on a leash,” he says. “Sometimes they just say to hell with you.”

Dogs also disturb ecosystems in stranger, subtler ways. In the fall of 2020, Brooke Maslo, an ecologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, embarked on an ambitious study of how coastal scavengers dispose of carrion. She and her collaborators set out motion-activated cameras on beaches along the Jersey Shore, then baited each with three fish carcasses acquired from tackle shops. “They would always get a big kick out of it,” Maslo says. “‘What do you want 150 dead menhaden for?’”

Maslo’s intent wasn’t to study dogs—it was to monitor the wildlife that came to beaches to feed, from red foxes and raccoons to corvids and laughing gulls. Yet dogs inevitably appeared. Sometimes Maslo’s cameras caught owners dragging their pooches away from the dead fish or placing the carcasses back on the ground, presumably after prying them from their pets’ jaws. More often the dogs urinated or defecated around the menhaden, as though claiming the carrion as their own.

At first, Maslo admits, the constant canine presence was frustrating: here she was, trying to document wild scavengers, and her cameras were clogged with domestic ones instead. As she watched more videos, though, a pattern emerged: When dogs appeared during the day, other scavengers steered clear that night, likely scared off by the scent-marking of an apex canid. Raccoons, skunks, and grackles were completely absent from dog-infested beaches, and foxes, black-backed gulls, and ghost crabs were rare. Maslo and her colleagues observed last year in Scientific Reports that nocturnal scavengers took 34 percent longer to find the dead fish after dogs had come around and ate far smaller portions when they finally showed up.

Why does this matter? Coastal necrophages play a crucial and salutary role, consuming the dead and thus preventing beaches from being strewn with carcasses. What’s more, Maslo says, mobile scavengers like gulls distribute carrion across beaches, spreading out nutrients and thus supporting ecosystems—not unlike dying salmon gifting their nitrogen and phosphorus to the forests in which they spawn. By claiming beaches for their own, dogs inhibit this breakdown and dispersal. You might not find a dachshund particularly intimidating, yet our pets are creating landscapes of fear, monopolizing food sources, and disrupting life’s fundamental processes.

In fairness, coastal managers aren’t blind to dogs’ impacts. Not long after I visited Tasmania, the state government raised the fines for owners whose dogs entered penguin colonies more than 20-fold, a measure that dramatically reduced the rate of attacks. Still other beaches require dogs to be leashed, restrict the hours in which they’re permitted to run loose, or are altogether dog-free. Oregon, for instance, bars even leashed dogs from snowy plover nesting grounds between March 15 and September 15. After an off-leash dog killed a piping plover chick in Scarborough, Maine, in 2013, the town hired plover police to post signs and educate beachgoers about leash laws. “I was expecting to be getting a lot more negativity,” a plover cop cheerfully told reporters.

But Scarborough’s plover guards are more exception than rule—for when dog regulations arrive, controversy usually follows. Few people know that better than Karen Harper, a councilor in Saanich, a municipal district on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. For years Harper had fielded complaints from coastal homeowners who’d witnessed dogs harassing wildlife and people along Cadboro Bay, an inlet whose beaches lie within a federal bird sanctuary. Although Canadian law prohibited off-leash dogs in the sanctuary, Saanich’s own regulations permitted them. In early 2020, Harper, hoping to resolve the contradiction, formally requested that Saanich’s staff study dogs’ impacts and review its bylaws.

“And then,” she says, “all hell broke loose.”

Angry emails poured into the council: Saanich residents urged Harper to “stop wasting staff time,” called her concerns “unfounded and largely irrelevant,” and described her request as “bogus procedure.” (Other commenters applauded Harper for confronting the degradation of “precious and priceless natural areas.”) On Facebook, Harper says, residents derided her as a “dog hater,” though she’d long owned dogs, most recently a pair of German shepherds. One local had dog feces flung into her yard. The situation got so volatile that animal-control officers started going to the beaches in pairs.

Harper was grappling with a persistent conundrum in coastal management: we know a lot more about how dogs harm beaches than how to get people to rein in their pets. In one typical study, researchers in southeast Australia found that just one-third of dog walkers felt “strongly obliged” to leash dogs. “While wildlife protection is important to dog owners,” the scientists added, “greater importance is given to the benefits of unleashed exercise for dogs.” Per one survey, 85 percent of American dog owners consider their pets part of the family; no wonder we privilege our own animals’ happiness over the welfare of wild creatures.

Other scientists have sought the answer in one of humanity’s most powerful motivators: peer pressure. In 2018, researchers interviewed nearly 900 coastal dog walkers in Maine, New York, and South Carolina. People didn’t just let their dogs roam free to exercise and sniff other mutts, they realized, but because social and personal norms sanctioned it. To change the attitudes of dog owners, the researchers proposed modeling different behavioral norms. Perhaps a group of volunteers could parade Spot and Rex around on leashes, each dog outfitted with a vest that reads “This Dog Shares the Shore with Shorebirds.” Social media loves nothing so much as a puppy (well, aside from a cat); maybe #ThisDogSharesTheShore will someday go viral on Instagram.

Still, the most sure-fire solution to averting dog conflict is also the most draconian—an outright ban of even leashed dogs. “Canadians are theoretically compliant types, but if you have leash-only areas, people ignore it,” Harper says. “It’s kind of discouraging.” The temptation to let dogs run free may be irresistible; better, perhaps, to proscribe our pooches altogether.

Ultimately, it’s hard not to conclude that the furor over dogs is a red herring—for the real problem isn’t our mutts, but our cognitive dissonance. Just as we forgive the foibles of our human relatives, we ignore the casual harm wrought by our four-legged children. (“Sure, those other dogs might chase birds, but my Duke would never hurt a fly.”) Perhaps because our dogs’ behaviors are a direct reflection of us, we harbor the delusion that they’re under our control; I recently saw an off-leash collie take a healthy bite of a jogger’s butt, even as the animal’s owner yelled at her to stand down. We rationalize their misdeeds, overrate their training, prioritize their pleasure over other beings’ right to exist. Love is not only blind, it’s blinding.

Much though I believe in protecting the natural world from our pets, I’m as guilty of this myopia as anyone. Earlier this winter, a year after Kit experienced the Pacific Ocean, I took her skiing near our new home in Colorado—unleashed. For a few minutes she trotted beside me, sniffing scat and eyeing squirrels, and, as always, I felt joy to see her happy and stimulated. Then she veered into a jumble of windblown logs and scrabbled at the snow with her paws. I slogged over and dragged her away, but it was too late; she’d unearthed and killed a hibernating vole, soft and warm as a newborn’s cheek. I felt grief, then momentary anger at Kit, but it wasn’t her fault—she was merely doing what her ancestors had been bred to do. The responsibility was entirely mine.

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

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Melting ice sheets in Antarctica can retreat much faster than scientists previously thought. A study published April 5 in the journal Nature found that at the end of the last Ice Age, parts of the Eurasian Ice Sheet retreated up to 2,000 feet per day. This rate is 20 times faster than previous measurements. These changes far outpace even the fastest-moving glaciers studied in Antarctica, which are estimated to retreat as quickly as 160 feet per day. 

The new findings could be crucial to better understanding today’s ice melt.

The Eurasian Ice Sheet was the third-largest ice mass during the last Ice Age and retreated from Norway about 20,000 years ago. At its largest, it had a span of almost 3,000 miles. Mirroring these retreats are ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica, which have lost more than 6.4 trillion tons of ice over the past three decades. Both of these modern-day ice sheets are responsible for more than one-third of total sea level rise. 

“Our research provides a warning from the past about the speeds that ice sheets are physically capable of retreating at,” Christine Batchelor, study co-author and physical geographer from Newcastle University, said in a statement. “Our results show that pulses of rapid retreat can be far quicker than anything we’ve seen so far.”

[Related: We’re finally getting close-up, fearsome views of the doomsday glacier.]

For this study, an international team of researchers used high-resolution imagery of the seafloor to see how the ice sheet changed over. They mapped out more than 7,600 small-scale landforms called “corrugation ridges” on the seafloor around where the ice sheet once stood. The ridges are less than eight feet high and are spaced around 82 to 984 feet apart. These types of ridges are believed to have formed when the ice sheet’s retreating margin moved with the tide. Seafloor sediments are pushed into a ridge every low tide, so two ridges would have been produced during two daily tidal cycles. The spacing helped the team calculate the enormous speed of retreat. 

This kind of data on how ice sheets reacted to past periods of warming can help inform computer simulations which predict future ice-sheet and sea-level change. It also suggests that these periods of rapid melt may only last for days to months, which are relatively short periods of time from a geologic standpoint. 

“This shows how rates of ice-sheet retreat averaged over several years or longer can conceal shorter episodes of more rapid retreat,” study co-author and University of Cambridge glaciologist Julian Dowdeswell said in a statement. “It is important that computer simulations are able to reproduce this ‘pulsed’ ice-sheet behavior.”

[Related: Ice doesn’t always melt the same way—and these visuals prove it.]

Understanding these seafloor landforms also showcases the mechanics behind rapid ice retreat. The study found that the former ice sheet retreated most across the flattest point of its bed where, “less melting is required to thin the overlying ice to the point where it starts to float,” explained co-author and Cambridge glacial geophysicist Frazer Christie from Scott in a statement. “An ice margin can unground from the seafloor and retreat near-instantly when it becomes buoyant.”

The team believes that pulses of similarly quick retreat could soon be observed in some parts of Antarticia, including West Antarctica’s vast Thwaites Glacier. Nicknamed the “Doomsday Glacier,” Thwaites could undergo a similar pulse of rapid ice retreat since it has recently retreated close to a flat area of its bed.

“Our findings suggest that present-day rates of melting are sufficient to cause short pulses of rapid retreat across flat-bedded areas of the Antarctic Ice Sheet, including at Thwaites,” said Batchelor. “Satellites may well detect this style of ice-sheet retreat in the near-future, especially if we continue our current trend of climate warming.”

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An international team of botanists recently discovered two new species of carnivorous plants in the high Andes of southern Ecuador near the Peruvian border. Both species are described in a study published March 24 in the journal PhytoKeys and part of the butterworts group. This group of about 115 species of flowering plants can catch and digest small insects with their sticky leaves. Carnivorous plants use these animals as an additional food source to compensate for any nutritional deficiencies in the soil they’re growing in.

Eating insects gives these plants a competitive advantage over other plants and helps them thrive in challenging habitats like the tropical high Andes Mountains.

[Related: Meet the world’s newest carnivorous plant.]

The team found Pinguicula jimburensis on the shore of a highland lagoon over 11,000 feet high  and Pinguicula ombrophila on a nearly vertical rock face over 9,000 feet high. The lagoon and rock face are within the Amotape-Huancabamba zone, an area with rugged terrain, a varied climate, and known for exceptional biodiversity due to these conditions. The Amotape-Huancabamba zone makes up large portions of southern Ecuador and northern Peru. 

Botanist Álvaro Pérez of the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador and his team were the first to discover the plants and worked with study co-author and botanist Tilo Henning from the Leibniz Center for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF) in Germany.

“As small and scattered as the species’ suitable habitats are, so is the species composition,” Henning said in a statement. “Both of these new species are only known from a single location, where only a few dozens of plant individuals occur in each case.”

Only one population with about 15 mature individuals was discovered, which makes the species quite vulnerable even if it lives in an isolated and difficult-to-access area. According to the team, this limited distribution is common in the Amotape-Huancabamba zone, and there are many more new plant and animal species awaiting discovery.

The discovery of these new species triples the number of butterwort species recorded in Ecuador and the team believes that there are more new species awaiting formal scientific recognition, but finding them has been a race against time.

“The results presented in this study show that the assessment of the Neotropical biodiversity is far from complete. Even in well-known groups such as the carnivorous plants, new taxa are continuously discovered and described, in particular from remote areas that become accessible in the course of the unlimited urban sprawl,” the team wrote in the study. “This is both encouraging and worrying at the same time.”

[Related: Scientists just rediscovered a rare, fungi-eating ‘fairy lantern.’]

They cite relentless urban sprawl and habitat destruction that are a massive threat to biodiversity in general, particularly threatening fragile microhabitats like these plants. While the new species are safe from human interference since they grow in protected areas, human-induced climate change is increasingly affecting carnivorous plants and ecosystems, particularly places like mountain wetlands that rely on regular precipitation.

This reliance on precipitation and waterlogged soil is even reflected in the name Pinguicula ombrophila, which means “rain-loving butterwort,” and more research is needed to study how these rare species will continue to fare as the climate changes.

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As winter melts into the spring, flowers start to bloom and  some unique animals also begin to change color. The white-tailed jackrabbit is one of close to 20 species of animals and birds that have evolved to change colors with the seasons. The rabbit is not white all year, changing from its winter white into spring and summer brown with the season. It’s a survival tactic, as darker hued animals stand out to predators in snowy climates. 

A team of researchers from the United States and Portugal sought out to learn more about the genetics involved in these colorful seasonal changes. Their study, published today in the journal Science, details the evolution of winter camouflage in white-tailed jackrabbits. They uncovered how the genes that control this winter color variation could be a key to their survival as the planet warms and snow cover reduces.

[Related: How a peculiar parasitic plant relies on a rare Japanese rabbit.]

“Several members of the research team live and work in the Rocky Mountains, with a close connection to nature and the incredible changes that we are all experiencing year to year in the intensity of extreme weather and climate,” study co-author and ecologist/evolutionary biologist Jeffrey Good from the University of Montana, told PopSci. 

When beginning this research over a decade ago, Good said that a team member discovered a natural history study from 1963 which described more complicated, but intriguing patterns of continuous color variation in a white-tailed jackrabbit population in Colorado.

Study lead author and evolutionary biologist Mafalda Sousa Ferreira from BIOPOLIS-CIBIO at the University of Porto in Portugal was conducting this research as part of her PhD and took a closer look. “This made this part of my PhD project a bit risky,” Sousa Ferreira told PopSci. “If the paper was correct, we could explain something very unique, but if we couldn’t sample the specimens to characterize it, I might have to rethink part of my thesis.” 

With this half a century old clue in tow, they used museum specimens collected over the years to characterize the variations in color. The oldest of their 196 specimens dated back from 1906, sourced  from multiple museums including the Denver Museum of Nature & Science and the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Importantly, they confirmed the study from 1963 on color variation in white-tailed jackrabbits.

“It is very exciting to see something described years earlier materialize like that before your eyes. The high-risk project was actually possible, and eventually successful!” said Sousa Ferreira.

[Related: This hybrid hummingbird’s colorful feathers are a genetic puzzle.]

After categorizing the fur color variation, the team then used genetic sequencing and determined that the jackrabbits’ color variation in winter is primarily determined by three genes (EDNRB, CORIN, and ASIP) that control the production and localization of melanin pigments.

“Fur coat color is determined by pigments that are produced in special cells in the skin (melanocytes). You can think of these cells as pigment factories. How active these factories are—what type of pigment (black and brown, red and yellow) and how much is produced determines the color of hair,” explained Good. 

This process is quite common across mammals and are the same pigments that determine the color and darkness of hair in humans. Jackrabbits can display white, brown, or more intermediate-colored coats depending on what versions they get from their parents. 

After establishing how winter color variation, the environment, and the rabbit’s genetics were related, they combined these results with climate projections on expected snow loss due to climate change.

Surprisingly, they found that rabbit populations with higher variability in their color genes should be well prepared to face snow loss over the next 100 years. These projections indicate that the winter-brown jackrabbits will actually expand their range and could even help rescue the whole species from decline. 

It was a welcome bit of positive news, but the team still cautions that human-caused threats (disease, habitat loss, etc.) put this adaptability in jeopardy and highlights the importance of conservation at the species level.

“The jackrabbits and their coat colors show how understanding and preserving the genetic diversity of a species is just as important, particularly in this rapidly changing natural world,” said Good.

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On March 21, President Biden hosted the White House Conservation in Action Summit. His administration announced two new national monuments aimed to conserve and restore land, a possible new marine sanctuary in the Pacific Ocean, and the “first of its kind” Ocean Climate Action Plan.

“Our natural wonders are literally the envy of the world,” President Biden said while addressing the summit. “They’ve always been and they always will be as central to our heritage as a people and essential to our identity as a nation.”

[Related: ‘Humanity on thin ice’ says UN, but there is still time to act on climate change.]

Here’s a look at some of the announcements and plans from the summit.

Two new national monuments

Biden announced two new monuments, one in Nevada and another in Texas. Nevada’s Avi Kwa Ame National Monument, “will honor Tribal Nations and Indigenous peoples while conserving our public lands and growing America’s outdoor recreation economy,” according to a press release from the Biden Administration.  The new national monument site spans more than 500,000 acres of rugged landscape close to the California and Arizona state lines. It’s home to desert tortoises, bighorn sheep, some almost 900 year-old Joshua Trees, and the sacred desert mountain Avi Kwa Ame.

“The Mojave people, known as the people by the river, hold Avi Kwa Ame in our hearts,” said Fort Mojave Indian Tribal Chairman Timothy Williams at the summit. “Avi Kwa Ame, also known as Spirit Mountain, lays within the vast landscape of the pristine land of Southern Nevada. It is a place we know as our creation. It is the beginning of our traditional songs, and it is the place that Nevada nations throughout the southwest hold sacred.”

In southern Texas, the new Castner Range National Monument intends to honor veterans, servicemembers, and Tribal Nations, while expanding access to the outdoors for the El Paso community. Castner Range is located on Fort Bliss and was once a training and testing site for the United States Army during World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. 

Castner Range also hosts significant cultural sites for Tribal Nations, including the Apache and Pueblo peoples, the Comanche Nation, Hopi Tribe, and Kiowa Indian Tribe of Oklahoma. 

“Today’s historic announcement has been decades in the making,” said Representative Veronica Escobar, D-El Paso, who has pushed for this designation. “Generations of activists have dedicated countless hours and resources toward achieving this once seemingly impossible goal. It brings me such joy to know that El Pasoans will soon be able to enjoy the beauty of this majestic, expansive landmark for years to come.”

[Related: Biden sets an ambitious goal to protect 30 percent of US lands and waters.]

Protecting Pacific Remote Islands

President Biden will direct Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondoto to consider a new National Marine Sanctuary designation within the next 30 days. The designation will protect all US waters near the Pacific Remote Islands (PRI’s). These remote islands and atolls located in the Central Pacific have nearly 777,000 square miles of water around them and expanding the current protections in these areas would further President Biden’s “30 by 30” plan of conserving at least 30 percent of U.S. ocean waters by 2030. 

If enacted, the area would be larger than Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, an area that protects 583,000 square miles around the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. President Barack Obama expanded the area in 2016 and the monument is already helping to restore large fish species like tuna.

“Our world’s oceans are at mortal risk, a breaking point precipitated by the unsustainable overfishing and other resource extraction, debris and land-based pollution, exacerbated and compounded by the devastating and pervasive marine effects of climate change,” said Representative Ed Case, D- Honolulu from Makapu’u to Mililani and Ko Olina. “As a nation, we have a duty to ensure the long-term survival of the PRI’s ecological, scientific and cultural value.”

US Ocean Climate Action Plan

According to President Biden, the first-ever Ocean Climate Action Plan will “harness the tremendous power of the ocean to help in our fight against the climate crisis.” He touted building more offshore wind farms to reduce carbon emissions, fortifying coastal communities, and better fisheries management in the speech and this new plan for the ocean. 

The plan outlines actions to meet three major goals: creating a carbon-neutral future without the harmful emissions that cause the climate to change, accelerating nature-based solutions, and enhancing resilience through ocean-based solutions like blue carbon that will help communities adapt and thrive in the face of an ever-changing climate. 

[Related: In the latest State of the Union, Biden highlights infrastructure, chips, and healthcare.]

To many environmental advocates, the plan comes not a moment too soon. On March 20, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released their Sixth Synthesis Report on climate change, which found that there is still a chance for humanity to avoid the worst of climate change’s future harms, but it might be our last chance.

“It’s reassuring that President Biden is taking the climate crisis seriously and ensuring that our oceans are factored into the plan to address it. To date, our oceans have helped protect us from the worst impacts of climate change, and we know they can play an outsized role in keeping the planet from warming to catastrophic levels,” said Oceana’s Vice President for the United States, Beth Lowell, in a press release. “But in order for that to happen, countries like the United States must stop the expansion of dirty and dangerous offshore drilling.”

Oil drilling was front and center at some of the protests the same day as the conservation summit. Climate activists gathered outside the Interior Department, protesting what they call Biden’s “climate hypocrisy.” Representatives from activist groups like Democracy Now! demanded that the Biden Administration change course on the controversial Willow oil project in Alaska. On March 13, President Biden approved the $8 billion plan to extract 600 million barrels of oil from federal land, despite a campaign promise of “no more drilling on federal lands, period.”

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Around a decade ago, Kobe University biologist Kenji Suetsugu took a research trip to Japan’s Chiba Prefecture on the eastern outskirts of Tokyo. While there, pops of vivid colored flowers rising out from the green and brown grassland caught his eye.

“Its vibrant colors immediately caught my attention. I remember being struck by its unique rosy pink petals that bear a striking resemblance to glasswork,” Suetsugu tells PopSci in an email. 

[Related: This incredibly rare orchid survives by making male beetles horny.]

What he saw was actually an undiscovered species of orchid, a rarity in a country whose plant species have been extensively studied and classified.  The discovery of the delicate, elegant, pink-petaled Spiranthes hachijoensis (S. hachijoensis) is detailed in a new study co-authored by Suetsugu and published on March 17 in the Journal of Plant Science. 

S. hachijoensis is actually found in many common places in Japan like parks, lawns, and gardens,  but the striking plant was not named.  Scientists believed that all the Spiranthes on the Japanese mainland were actually one species. The blooms of S. hachijoensis are pink, purple, and white and its petals are about 0.1 to 0.2 inches long. 

Additional specimens have been collected in Japan and as far away as Taiwan and Laos. “After collecting some samples, we took the flowers back to the laboratory and dissected them. We noticed that the morphology was different from other plants we had studied,” Suetsugu explains. 

They analyzed the samples DNA and reproductive biology and found that this cryptic species had genetic differences from other orchids in the genus at the molecular level. S. hachijoensis has a smooth stem instead of the typically hairy stem of another lookalike species named Spiranthes australis. While the new species grows alongside S. australis, it blooms about a month later, leading to reproductive isolation between the two distinct plant species. 

The orchid species that make up the Spiranthes genus are commonly called ladies’ tresses, due to their resemblance to locks of hair. Their dainty, bell shaped flowers bloom  in a variety of colors from yellow to purple to pink or white, and are typically grown from a hairy central stem in a spiral. There are roughly 50 Spiranthes found in tropical or temperate regions of North and South America, Eurasia, and Australia. According to Suetsugu, Spiranthes have been known to Japan for centuries and is the country’s most familiar orchid. It is even featured in Manyoshu, or “Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves,” Japan’s oldest anthology of poetry dating back to 750 CE.

[Related: How a peculiar parasitic plant relies on a rare Japanese rabbit.]

The team will continue to keep studying S. hachijoensis to better understand its DNA, ecology, evolutionary history, and conservation status. While orchids are a very prolific plant with roughly 28,000 known species around the world, habitat loss has endangered the beautiful and ephemeral flowers.

“Discovering a new species is not only exciting, but also important for our understanding of biodiversity and for conservation efforts,” says Suetsugu. “The discovery of this new species hiding in mundane places demonstrates the need for persistent exploration even in seemingly unremarkable places. I think it’s a discovery that reminds us that there is still an unknown world in nature that we come into contact with on a daily basis.”

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This article was originally featured on High Country News.

Those who visit the Gila Wilderness in southern New Mexico these days have to grapple with a number of perils: rattlesnakes, extreme heat, bears, rugged terrain and, of course, raging bulls. Between 50 and 150 cattle are parading across the landscape, chomping native plants down to the nub, trampling riparian areas to dust, eroding landscapes, damaging habitat and oozing vast clouds of methane. Oh, and, according to the U.S. Forest Service, they’re also playing bullfighter with unsuspecting hikers.

This kind of behavior is, naturally, unacceptable to  the Gila National Forest, which manages the land in question. So, last summer, officials hired contract wranglers to round up the rambunctious cattle and evict them from the forest. After both contractors and cows were injured in the process, officials decided to take a more lethal tack, and, in February, sent out  helicopter-borne shooters to “attempt to eradicate them from the area,” as the agency’s decision put it.

It may be the most consequential action the federal government has taken in at least two decades to mitigate the impacts of overgrazing on public lands. It might even look like the start of real grazing policy reform, something conservationists have been pushing for since the 1970s. But there’s a catch: The only reason the Forest Service did something this time is that the bovines in question are feral — descendants of cattle abandoned by a belly-up livestock operator in the 1970s. Think of them as the bovine version of “orphaned” oil and gas wells, similarly sullying land and water and continuously belching methane.

The Forest Service’s justification for its lethal response, in a nutshell is: “Feral cattle are an invasive species that damage native habitats with their grazing behaviors.” That’s all fine and good, but you could take the “feral” off the front of that sentence and it would still be equally true. And yet the 1.5 million or so additional “authorized” cattle that are trampling the public lands are getting off scot-free. Same goes for Cliven Bundy, whose own semi-feral cattle have been illegally grazing public lands in Nevada for about 40 years, and there is still no plan to remove them. 

The Biden administration promised new grazing rules this spring, but early indications suggest we can expect another big nothing-burger. Several weeks ago, the administration announced this year’s grazing fees, although it hardly needed to go through the trouble, since for the 27th year in the last four decades, the fee once again amounts to just $1.35 per animal unit month — the minimum allowed by law. That’s all it takes to authorize a half-ton cow and her calf to gobble up 600 to 800 pounds of the public’s forage per month, destroy cryptobiotic soil and disgorge more climate-warming methane. Hell, you can’t get a cup of coffee for $1.35 these days!

8.09 million
Number of animal unit months (AUMs) for cattle authorized by the Bureau of Land Management for Western states in 2021. This does not include non-cattle livestock or cattle grazing on Forest Service lands. 

233 pounds per year 
Amount of methane emitted by a single cow-calf pair.

$6.10; $4.85; $20.10
Minimum fee per AUM for grazing on Utah state land; New Mexico state land; and non-irrigated private land (estimated average), respectively. 

The Bureau of Land Management says it uses market forces and other considerations to determine its grazing fees. Yet even though the market for cattle has changed substantially over the last 40 years, grazing fees haven’t budged. In 2000, for example, the price for a pound of live cattle was $0.70; today it’s $1.65. And yet in both years the grazing fee was the same. One might argue that low fees are necessary to keep cheeseburgers from becoming a luxury item. But since only about 5% of America’s 29 million beef cows graze public lands, the fee would have little impact on your tab at Blake’s Lotaburger, New Mexico’s favorite fast food beef joint. While in some ways it’s far better to have cows out on the range than confined to a feedlot, open-range cattle are a lot harder on the climate.

That’s the conclusion of a study published last year, which found that public-range cows not only emit methane (via enteric fermentation) and nitrous oxide (in manure), like all cattle do, they also wreck native plants and soils enough to shift the landscape from serving as a carbon sink to becoming a source of greenhouse gases. And they emit more methane because the energy content of public-land forage tends to be lower than the alfalfa or grain fed to pastured and feedlot cattle. “The forage from public lands, especially when high in exotic grasses,” the authors wrote, “is about the worst diet to feed cattle from a greenhouse gas perspective.” 

Low fees are only one of the places the feds have dropped the ball on grazing. The data shows that the BLM fails to meet its own standards for rangeland health. Agency-managed national monuments — including Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah and Canyon of the Ancients in Colorado — not only grandfathered in existing grazing, but allow for new leases, even when cow hooves are likely to damage cultural sites.

$12.77 million
Revenues to the BLM from grazing fees (for all livestock categories) in 2021.

$105.9 million
Amount budgeted to the Department of Interior for rangeland management in 2020, meaning the taxpayers are subsidizing grazing operations to the tune of $93 million per year. 

$2.5 billion
Total amount of livestock subsidies paid by the federal government to ranchers and farmers in the 11 Western states between 1995 and 2020. 

Congress has also failed to pass legislation making voluntary grazing permit retirements permanent. That would allow conservation groups to buy out a willing livestock operator’s permit, knowing that it would stay retired, something that seems like a win-win, though it is still adamantly opposed by the Sagebrush Rebel crowd. As things stand, retired permits can be put back into action 10 years down the road, which, you know, sort of defeats the purpose.

Admittedly, it’s hard to make meaningful reforms in this realm. To do so means pushing back against the mythology of cowboy culture and the outsized political influence livestock operators wield. Even the plan to shoot the feral cattle in the Gila ran up against this: The New Mexico Cattle Growers’ Association tried to stop the shoot, claiming it was animal cruelty. (A judge rejected the bid.) It’s an odd stance, given that the livestock industry advocates shooting wolves and other predators, ridding the public lands of wild horses, and, of course, ultimately eating its cows.

But then again, (almost) no one is suggesting that the feds start shooting “authorized” cattle. They’re just asking for a few common-sense reforms and maybe a grazing fee a little more in line with the cost of a cheeseburger. It shouldn’t be so difficult.

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When people think of spring, they often picture flowers and trees blooming. And if you live in the U.S. Northeast, Midwest or South, you have probably seen a medium-sized tree with long branches, covered with small white blooms – the Callery pear (Pyrus calleryana).

For decades, Callery pear – which comes in many varieties, including “Bradford” pear, “Aristocrat” and “Cleveland Select” – was among the most popular trees in the U.S. for ornamental plantings. Today, however, it’s widely recognized as an invasive species. Land managers and plant ecologists like me are working to eradicate it to preserve biodiversity in natural habitats.

As of 2023, it is illegal to sell, plant or grow Callery pear in Ohio. Similar bans will take effect in South Carolina and Pennsylvania in 2024. North Carolina and Missouri will give residents free native trees if they cut down Callery pear trees on their property.

How did this tree, once in high demand, become designated by the U.S. Forest Service as “Weed of the Week”? The devil is in the biological details.

A quasi-perfect tree

Botanists brought the Callery pear to the U.S. from Asia in the early 1900s. They intentionally bred the horticultural variety to enhance its ornamental qualities. In doing so, they created an arboricultural wunderkind. As The New York Times observed in 1964:

“Few trees possess every desired attribute, but the Bradford ornamental pear comes unusually to close to the ideal.”

Modern varieties of Callery pear produce an explosion of white flowers in springtime, followed by deep green summer foliage that turns deep red and maroon in autumn. They also are very tolerant of urban soils, which can be highly compacted and hard for roots to penetrate. The trees grow quickly and have a rounded shape, which made them suitable for planting in rows along driveways and roadsides.

During the post-World War II suburban development boom, Callery pear trees became extremely popular in residential settings. In 2005 the Society of Municipal Arborists named the “Chanticleer” variety the urban street tree of the year. But the breeding process that created this and other varieties of Callery pear was producing unexpected results.

Cloning to produce an American original

To ensure that each Callery pear tree had bright blooms, red foliage and other desired traits, horticulturists created identical clones through a process known as grafting: creating seedlings from cuttings of trees with the desired characteristics.

This approach eliminated the messy complexity of mixing genes during sexual reproduction and ensured that when each tree matured, it would have the characteristics that homeowners desire. Every tree of a specific variety was a genetically identical clone.

Grafting also meant Callery pear trees could not make fruits. Some fruit trees, such as peaches and tart cherries, can fertilize their flowers with their own pollen. In contrast, Callery pear is self-incompatible: pollen on an individual tree cannot fertilize flowers on that tree. And since all Callery pears of a specific variety planted in a neighborhood would be identical clones, they would effectively be the same tree.

If a tree can’t produce fruits, it can’t disperse into natural habitats. Gardeners and landscapers thought it was perfectly safe to plant Callery pear near natural habitats, such as prairies, because the species was trapped in place by its reproductive biology. But the tree would break free from its isolation and spread seeds far and wide.

The great escape

University of Cincinnati botanist Theresa Culley and colleagues have found that as horticulturalists tinkered with Callery pears to produce new versions, they made the individuals different enough to escape the fertilization barrier. If a neighborhood had only “Bradford” pear trees, then no fruits could be produced – but once someone added an “Aristocrat” pear to their yard, then these two varieties could fertilize each other and produce fruits.

When Callery pear trees in gardens and parks started depositing seeds in nearby areas, wild populations of the trees became established. Those wild trees could pollinate one another, as well as neighborhood trees.

In today’s landscape, Callery pear is astonishingly fertile. The prolific flowering that horticulturists intentionally bred into these varieties now yields tremendous crops of pears each year. Although these little pears are generally not edible by humans, birds feed on the fruit, then fly away and excrete the seeds into natural habitats. Callery pear has become one of the most problematic invasive species in the eastern United States.

A thorny problem

Like other invasives, Callery pears crowd out native species. Once Callery pear seedlings spread from habitat edges into grasslands, they have advantages that allow them to dominate the site.

In my research lab, we have found that Callery pear leafs out very early in spring and drops its leaves late in fall. This enables it to soak up more sun than native species. We also have discovered that during invasion, these trees alter the soil and release chemicals that suppress the germination of native plants.

Callery pear is highly resistant to natural disturbances. In fact, when my graduate student Meg Maloney tried to kill the trees by using prescribed fires or applying liquid nitrogen directly to stumps after cutting the trees down, her efforts failed. Instead, the trees sprouted aggressively and seemingly gained strength.

Once Callery pear has escaped into natural areas, its seedlings produce very sharp, stiff thorns that can puncture shoes or even tires. This makes the trees a menace to people working in the area, as well as to native plants. Another nuisance factor is that when Callery pears bloom, they produce a strong odor that many people find unpleasant.

Currently, directly applying herbicides is the only known control for a Callery pear invasion. But the trees are so successful at spreading that poisoning their seedlings may simply create space for other Callery pear seedlings to establish. It is unclear how habitat managers can escape a confounding ecological cycle of invasion, herbicide application and re-invasion.

Banned but not gone

In response to work by the Ohio Invasive Plants Council and other experts, Ohio has taken the extraordinary step of banning Callery pear to thwart its ecological invasion into natural habitats. But the trees are common in residential areas across the state and have established vigorous populations in natural habitats. Ecologists will be working well into the future to maintain openness and biodiversity in areas where Callery pear is invading.

In the meantime, homeowners can help. Horticulturists recommend that people who have a Callery pear on their property should remove it and replace it with something that is not an invasive species. Few trees possess every desired attribute, but many native trees have visually attractive features and will not threaten ecosystems in your region.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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In a phenomenon that sounds straight out of a sci-fi movie or kooky musical, there are some plants on Earth that actually eat other organisms. The genus Thismia, commonly called fairy lanterns, is a rare but widely dispersed plant genus that is primarily spread across tropical regions of Asia, Australia, and South America and the subtropical and temperate regions in Japan, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States. 

Despite being found in forests and multiple regions, scientists know very little about the mysterious flora’s ecology. They live underground, have colorful flowers that rise about the soil, and lack green leaves and chlorophyll to make their own food using photosynthesis like the vast majority of plants.Instead, they snack on fungi like arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi.

[Related: Young trees have special adaptations that could save the Amazon.]

Only 90 species have been found, but one that was believed to be extinct has been rediscovered. A team of scientists describe the rediscovery of a Thismia species in a study published February 27 in the journal Phytotaxa. The species named Thismia kobensis was originally discovered in Kobe City, Japan in 1992, but the building of an industrial complex supposedly destroyed the entire population. Thirty years later, biologist Kenji Suetsugu from Kobe University and his colleagues rediscovered the plant in Sanda City, about 18 miles away. 

The team describes Thismia kobensis in new detail, adding on to the original description that was only based on an incomplete museum specimen instead of a plant found in nature. Their examination found that Thismia kobensis is different from a similar species called Thismia huangii. It has a short and wide ring and many short hairs on its stigma–the female part of a flower where pollen lands. Their study argues that Thismia kobensis is its own distinct species, with unique characteristics and evolutionary history.

Thismia kobensis is also the northernmost known Asian fairy lantern species, and its rediscovery could offer new insights in the biogeography of a strange and mysterious fairy lantern called Thismia americana, which was originally thought to be related to some species in Australia and New Zealand. 

[Related: Meet the world’s newest carnivorous plant.]

The study suggests that Thismia kobensis is the closest relative of Thismia americana, which has only been found near Chicago and may have evolved independently from other Australia-New Zealand species because of how its outer flowers appear. The similar inner flower construction of Thismia americana–like a lack of nectar glands–shows a closer relationship between it and Thismia kobensis. 

The strange distribution pattern is still puzzling botanists, but one possible reason for its distribution and close relationship might be migration through Beringia–or the Bering Strait Land Bridge that once connected eastern Asia with North America during the last Ice Age.

This rediscovery after three decades has helped scientists better understand fairy lanterns and their evolution and biogeography as a whole. The team assessed that the species is critically endangered based on IUCN red list criteria and the team recommends more logging regulations to protect the forests it lives in. 

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In the days after a record-breaking heat wave baked the Pacific Northwest in 2021, state and federal foresters heard reports of damaged and dying trees across Oregon and Washington. Willamette Valley Christmas tree farmers had lost up to 60% of their popular noble firs, while caretakers at Portland’s Hoyt Arboretum said Douglas firs, their state tree, dropped more needles than ever seen before. Timber plantations reported massive losses among their youngest trees, with some losing nearly all of that year’s plantings. 

The damage was obvious even to those who weren’t tasked with looking for it. Drivers, homeowners and tree experts alike called or sent photos of damaged redcedars, hemlocks and spruce, particularly in coastal forests. Swaths of the landscape were so scorched it looked like a wildfire had torn through.

Some farmers and homeowners had tried to prepare, dumping water on their orchards and yards before and during the heat wave. Many lost branches, leaves and entire trees anyway. “There’s a misconception out there that a lot of people have that, if things are just watered enough, they can get through these events,” said Chris Still, an Oregon State University tree ecologist and expert in tree heat physiology. “But the heat spells we’re talking about, like the heat dome, are so intense that I don’t think that’s really a tenable assumption anymore.” Simply watering trees during extreme heat makes intuitive and practical sense, but that idea is based largely on knowledge about droughts. After all, nearly all of the research on climate-related stress in trees has focused only on the impact of insufficient water. But it turns out that trees respond quite differently to extreme heat versus prolonged drought. Still’s own research, including a new study on the heat dome, is part of a growing body of work focused on untangling the effects of both conditions. Given that extreme heat and drought are both becoming more common and intense — and won’t always coincide — foresters and tree farmers will need tools to prepare for each.

The threat human-caused global warming poses to the Northwest’s forests was evident long before the 2021 heat dome: Oregon and Washington’s most common conifer species are all dying in alarming numbers, many because of drought. Starting in 2015, state foresters began warning that western hemlocks, a particularly drought-sensitive species common to the Coast Range and Cascades, were succumbing to pests and fungi that infested the already-stressed trees. More recently, foresters have seen widespread die-offs of western redcedar and Douglas firs. Aerial surveys in 2022 documented what foresters have dubbed “firmageddon” — the sudden death of 1.2 million acres of “true firs” (which include grand and noble firs, but not Douglas firs), mostly in Oregon.

“All of our trees are drought-stressed,” Oregon state entomologist Christine Buhl told HCN last July. “They can’t protect themselves against other agents” in their weakened state. Even common pests and native parasites that don’t normally kill trees are now proving lethal.

When the 2021 heat wave hit, foresters weren’t certain what new chaos it might bring. Drought affects tree stems and the structures that move water and nutrients around, but heat destroys needles and leaves. When those tender green structures heat up — and they often reach temperatures far higher than the air around them — they lose water fast. The tissues inside them fall apart, and they turn red or brown as their chlorophyll breaks down.

“Just like our skin, when (sun exposure) rips those cells apart and we have blisters and sunburn, it does the same exact thing to those needles and leaves,” said Danny DePinte, a forest health specialist who flies annual aerial surveys for the U.S. Forest Service in Washington and Oregon. The 2021 heat dome offered a rare glimpse of the results on a large scale: When DePinte flew over the region later that year, he saw whole landscapes of trees scorched on their south and west-facing sides, where temperatures would have been hottest. The worst damage occurred on southern slopes with prolonged exposure and in coastal forests that are adapted to far cooler temperatures. DePinte’s survey found that at least 229,000 acres of forest had been damaged by the heat wave — a figure state researchers say only begins to capture the total area damaged, which was likely much larger.

Research like Still’s, which drew in part on DePinte’s data, has made it clear that heat stress causes more immediate and acute damage than drought. Its long-term impacts are far less understood, though, because events like the 2021 heat dome are still unusual.

On his 2022 survey flights, DePinte found that the most obvious damage seems to have been temporary: Damaged areas are mostly green again with new growth. Further research, by Still’s team and others, will investigate possible lingering health effects, including whether the trees become more susceptible to pests, disease and death.

Researchers will also consider how foresters and tree farmers could respond, as extreme heat waves become more common. Adaptations might include planting certain species together to shade more vulnerable trees, determining which native trees are most tolerant to extreme heat, and planting species on farms or after wildfires that are already adapted to hotter conditions farther south.

“We need to be smart about what trees we’re planting so that we have forests in the same places,” DePinte said. “We’ve got to think hundreds of years into the future: What is this area gonna look like? And then plan accordingly.”

Update 02/28/23: This story was updated to remove a photo that showed a tree damage unrelated to the heat wave and to include a photo that shows the effects of acute hot weather injury.

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Conifer forests across Europe are under siege from a tiny threat with a gigantic impact. Abnormally high temperatures and summer droughts have helped populations of the Eurasian spruce bark beetles (Ips typographus) soar, eventually killing the trees. Forest management entities are rushing to fix the problem. In July 2022, the United Kingdom’s Forestry Commission began a new management program to handle outbreaks of beetles and to combat future spread, particularly in southwestern England. Germany alone has lost half a million hectares of forests since 2018, with spruce tree species being hit particularly hard by the species, also called the European bark beetle. 

[Related: Mother dung beetles are digging deeper nests to escape climate change.]

These small beetles burrow into the bark of Norway spruce trees, and once inside, they mate and lay their eggs. They also seem to preferentially attack the spruce trees that are already infected with a symbiotic fungus, such as Grosmannia penicillata, which is believed to weaken trees and break down their chemical defenses. This allows the beetles to successfully reproduce within the bark.

In a study published February 21 in the journal PLoS Biology, a team investigated the chemical signals that the insects use to identify host trees that are infected with the fungus. The team performed experiments in a lab on captive bark beetles and samples of Norway spruce bark. 

The experiments found that the fungus breaks down monoterpenes–chemicals present in tree bark resin–into new compounds, including camphor and thujanol. They also found that the fungus-produced compounds dominated the chemical mixture emitted by the bark samples after 12 days of infection. 

Additionally, single cell recordings of sensory neurons in the beetles’ antennae revealed that the bugs can detect camphor and thujanol. Behavioral experiments found that the bark beetles were attracted to the bark that had these fungus-produced compounds. The compounds may allow bark beetles to assess the presence of the fungus and find trees that are suitable to eat and breed in. 

[Related: The government is raising an army of parasitic wasps to fight invasive beetles.]

According to the study authors, understanding the role that these chemical compounds play in bark beetle attacks could help create better pest-management strategies and protect European conifers from future epidemic outbreaks.

“The bark beetles currently killing millions of spruce trees every year in Europe are supported in their attacks by fungal associates,” said study co-author Jonathan Gershenzon, a biochemist from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, Germany, in a statement. “We discovered that these fungi convert volatile compounds from spruce resin to products, which may serve as cues for bark beetles to find them.”

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Western forests are a modern artifact. Gaze upward, and you’ll see needles overlapping needles, blocking out the sky. Peer around, and you won’t see far through the congestion of shrubs, young trees and vines. Look down, and you will see duff, debris and non-native plants. Primeval forests, by contrast, were a patchwork of varying densities, often sparsely populated by leviathan trees lording over a healthy, diverse and fruitful understory.

The strange new state of modern forests makes them more flammable. 

Severe wildfire —which kills most of the trees in its path — has increased eightfold in 30 years. The burned forest is often replaced by shrubland, extinguishing a once-magnificent ecosystem.

Decades of scientific research and field practice have landed on a powerful tool for preventing severe wildfire — and helping forests become more resilient to climate change: fuels reduction. This term includes both thinning, the mechanical removal of shrubs and small trees, and prescribed burning, the purposeful introduction of fire under favorable conditions.

Wildfire ecologists almost universally support fuels reduction — especially in forests that used to flourish under frequent ground fires, such as the ponderosa pine forests of the Southwest. There is no sizeable cohort of scientific dissent, but forest managers still struggle to put it into practice. Thinning is the target of prolific misinformation, while nearby residents may see prescribed burning as a nuisance or threat, sometimes with good reason. 

Here’s a brief rundown on fuels reduction, wildfires, and what most scientists think we should do to protect forests and homes:

Thinning is not logging. To its opponents, thinning is a form of “silviculture by stealth,” as wildfire historian Stephen Pyne put it. Pyne, however, says thinning is more like “woody weeding.” Logging, he explained, harvests large, mature trees over large areas, while thinning mostly removes small trees. Logging makes money; thinning almost always costs money. “When you hear something like ‘fuels reduction logging,’ that’s a classic conflation,” said Gavin Jones, research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service and lead author of a paper on wildfire misinformation published last September in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

Thinning does not make wildfires more destructive. One line of misinformation claims thinning creates “hotter, drier, and windier conditions that favor the spread of flames.” “Yes, but they favor the spread of flames on the surface,” said Pyne, “and that’s where you want it.”

Thinning followed by frequent ground fire is generally beneficial; it promotes nutrient cycling and maintains an open forest structure that won’t get dense enough to invite a crown fire.

Thinning is not a climate change risk. Detractors say thinning contributes to climate change by depleting carbon reserves in the form of forests. That’s not entirely inaccurate, but it overlooks an important point: Forests in need of thinning are already “pretty darn at risk of total loss from wildfire and drought,” said Jones. Thinning sacrifices a portion of the carbon reserves in order to save the ecosystem and the remaining carbon reserves.

Thinning should be followed by prescribed fire. “If you don’t follow it up with the right fire, then it’s worthless, and in many cases may have made it worse,” said Pyne. Thinning and prescribed burning are the one-two punch that will knock out many severe wildfires. Prescribed fires do have drawbacks: They are complicated to plan and execute, they dump unwanted smoke on communities, they’re subject to litigation, and in rare instances they can spark destructive burns. Nevertheless, they are sorely needed, and without them, thinning rarely succeeds. Updated policies, funding and new programs could reduce the risks and increase the use.

The vast majority of scientists approve of thinning, though a quick Google search may seem to show otherwise. Chad Hanson, director of the John Muir Project, is thinning’s most vocal opponent. His opinions have appeared in dozens of news clips, reports, letters to Congress, lawsuits, op-eds, webinars, books and interviews. In 2019, Jones co-authored a paper criticizing Hanson’s methods and conflicts of interest in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

Jones argued Hanson and his coauthors were guilty of unscientific practices, including “mixing science and litigation without disclosing potential conflicts of interest,” “pressuring scientists and graduate students with different research findings to retract their papers,” and “selectively using data that support their agendas.”

In 2021, a group of more than 20 fire ecologists led by Susan Prichard, Keala Hagmann, and Paul Hessburg published a trio of scientific reviews in the journal Ecological Applications, refuting some of the most persistent misinformation about wildfire. In answer to the question, “Are (fuels reduction) treatments unwarranted and even counterproductive?” they argued the evidence was clear: No.

Still, misinformation and confusion surround fuels reduction. For example, thinning, which by definition happens before a burn, is at times conflated with salvage logging, or harvesting mature but dead trees after a wildfire or a disease outbreak. While there are practical and ecological reasons for salvage logging, such as road safety or avoiding future wildfires in downed dead trees, the trade-offs between benefits and ecological detriments are less clear. Many scientists say more research is needed to employ salvage logging for ecological benefit.

“All these decimated towns were not taken out by tsunamis of flame raging through the woods — they were taken out by embers.”

Fuels reduction also has its limits. It can help save forests from obliteration — but it might not protect the towns nestled within them. This is because even low-intensity fires can ignite human-built structures from afar.

“All these decimated towns were not taken out by tsunamis of flame raging through the woods — they were taken out by embers,” said Pyne. “They come in as a kind of blizzard of sparks. Once a house or two gets started, then it spreads structure to structure.” Fuels reduction can help save forests, but saving towns means using fire-savvy construction: ignition-resistant building materials, ember-trapping ventilation systems, and defensible space around structures.

In short, thinning and prescribed fire are critical for preserving Western forests. But they won’t save forests on their own: Climate action is imperative, too.

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Wildfires have a multitude of impacts on an ecosystem. While many are negative, some animals thrive after fire, from the charred remains serving as shelter for insects and small animals like the black-backed woodpecker and spotted owl.

In a study published February 6 in the journal Molecular Ecology, researchers from the University of California, Riverside (UCR) examined how the 2018 Holy Fire in California’s Orange and Riverside countries affected bacteria and fungi over time after the flames were extinguished. The fire burned more than 23,000 acres of land and destroyed 24 structures.. 

[Related: Wildfires are burning away snow in the American West.]

Sydney Glassman, a UCR mycologist and co-author of the study, led a team of researchers into the burn scar or the noticeable mark on the land left by a wildfire. “When we first came into fire territory, there was ash up to my shins. It was a very severe fire,” Glassman said in a statement.

Over the next year, the team visited the scar nine times, comparing the charred earth with samples from unburned soil found nearby. The mass of microbes dropped between 50 and 80 percent and didn’t recover during that first year post-fire. But some species found a way to live on. 

“Certain species increased in abundance, and in fact there were really rapid changes in abundance over time in the burned soils,” Glassman said. “There were no changes at all in the unburned soils.”

Multiple microbes took turns dominating the burned soil in the first post-fire year, with distinct shifts in microbes over time. “As one species went down, another came up,” Glassman said.

In the early days post-fire, microbes with a high tolerance for fire and higher temperatures were found. As time went on, the team found more fast-growing organisms that have a lot of spores dominating, as they appeared to be able to take advantage of space with little microbial competition. 

The organisms that could consume charcoal and post-fire, nitrogen-filled debris tended to be most dominant towards the end of the year. 

Fabiola Pulido-Chavez, a UCR plant pathology PhD candidate and co-author of the study noticed that the genes involved in methane metabolism doubled in post-fire microbes. Methanotrophs are microbes that regulate the breakdown of methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas. 

“This exciting finding suggests post-fire microbes can ‘eat’ methane to gain carbon and energy, and can potentially help us reduce greenhouse gasses,” Pulido-Chavez said, in a statement.

The team tested whether the fungi and bacteria could thrive at different points in time based on their individual traits or if another reason was behind the shifts in dominance in the soil.

[Related: Fires can help forests hold onto carbon—if they’re set the right way.]

“We think one organism can’t be good at all the skills necessary to thrive in a burn scar,” Glassman said. “If you’re good at tolerating heat, you’re probably not as good at growing fast.”

The process in the post-fire soil is similar to what happens in the human body under stress. For example, when a patient takes an antibiotic, the medicine destroys gut bacteria and new organisms begin to show up that either weren’t prevalent or weren’t there before at all. Eventually, the gut bacteria may return to pre-infection state, but that’s not guaranteed. 

The team is working to understand what processes help the land return to the pre-fire state. This knowledge could change older theories on how plants adapt to wildfires, since microbes like these were not factored into them. “To me, this is exciting, as microbes have long been overlooked, yet they are essential for ecosystem health,” Pulido-Chavez said.

A yet unanswered question is whether plant and microbe adaptations that have developed here could adapt again in response to another megafire or recurrent fires in the same area. Future research could look into how rising temperatures, earlier snowmelt, longer dry seasons, and increased wildfires caused by climate change has on natural burn recovery. 

“Things can recover, but it takes time, and whether or not the land recovers after super-frequent megafires is another story. Can recovery time keep pace with megafires? We don’t know yet,” Glassman said.

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Ecosystems aren’t landscape paintings so much as mosaics, with different pieces that grow and change over time. In healthy forests, patches of recent disturbance, such as fire or logging, sit alongside patches of grasses and shrubs, fast-growing trees and centuries-old mature forests. But these ecological patterns require a climate stability that no longer exists. 

Due to human-caused climate change, California’s forest mosaics are vanishing. According to a study published in AGU Advances last July, the state’s forests lost almost 7 percent, or just over 1,700 square miles, of tree cover since 1985. That’s an area larger than Yosemite National Park. In particular, forests in California’s southwestern mountains lost 14 percent of tree cover.

Jon Wang, the study’s lead author and an Earth systems scientist at the University of Utah, said that at the current rate, “in a hundred years, we will have lost almost 20 percent of our forests. That’s like all of Southern California’s forests being gone, or all of the Southern Sierras being gone.” 

Thousand-year-old forests now get only a decade or less between fires to recover. California’s forests are “never going to get a chance to become old-growth forest again,” Wang said. Instead, they may have “more of a permanent stunted state.” And aridification means that forests once considered fairly fire-resistant, such as old-growth coastal redwoods, can no longer rely on wet weather conditions for fire protection. 

The dramatic loss of many of California’s giant sequoias, ancient trees that lived with fire for thousands of years, particularly troubles Wang’s co-author James T. Randerson, an Earth systems scientist at the University of California, Irvine.

“You can extrapolate out what’s going to happen to the forest,” Randerson said. “It’s horrific.”

“You can extrapolate out what’s going to happen to the forest. It’s horrific.”

To track how California’s forests changed over the past few decades, researchers used machine learning, training an algorithm to identify vegetation types in satellite images taken every few days, dating back to 1985. The algorithm differentiated between three causes of tree death: wildfires, logging and drought. As it turns out, far more of California’s tree cover is disappearing due to wildfires than from drought or logging.

The sheer amount of data that this study provides is important, said Philip Higuera, a fire ecologist at the University of Montana, who was not involved with the research. “The ability to quantify changes, not only from fire, but from forest die-back, and from timber extraction — to be able to do all of those three at once — is really valuable, because it helps place them in context” throughout California, Higuera said.

To be clear, wildfires remain a natural part of healthy forest ecosystems across the West, and controlled burns are important tools in forest management. But California has a fire deficit. Colonizers stamped out Indigenous fire-management practices, so fuels keep building up, leading to ever more destructive conflagrations. Today, the astronomical costs of living in California’s cities encourage  people to move into forests, and fires follow. And those fires, combined with drought, are quickly changing California’s ecosystems. 

With effective fire management, some Northern California forests might eventually grow back. But in the southern mountains, where forests are dying even without fires because of drought stress, chaparral may replace trees permanently. 

One limitation of this study is its timescale. “Thirty-five years is a long study from the perspective of using satellite data, but in the context of forest development and ecosystem change, it can still be relatively short,” Higuera said. Wang and Randerson also cautioned that this research doesn’t model future fire recovery, so more work needs to be done before drawing conclusions about whether these ecosystem changes are permanent. 

Meanwhile, California is proposing an ambitious plan to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2045. Right now, Wang said, the carbon offset market is really focused on growing trees. But his data suggests that California may have to lower its expectations. “We might be moving to a paradigm of saving what’s there,” he said.  

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Verra, the world’s leading provider of already controversial forest carbon offsets utilized by major corporations like Shell and Disney, may actually be making the planet’s dire climate crisis even worse. The new allegations come courtesy of a months’ long investigation recently undertaken by The Guardian alongside Germany’s Die Zeit newspaper as well as the nonprofit journalism outfit, SourceMaterial, adding to an already questionable picture of the $2 billion a year voluntary emissions offset market.

Carbon offsets are increasingly relied upon by corporations to meet publicly stated “net neutral” environmental goals. To accomplish this, projects such as tropical reforestation are financed by these companies, who then rely upon complicated calculations from sources like Verra to determine how much the green investment counteracts their own emissions.

[Related: Dozens of companies with ‘net-zero’ goals just got called out for greenwashing.]

Although frequently touted by some of the world’s largest companies in an effort to assure consumers that their purchases and investments aren’t contributing to ecological catastrophe, multiple studies already showcase the carbon offset industry’s problematic, misleading, and often harmful consequences.

According to findings in multiple studies cited by The Guardian, however, over 90 percent of Verra’s most popular rainforest offset credits are in reality “phantom credits.” These credits do not result in “genuine carbon reductions,” in fact  one study found that 21 out of 29 Vera-approved projects had no actual climate benefit. Another 7 underperformed Verra’s expectations by as much as 98 percent. One project actually had 80 percent more of an impact than claimed. In another study of 40 Verra projects by a team at the University of Cambridge, only four were responsible for three-quarters of the total protected forestation.

[Related: What successful forest reforestation looks like.]

Critics and experts point towards the so-far wildly uneven, complicated, and frequently fluctuating standards within the carbon offset market as one of the key impediments to producing meaningful, restorative results. Yadvinder Singh Malhi, a professor of ecosystem science at the University of Oxford, told the Guardian  that, “this work highlights the main challenge with realizing climate change mitigation benefits from [forest offsetting projects],” known as Redd+ schemes. “Many of these projects may have brought lots of benefits in terms of biodiversity conservation capacity and local communities, but the impacts on climate change on which they are premised are regrettably much weaker than hoped.”

The implications of the newest findings are particularly troubling, in that it appears companies claiming progress towards carbon neutral goals may actually be backsliding. Although some companies mentioned in the investigation said they’d look further into the discrepancies or move away from carbon offsets in favor of other eco-strategies, businesses like Shell appeared to double down on their commitment to Verra’s methodologies and offerings. Verra, for its part, strongly disputes the investigations’ data, according to rebuttals reported by The Guardian.

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National parks are the few places left in the continental United States where wild animals can roam free. In recent years, however, many mammals on these protected sanctuaries have come under pressure from roads and highways surrounding parks that restrict their migration, and other human activities like development that force them to move.

A new study focusing on western US national parks suggests that connecting them could give mammals like grizzly bears, wolverines, mountain lions, and gray foxes a few hundred more generations to live. The authors hope the study, published on January 11 in Scientific Reports, will push the Biden administration to support these linkages as part of their pledge to protect 30 percent of the United State’s habitat by 2030. 

“We believe this probably would be the most beneficial protection of lands to protect large mammal communities of any place in the US,” says William Newmark, lead author of the study and a conservation biologist at the Natural History Museum of Utah. “So this should definitely be a priority for the Biden administration’s efforts to protect 30 percent of all lands.”

The study’s authors drew up two hypothetical networks that connect the parks through ‘corridors,’ which are strips of natural habitat that connect animals otherwise separated by roads, cultivated land, and other human activities and structures. In the first network, they linked Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming to Glacier National Park in Montana. In the second, they connected Mount Rainier National Park to North Cascades National Park, both of which are in Washington state.

[Related: A new mapping method could help humans and wildlife coexist]

The team chose corridors already known to be the safest and easiest paths for mammals to migrate between the parks. They also considered if the corridors were adjacent to wilderness areas and if they intersected known migration routes. Based on these conditions, they identified four corridors between Yellowstone and Glacier and one corridor between Mount Rainier and North Cascades.

After conceptualizing these two protected area networks, they then calculated how rapidly medium and large mammals larger than about a pound in size would disappear in the networks compared to their individual parks. The persistence time, or the length of time that a species will survive in a habitat fragment like a national park, by 4.3 in a hypothetical network that incorporates not only the parks, but also the corridors, adjacent wilderness areas and known migratory routes.

That means by linking the national parks, the number of generations for mammals in the Yellowstone-Glacier network would gain 682 generations, and mammals in the Mount Rainier-North Cascades network would increase by 305 generations.

“We’ve known that larger patches of habitat support more species for longer periods of time than smaller patches, and practically this means that animals in isolated parks and reserves will eventually go extinct,” Dan Blumstein, a conservation biologist and professor at UCLA who was not involved in the latest study, wrote in a statement to Popular Science. “The statistical approach Newmark and his colleagues used here shows the value of connecting isolated parks and can inform the basis of increased land protection,” he explained. 

[Related: Animals notice—and adapt—when humans are in national parks]

If built, the corridors to connect these national parks would run almost entirely through public lands managed by the US Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. Less than 4 percent of the corridors the study’s authors proposed would be on non-public land, Newmark says. That non-public land is largely in reservations managed by tribes or private farm land. Newmark says he doesn’t imagine any situation where the government would force them to sell the land, which is a tactic used to build railroads, national parks, and other public projects known as eminent domain. Instead, he believes landowners either reach an agreement to amicably sell the space to the government, swap land with the government, or allow for conservation easements, which are voluntary legal agreements that prohibit development of the land. 

Newmark says that medium and large mammals are among the most threatened species in the continental United States. Creating networks of national parks would be a cost effective tactic to conserve large mammal communities, he says. Those land connections could be even more important under a changing climate.

“Our national parks are increasingly becoming habitat islands in a sea of human-ordered habitat,” Newmark says. “By linking these parks, not only do you address the adverse effects of habitat fragmentation and loss on species and habitat remnants, but you also allow species to more readily shift their geographic ranges in response to climate change.”

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OVER THE LAST CENTURY, seas have risen by roughly a foot, making sunny-day floods a regular occurrence, particularly on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Under the most dire climate scenarios, the ocean around the United States will go up another two to seven feet by the year 2100. As higher tides climb up America’s coastlines, which are far too developed to move residents away from the water entirely, the country will need to embark on a campaign of coastal defense building—sea walls, levees, and floodgates—to protect urban areas as varied as Houston, New York City, and Charleston.

In the South, where seas are rising fastest and hurricanes are intensifying, much of that work has already begun. Those efforts hold clues for how future strategies might take shape across the country. Buffering the nation’s coastlines, experts warn, will require thinking beyond conventional barriers like levees. “We can’t afford to turn our entire East Coast into downtown New Orleans. Imagine what the cost of that would be,” says Pippa Brashear, who leads resilience planning at SCAPE, a landscape architecture firm behind engineered oyster reefs being installed off NYC’s Staten Island.

The builders of the most expansive traditional ocean barrier in the US are likely to break ground soon. Over the summer, the Army Corps of Engineers—the federal agency responsible for the bulk of national flood infrastructure—received $31 billion from Congress to build a “spine” of protection for Houston and Galveston. The project, which would protect the cities and Galveston Bay’s industrial corridor from hurricanes, is modeled on Dutch coastal defenses; it will chain together sand dunes, levees, and sea walls. The central component, a 2-mile cement gate system known locally as the “Ike Dike,” will swing closed during storm surges. Once the Corps breaks ground, the project will take 15 to 20 years to build—by which time, critics say, it may fail to protect against future storms due to shifts in sea levels and climate.

Miami-Dade County has decided to pursue another path, one that coastal experts say could be more flexible against changing baselines. Last year, county and city governments rejected a proposed Corps sea wall in favor of a “hybrid” plan from a local developer that would absorb and redirect water. It shields the mainland first with oyster reefs, then an earthen ridge covered in mangroves, and, finally, a much shorter sea wall. In September, the Corps agreed to reexamine its plan, and it expects to break ground on the approach it selects in 2025.

Nature-based flood control projects like Miami’s might be able to address more risks than hard infrastructure alone. Corps-designed sea walls can hold back surges, but they aren’t necessarily capable of defending against high-tide floods or heavy rain. In some cases, the barriers can even trap waves on the wrong side. A system designed to soak up water can resist different types of stress—while also creating wildlife habitat and urban green space. Although houses might still need to be elevated on pilings, “You’re still able to live day to day” on the coast, Brashear says.

Engineered wetlands and barrier islands won’t replace sea walls entirely, however. They also require intensive maintenance and monitoring, says Joshua Lewis, an ecologist specializing in urban water management at Tulane University’s ByWater Institute. But rebuilding, if governments are willing to invest in it, presents an opportunity: Because marshes and breakwaters must be restored after powerful disasters, he says, “You have to be willing to have them fail and re-imagine them.” Each time, hopefully, you get better at withstanding the ocean’s might.

This story originally appeared in the High Issue of Popular Science. Read more PopSci+ stories.

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Early on Monday morning, delegates at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP 15) reached a historic deal representing the most significant effort ever to protect the world’s dwindling biodiversity. It also provides funding in an effort to save and preserve biodiversity in lower-income countries.

The “30 by 30” deal was agreed upon by delegates from nearly 200 countries gathered in Montreal, Canada. The pledge vows to protect 30 percent of the Earth’s wild land and oceans by 2030. Currently, only 17 percent of terrestrial and 10 percent of marine areas are protected through legislation.

[Related: Why you can’t put a price on biodiversity.]

“We have in our hands on a package which I think can guide us as we all work together to halt and reverse biodiversity loss and put biodiversity on the path to recovery for the benefit of all people in the world,” Chinese Environment Minister Huang Runqiu said to applause just before dawn on Monday. “We can be truly proud.”

However, the ambitious goals face a steep climb. Countries have fallen short of goals set in similar deals. A 2010 meeting in Japan was the last time this governing body set any major conservation targets, and they have not met any of them.

While the document includes reforms to subsidies that make fuel and food so inexpensive in some parts of the world, some environmental advocates want tougher language around those subsidies.

“The new text is a mixed bag,” Andrew Deutz, director of global policy, institutions and conservation finance for The Nature Conservancy, told the Associated Press. “It contains some strong signals on finance and biodiversity but it fails to advance beyond the targets of 10 years ago in terms of addressing drivers of biodiversity loss in productive sectors like agriculture, fisheries, and infrastructure and thus still risks being fully transformational.”

In addition to the 30 by 30 pledge, the deal aims to raise $200 billion by 2030 to preserve biodiversity. The financing package asks for increasing the money that goes to low-income countries in Africa, Asia, and South America by at least $20 billion per year by 2025 and by $30 billion annually by 2030.

The financing component of the deal was one of the more contentious issues. Countries home to most of the world’s rainforests and habitats wanted reassurances that money from donors and governments would help them better protect landscapes and police against illegal logging and poaching.

Colombia’s environmental minister Susana Muhamad emphasized that the agreement must, “align the resources and the ambitions.” Additionally, Democratic Republic of Congo environment minister Ève Bazaiba, told The Washington Post over the weekend her country is committed to the “30 by 30” goal, but that her government needs financial helps to protect the Congo Basin. “When it comes to fauna, we need to have the means to achieve this objective,” she said.

[Related: Here’s where biodiversity is disappearing the quickest in the US.]

Before the vote, Pierre du Plessis, a negotiator from Namibia who helped coordinate the African group, told the AP, “all the elements are in there for a balance of unhappiness which is the secret to achieving agreement in UN bodies. Everyone got a bit of what they wanted, not necessarily everything they wanted.”

Today, Canada’s environment minister Steven Guilbeault compared the 30 by 30 deal with the United Nations’ landmark 2015 Paris agreement, in which countries pledged to keep global temperature increase below 2 degrees Celsius and ideally closer to 1.5C (2.7F). “It is truly a moment that will mark history as Paris did for climate,” Guilbeault said to reporters.

This deal was also over two years in the making. The final proceedings were originally scheduled for 2020 in Kunming, China, but were postponed and moved to Montreal due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Human beings are the driving force behind the planet’s dramatic loss of biodiversity. The forces of climate change, pollution, and habitat loss have threatened more than one million animal and plant species with extinction, a rate of loss that is 1,000 times greater than previously expected. Additionally, about 1 out of 5 people depend on 50,000 wild species for income and food.

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Last month, the US Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Justice announced more than a million dollars in penalties against companies for polluting local waterways. The culprits? Four solar farms in Illinois, Alabama, and Idaho.

“The development of solar energy is a key component of [the Biden] administration’s efforts to combat climate change,” said Larry Starfield, an administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in a press release on November 14. “These settlements send an important message to the site owners of solar farm projects that these facilities must be planned and built-in compliance with all environmental laws.”

Each of the large-scale solar projects, which shared a common contractor, violated construction permits and mismanaged storm water controls, causing harmful buildup of sediment in waterways. As private companies race to build renewable capability, the EPA’s case with the four solar farms illustrates a central challenge: While gleaning energy from the sun might be a panacea to overconsumption of fossil fuels, building a clean power grid that can harness solar energy is often more complicated.

[Related: Solar power got cheap. So why aren’t we using it more?]

Experts say a path to net zero emissions will almost certainly require solar energy—and that calls for a hard look at the challenges these sweeping facilities face with clean construction and more ethical production of panels.

Building and recycling solar panels

Most solar panels used in the US today start out as sand. Scientists purify the grains into almost pure crystalline silicon, but the process requires a large amount of electricity. Almost 80 percent of a solar panel’s carbon footprint can come from this purification process alone, according to Annick Anctil, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Michigan State University.

“Where that electricity is coming from is really important,” Anctil says. “If you’re making solar panels in a place where electricity uses coal or natural gas, that makes your solar panels not as green as if you’re able to produce it from solar energy.”

Solar panels are built to last about 30 years. At the end of their lifecycle, installers can either throw them into a landfill or recycle them, but there isn’t much infrastructure for reusing the materials in the panels since the industry is new. 

Government agencies, organizations, research groups, and companies worldwide have begun developing technologies and creating recycling programs to break down solar panels and materials. The US-based Solar Energy Industries Association, for instance, has been creating a network to help consumers identify where they can recycle their solar panels and installers find a place to purchase recycled modules, Anctil explains. The association reports it’s processed over 4 million pounds of solar panels and related equipment since its recycling program launched in 2016. Luckily, if panels wind up in landfills, the glass and silicon materials are not toxic, Anctil says. (She does note that the metal frame needs to be broken down, too.)

There isn’t comprehensive data about how many solar panels are recycled versus thrown away in the US. Large-scale production of solar panels only began about 10 years ago, so it’s likely that most haven’t reached the end of their life cycle yet.

Grading land for solar farms

Solar panels are easier and cheaper to install on leveled ground, which often requires companies to mow down trees and local vegetation. Leveling, or grading, the land can lead to soil erosion and eventually sediment runoff, where storms force eroded soil to travel downhill, sometimes into waterways. Too much soil in bodies of water can disrupt local ecosystems, hurt the plants and animals that live in them, and damage drinking water treatment systems.

In the recent settlement, the EPA and Department of Justice charged the four solar farms with violating the Clean Water Act by failing to prepare for the sediment runoff created during construction. The agencies alleged that two of the farms in Idaho and Alabama even discharged sediment illegally into nearby waterways.

Dustin Mulvaney, an environmental studies professor at San José State University in California whose research focuses on solar energy commodity chains, says these violations appeared to be “really manageable problems” that the companies should have had under control. “Where [solar farms often] go wrong is they assume they understand the landscape,” Mulvaney says. But when building starts, “they run into endangered species conflicts, stormwater issues, and air pollution issues.”

Grading the land for solar farms “is like any other road construction project,” Anctil says. “It’s just unfortunate that some companies in the construction [process] just didn’t care or weren’t careful.” The runoff from building these recent solar farms could have been avoided by, say, planting vegetation to catch some of the soil and water.

Anctil and Mulvaney say that regulations can help prevent these kinds of water and pollution issues from construction projects. While the bidding process for projects varies from state to state, stronger government assessments could ensure that solar companies preserve the environments they’re otherwise capitalizing on.

Since farmland is already flat and offers room to scale up, it’s been a prime candidate for solar projects—with energy companies incentivizing farmers with financial returns. But converting this land into solar farms also presents cultural and wildlife issues. Farmers may be reluctant to see their land converted from rows of crops to rows of synthetic panels. 

While the construction process has the potential to cause significant land disturbance, solar farms do offer some immediate benefits to farmers and the environment, David Murray, director of solar policy for American Clean Power, wrote in a statement to Popular Science. In some setups, growers can plant crops between or alongside the panels. “Ecosystem services are an understated benefit of large-scale solar sites and once operational, solar facilities yield less nutrient runoff and require far less pesticide and herbicides compared to row crop agriculture,” Murray writes. 

Accountability from start to finish

The four solar farms that violated the Clean Water Act are all subsidiaries of international finance and investment companies. But Mulvaney argues that what’s even worse are inexperienced solar developers that build a single arm and then soon disband. He’s seen “quite a few projects” handed to these temporary companies.

“When you have these entities that do one-offs and then vaporize, there’s absolutely no accountability at all,” he says. “That’s a structural problem.”

[Related: Dams show promise for sustainable food systems, but we should tread lightly]

While public and private groups might feel the urgency in building renewable energy systems, it’s important to be cautious about how the systems themselves are built and sourced, Anctil says.

“The problem is people tend to just look at how much electricity is going to be produced,” she explains. “We need to plan and choose panels considering not just the electricity production but the full lifecycle.”

A more environmentally conscious process is needed from start to finish. Sand should be legally and ethically mined, Anctil says. Developers also need to consider how to build sustainable  solar arrays that minimize the impacts on the local habitat. Better recycling plans should be in place for the solar panels once they reach the end of their lives. And like with any other major construction project, renewable energy companies should take heed of state and federal environmental regulations.

“I’m not trying to kill solar,” Anctil says. “It’s making sure that in 5 or 10 years from now, we don’t find out there’s a new environmental disaster.” 

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Massive wildfires in recent years have wreaked havoc in the US—causing health complications, disrupting industries, and displacing long-standing residents. While climate change has intensified wildfires across the country, scientists have said that the US Forest Service’s past policy is partially to blame. In the 20th century, the agency extinguished all wildfires, even small fires that posed no immediate danger to human lives and infrastructure. 

However, ecosystems like those in the southwest require some fire to remain healthy. Regular fire prevents the forest from overgrowing, clears out dead organic material, and encourages the growth of certain plant species. In the past few decades, forestry managers have attempted to recreate wildfire management practices from the Indigenous peoples who were once the primary stewards of the land. 

One such practice is creating controlled “good fire” also called prescribed burning. Intentionally burning parcels of land helps kill off fuels, like grasses and small trees, that would feed massive and destructive wildfires. But scientists have wondered how much of an effect these cultural burning practices had on the ecosystem when fire ran its natural course, before the Forest Service’s suppression policy existed. A new study from Southern Methodist University gives new insight on how much of an effect Indigenous burning practices had on the land.

The study, published on December 7 in Science Advances, examined the burning practices of three different tribes native to the southwest and compared it to the size and intensity of historic wildfires. Using tree ring records, the researchers found that prescribed burning served as a buffer for climate conditions from the years 1500 to 1900.

[Related: How we can burn our way to a better future]

The data reflected a typical climate-fire pattern in the southwest: one to three years of above average rainfall followed by a year of significant drought. The rainfall allowed more vegetation to grow, then drought dried out the grass—becoming fuel that encouraged fire to spread. This pattern occurred regardless of whether tribes practiced prescribed burning or not. But when they did burn, the practice weakened the climate linkage, meaning the timing and the size of fires weren’t as influenced by moisture patterns, the study authors explain.

“This study is very careful in where it looks, in what period of time it looks at, and how it looks at the fire-climate relationship versus fire frequency, your fire seasonality,” says Christopher Guiterman, study coauthor and fire ecologist at the University of Colorado Boulder. “That to me uncovers the fingerprint of Indigenous management in a way that had not been shown before.”

Much of what the study did was break down exactly how and when tribes used fire. Each tribe included in the study—Navajo Nation, Pueblo of Jemez, and the Apache tribe—used fire differently depending on their economic and cultural conditions. The Diné of Navajo Nation used fire primarily to manage pastures. On land where their sheep grazed, fire incidence was less frequent. But land that served as travel corridors, where the grass grew freely, had higher fire incidence. The Hemish people of Pueblo of Jemez used fire in horticulture to clear fields and recycle nutrients. They also used it to burn shrub patches to usher in long, straight re-sprouted branches, which are good for basket weaving. The Ndée of the Apache used fire to manipulate wild plants, help grow tobacco, and drive deer into certain areas.

[Related: Fires can help forests hold onto carbon—if they’re set the right way]

While the total amount of area burned remained the same after prescribed burning, the size of burn patches differed from periods with no prescribed burning. Rather than one large wildfire, there might be small patches of fire. “Lots of small, prescribed burns can help reduce climate vulnerability of places that matter to us, whether those are around human communities or other parts of the landscape,” says Christopher Roos, the lead author of the study and a professor of anthropology at Southern Methodist University.

Roos says that Indigenous knowledge and expertise played an integral part in shaping how the paper communicated prescribed burning practices. Four tribal members coauthored the recent study. The team relied on archaeological evidence of prescribed burning to determine when tribes occupied the land. But the record isn’t perfect. The Ndeé, for example, have left a light archaeological trace but members say they’ve been on the land since time immemorial. “Nobody was comfortable with the idea that people were absent, even in the absence of archeological evidence,” Roos says. “So it’s not periods of use and no use, or periods of presence and absence. It’s periods of intensive use and light use.”

Roos hopes the study could provide strategies to policymakers in the face of increasing massive wildfires in the southwest. These Indigenous practices have shown positive benefits for the environment and for people, says Roos. 

“I’m not Indigenous, but I try to hold up a banner to those in decision-making positions that Native American folks have managed fire for centuries in these landscapes,” he says. “These long histories of Native Americans and fire should give us hope about what we can do, rather than just feeling helpless in the face of climate and wildfire challenges.”

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Since 1990, the planet has lost about 420 million hectares of forest. That’s almost twice the size of Greenland. 

Most of the time, trees are cleared for agricultural expansion, which means converting forests into croplands and areas for grazing. Deforestation is responsible for around 20 percent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions every year, making it a huge contributor to climate change. This explains why reforestation, the intentional restoration of forest cover where it naturally occurs, is necessary.

“In addition to reducing emissions directly, restoring forests is one of the key tools at our disposal to help moderate excess greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere by drawing down carbon into biomass,” says Lindsay F. Banin, a statistical ecologist at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology in England. Forests have a huge carbon storage potential because trees pull carbon from the atmosphere as they grow and store it in wood and plant matter.

Banin says that forest restoration supports biodiversity, not only for plants and trees but also for other living species by providing additional habitat for them. It can also regulate local and regional climate and hydrology, she adds, which means helping reduce the climate-associated impacts of altered water cycles in watersheds and protecting coastal communities from increased storms.

[Related: We can plant trees to save the planet. But it’s harder than it sounds.]

But reforestation efforts aren’t always successful. A 2017 study on mangrove planting initiatives in Sri Lanka found that nine out of 23 restoration project sites had no surviving planted tree at all. Since reforestation plays a huge role in mitigating climate change, looking into long-term survival and understanding how to ensure positive outcomes is crucial.

In a new study published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Banin and her co-authors assessed 176 restoration sites in tropical and sub-tropical Asia to analyze tree survival and growth.

“Forests in tropical and sub-tropical regions have the capacity to grow and sequester carbon quickly because of long or year-round growing seasons,” says Banin. “Once forests have matured, forests in the tropics store relatively high amounts of carbon in biomass.” Moreover, forests in tropical and sub-tropical Asia have suffered from degradation and conversion over the last century, so there is an opportunity for restoration (and research) in the region, she adds.

According to the study, the average mortality of planted saplings was about 18 percent within its first year, rising to 44 percent five years after planting. The survival rates typically varied among different restoration sites and tree species. “Our study showed that some of the variability we observed was explained by the habitat condition at the planting site,” says Banin. “On average, survival was about 20 percent higher when there were trees remaining at the site versus open degraded conditions.”

Restoration efforts can be less successful in areas with little to no tree cover because the physical, chemical, and biological properties of the soil may be more disturbed due to a history of activities like clearfell or selective logging, agriculture, fire, or mining. Additionally, there might be increased competition and suppression from grasses, weeds, and ferns.

Meanwhile, saplings’ proximity to mature trees may increase their chance of survival because their root systems benefit from mutualistic fungi that can enhance survival and growth.

[Related: 4 ways the Inflation Reduction Act invests in healthier forests and greener cities.]

The height of the tree when it is planted also plays a role in its early survival, especially at degraded sites. Data shows that larger seedlings tend to withstand environmental challenges better. The authors also found that active restoration—assisting the recovery of a degraded ecosystem, like holding tree planting activities—can help the site gain forest cover more quickly than natural regeneration.

While the study identified some factors that may lead to positive reforestation outcomes, it’s necessary to highlight that not every site will be the same. Variation in outcomes did not seem to be explained by large-scale environmental factors like rainfall, says Banin. Therefore, they might be due to environmental variables that the study was not able to capture, like droughts or soil conditions, the presence of weeds and competing plant species, and the details of restoration like species choices and maintenance practices, she adds.

Overall, the study provides a basis for further research about restoration practices, which may help support successful outcomes. “Restoration has the potential to be successful, but we must identify and address common barriers and challenges to success,” says Banin.

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As the 2022 United Nations climate change summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt (COP27) heads into its second and final week, three countries are taking action to protect the world’s tropical rainforest. Brazil, Indonesia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, three countries that are home to more than half of the world’s tropical rainforests, signed a pact to protect these unique ecosystems. The joint statement was signed ahead of the G20 summit, a separate UN meeting that begins today.

The nations pledged to work together and establish a “funding mechanism” that could help preserve the Earth’s crucial rain forests. The three leaders also pledged to cooperate on sustainable management and conservation, the creation of economies that will ensure the health of both the landscape and people, and restoration of critical ecosystems.

[Related: Brazil’s presidential election is a win for the Amazon—and the planet.]

Throughout the world, these tropical rainforests are hotspots for biodiversity and help regulate Earth’s climate by serving as a carbon sink. Their rapid destruction over the years has released carbon dioxide, which has largely contributed to global warming. Conserving the jungle that remains and regrowing deforested land can help mitigate this process.

“South-to-south cooperation – Brazil, Indonesia, DRC – is very natural,” said the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Environment Minister Eve Bazaiba prior to the signing. “We have the same challenges, the same opportunity to be the solution to climate change.”

The plan currently doesn’t have any financial backing of it’s own, but the representatives from these countries will also work to negotiate more funding to help developing countries preserve their biodiversity and increase funding through the United Nations’ REDD program for reducing deforestation.

According to Brazil’s environmental minister Joaquim Leite, the main goal of the partnership is to attract private investors who will would offer money in exchange for assurances against deforestation. “The most important point is that we can create a group to present the minimum standards for the asset of native vegetation, and a way to recognize and pay for this asset,” he told The New York Times.

[Related: The Amazon is on the brink of a climate change tipping point.]

Brazil’s president-elect, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, additionally addressed COP27 today and promised to end deforestation in the Amazon during his presidential campaign. Deforestation increased under former Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro. Lula has also promised to give more representation to Indigenous people and make Brazil an environmental leader on the global stage. He officially takes office in January 2023.

This new rainforest agreement has implications ahead of the UN Biodiversity Summit (COP 15) in Montreal this December. This summit has a goal of negotiating a deal to protect and restore biodiversity, however, previous international agreements to protect rainforests, such one from last year’s UN climate change conference, haven’t really changed the trajectory of deforestation.

According to a report by the National Institute of Space Research in Brazil, the Amazon rainforest alone lost over 13,000 square miles of tree cover between 2019 and 2021. Additionally, deforestation has continued to rise the Democratic Republic of Congo, which lost 1.2 million acres in 2021.

However, forest loss in Indonesia declined by 25 percent last year from 2020, according the World Resources Institute. It was the fifth year in a row of falling totals country-wide.

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This article was originally featured on High Country News.

Editor’s note: This story contains a graphic description relating to the loss of a child.

The heat was in the triple digits when Lea Bossler and her U.S. Forest Service engine crew reached the blaze unfurling in a canyon outside Nogales, Arizona. As she trekked up a hill with her shovel-like rhino tool, flaming barrel cacti tumbled down the slope, igniting more parched fuels along the way. Despite the heat, a 45-pound pack and little sleep, Bossler felt strong and capable, mopping up the edges of the fire, extinguishing collapsed cactuses that smoldered like burnt rubber. This was her third season as a wildland firefighter, and she was well on her way to fulfilling her goal of becoming an incident commander.

After the fire was contained, Bossler and her crew drove home to Missoula, Montana, concluding a two-week roll in the Southwest. It was early July 2020, the middle of a record-breaking fire season that would burn over 10 million acres across the country, and Bossler was resting before her next assignment. There was a coronavirus outbreak at her partner’s workplace, and just a couple of days after she came home, she caught a debilitating case of COVID-19. Now, more than two years later, the 32-year-old still hasn’t recovered. Long COVID has not only damaged her health, it has also forced her to give up her career in firefighting.

Currently, over 19 million people in the United States—1 in 13 adults—are living with long COVID, though some estimates place the number as high as 23 million. Long COVID is a complex condition that affects all age groups and can involve multiple organ systems. It’s diagnosed weeks or months after a COVID-19 infection. Some of the symptoms include cognitive dysfunction, respiratory and cardiovascular problems and extreme fatigue, though roughly 200 other symptoms are recognized, and some can linger for years. Many patients meet the diagnostic criteria for other diagnoses, as well. Those include postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, which causes extreme dizziness, headaches and rapid heart-rate; and myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME)—sometimes called chronic fatigue syndrome—a disabling neurological disease that has been underfunded for decades.

A World Health Organization official recently warned that repeated infections may increase the risk of long COVID. A recent US Census Bureau survey analyzed by the National Center for Health Statistics showed that as many as 1 in 5 adults who were infected with COVID-19 now have symptoms of long COVID. 

While the number of US wildland firefighters affected is unknown, the workforce is considered at high risk of contracting COVID-19: In 2021, the leading cause of line-of-duty deaths in wildland firefighters was COVID-19. Firefighters are already stretched thin due to the prolonged and intensified fire seasons caused by climate change. Long COVID is not only affecting firefighters’ health and livelihoods, it could also seriously hamper their response to the escalating crisis.

Firefighters are a strikingly transient workforce, making them more vulnerable to catching and spreading COVID-19. “You have firefighters and other fire personnel who are traveling from all over the country to arrive at one common location,” said Matthew Thompson, a research forester with the Forest Service.

The lack of sanitation and privacy in the camps, combined with fatigue, heat, physically demanding work and other factors add to that vulnerability, according to the National Wildfire Coordinating Group (NWCG), which provides leadership to wildland fire operations among federal, state, local, tribal and territorial partners. One of the largest COVID outbreaks at a fire camp occurred during the 2020 Cameron Peak Fire in northern Colorado, with 79 positive cases and 273 close contacts who were quarantined. A Forest Service press officer emailed that among nearly 11,000 permanent and temporary agency firefighters, there were 1,847 reported cases of COVID-19 within the past 12 months. 

In a recent modeling study, Thompson and his co-authors found that social distancing and vaccination reduced outbreaks in fire camps, though their study did not assess long COVID or the highly contagious omicron variant. (According to a 2022 study in the journal Nature Medicine, vaccination may only slightly reduce the risk of long COVID.) Thompson’s study also found that firefighters were infected even more often outside of fire camp than within it, meaning that they are continually at risk as the US eases preventative measures, allowing for dangerous peaks that can occur in the heart of fire season. 

The NWCG recommends COVID safety prevention practices for wildland firefighters based on guidance from the Centers for Disease Control. But a widely referenced CDC document about COVID and wildland firefighters doesn’t specifically mention long COVID.

In a review published last year, Kathleen Navarro, a researcher at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, noted that particulate matter—including the hazardous mixture of small particles and droplets found in wildfire smoke—could contribute to a greater likelihood of COVID-19 infection in wildland firefighters, as well as more severe illness. “It’s not only the risk of transmission or getting COVID,” said Navarro. “It’s also the severity of outcomes.” 

But firefighters face a risk of long COVID, no matter the severity of their acute case: A 2022 white paper stated that nearly 76 percent of those diagnosed with long COVID have not been hospitalized.

Bossler returned to work after her 14-day quarantine despite not feeling fully recovered. “I went back hoping I would go back to normal,” she said. “But I really didn’t. I worked through it because you just don’t pass up opportunities as a female firefighter.” She often felt like she was drowning as she continued to fight fires across Montana the rest of the summer. 

“There’s an attitude in firefighters that you don’t quit for anything,” she said. “And there’s just no education, warning, or recognition of long COVID in fire.” 

Advocates for those with chronic illness warned of the possibility of complex chronic illness following COVID-19 in the beginning of the pandemic, but the federal government’s public health apparatus did not amplify these messages and still doesn’t consistently emphasize the risk of long-term health effects following an initial case. “I can only assume that I did more damage to myself,” she said. “I gave in to this notion that because I was young and healthy, I’d be fine, when I knew, deep down, there was something really wrong with me.”

A growing number of physicians warn that resuming activity while not yet fully recovered may increase a person’s likelihood of developing long COVID. But owing to financial hardship, inadequate sick leave and other pressures, many workers in the United States push on through their illnesses. 

Bossler continued to work on her crew through the summer, despite lingering symptoms. But then, in late August, she found out she was pregnant. She said she likely conceived around the time she first contracted COVID-19 in early July 2020.

In a joint decision with her superiors, Bossler transferred from the engine crew to a timber strike team for the rest of the season. Her due date was in May, and she planned to take a Forest Service office job that summer and resume working as a firefighter the following season—assuming she recovered from long COVID. But these plans were put on hold in January when she gave birth to her daughter, Maesyn, prematurely, at only 25 weeks. Her baby suffered fetal inflammatory response syndrome due to the maternal history of COVID, and Bossler’s placenta was filled with blood clots, which contributed to placental failure and abruption. “A COVID-affected placenta looks like you took a roadkill deer, took the liver out, and shot it with a shotgun a couple of times,” Bossler told me. 

When she first went into the hospital at 23 weeks with contractions from early labor, Bossler was told there was only a 30 percent chance of her baby surviving. Her daughter weighed just 1 pound and 6 ounces at birth when she arrived two weeks later and gained only 5 more pounds during her 115 days in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. She died on May 14, 2021, close to her original due date. In Maesyn’s final moments, Bossler was able to take her daughter out of the NICU to see the sky for the first time. Maesyn died outside in the spring sunlight, in the arms of Bossler and her partner, Marcus Cahoon.

Now, over two years since she first contracted COVID, Bossler continues to experience debilitating long COVID symptoms. She cannot walk more than half a mile without feeling fatigued and also struggles with headaches and memory loss, and has difficulty paying attention. She has chest pain that she says has worsened significantly since she was reinfected in June. Bossler believes her pregnancy complications made her more aware of her illness, which she might otherwise have been too stubborn to acknowledge. “I know of people that have long COVID that are still trying to be firefighters,” she said, “but I don’t think they have the same understanding or recognition of it that I might have. 

“I think all employers of wildland firefighters would be doing a huge disservice to their employees to not recognize long COVID and the mental health challenges that come from it,” Bossler said. When I reached out to the Forest Service in August about the agency’s approach to long COVID education and prevention, I was told to contact the United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which oversees all federal employees. The Interior Department, which employs over 5,000 temporary and permanent wildland fire personnel, wrote that it develops policy based on recommendations from the CDC and Safer Federal Workforce Task Force, which is led by the White House COVID-19 Response Team, the General Services Administration and the OPM—none of which offer publicly available guidelines on long COVID. The Office of Personnel Management sent a written statement in response to our request for comment but did not elaborate on its policies related to long COVID.

“(First responders’) careers depend on our health and us being able to respond to a fire or an emergency at any point of time, despite how we feel,” said Karyn Bishof, the founder of the COVID-19 Longhauler Advocacy Project, a nonprofit advocating for education, research and patient welfare. She said that many first responders, including wildland firefighters, are reluctant to speak about health issues for fear of losing their livelihoods. “The flip side of that is if they’re not seeking treatment and care, they’re not only risking their own lives, but possibly the lives of their crews.”

Bishof became infected with COVID after an outbreak at her firefighter paramedic training in the city of Palm Beach Gardens in South Florida. She told me she was later let go from her job on the Fire Rescue team without explanation. In late 2020, Bishof was also denied workers’ compensation after a doctor diagnosed her symptoms as psychosomatic, a common experience for many patients with complex chronic illness. She has since filed a discrimination lawsuit against the city of Palm Beach Gardens. The city did not respond to my request for comment.

Like other infectious diseases, including Lyme, mononucleosis and SARS-1, COVID-19 can develop into complex chronic illnesses. Researchers have consistently found a range of abnormalities in long COVID patients, including micro clots, persistent viral reservoirs, reactivated viruses and autoimmune responses. The US Department of Health and Human Services has recognized that the condition can be a disability, but in the fall of 2021, Bishof—like many long COVID patients—was denied Social Security disability benefits. She reapplied but was denied a second time and is now awaiting an appeal hearing.

Because there is no cure for long COVID, Bishof said that preventing COVID-19 and increasing public awareness of its long-term consequences are paramount, especially in protecting first responders. She’s concerned that if long COVID continues to affect one of every five infected people, it will inevitably effect public safety. “If we lose that percentage of that workforce, what does that mean for emergency response times?” she asked. “What does that mean for wildfire response?”

In testimony before a Senate Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis this July, Katie Bach, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said that policymakers need to support improved health care, sick leave, disability and workplace accommodations for workers. Given that as many as 4 million long COVID patients are unable to work, Bach estimates a cost of as much as $230 billion in lost earnings alone, not including other costs, such as health care or reduced productivity. 

The Forest Service and Interior Department offer sick leave for employees exposed to communicable diseases, like COVID-19, as well as disability accommodations that can include teleworking and more flexible work hours. Federal firefighters who can’t work at all due to long COVID contracted on the job may be eligible for workers’ compensation, according to an Interior spokesperson. But employees infected outside of work are not eligible for any benefits, according to guidelines by the Office of Personnel Management. 

Looking back at her experience over the past two years, Bossler says the Forest Service needs to develop policies that help protect firefighters from long COVID, as well as provide support for those affected by it. She was forced to leave her job at the Forest Service when she went into early labor. “It was a medically forced resignation,” she said. After her daughter’s birth, she considered returning to the agency, but at that point, she was still grieving and unable to work full-time due to her long COVID symptoms. 

In the fall of 2021, she began working part-time as a health unit coordinator in the same neonatal intensive care unit that treated Maesyn. A number of the nurses there, like other first responders, also suffer from long COVID. “I wanted to work somewhere that would understand me,” Bossler told me. 

“I learned how to handle all these traumatic situations by relying on the lessons from fire,” Bossler said. Maesyn’s brief life and death had such a profound impact that Bossler feels an obligation to continue telling her daughter’s story while educating people about this chronic illness. “I think about other firefighters that lost their ability to do their job.

“It’s not just your job. It’s your identity. The grief that comes with that is just not discussed enough.” 

This story was supported by the journalism nonprofit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Miles W. Griffis is an independent journalist based in Los Angeles, California. We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

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Before the creation of national parks and monuments, designated wildlife refuges, and the United States government, the Indigenous peoples who lived on the land cared for it based on intimate knowledge of local ecosystems. A powerful push in the last couple decades by many of those original inhabitants reasserting their claim to those lands have led to more “co-management” structures, where official management procedures include soliciting tribal input. Returning stewardship of the land to tribes would mark a culturally significant change—their knowledge, retained through generations, would be invaluable in the midst of a global biodiversity crisis. 

Every example of co-management in the US looks slightly different. Legislation transferred stewardship of the National Bison Range in western Montana to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes in 2020, and presidential decree re-established the Bears Ears Commission this summer, giving five tribes input in decision making for Bears Ears National Monument. Legal decisions, like the 2018 Supreme Court decision acknowledging tribal fishing rights, granted by treaties in the 19th century, required Washington state to repair damaged infrastructure that was contributing to salmon population decline. 

“Co-management can take all kinds of forms, from substantive, meaningful, timely consultation with tribes all the way to Congress delegating authority to a tribe or tribes to jointly make decisions for a piece of land with Congress,” says Monte Mills, director of the University of Washington Law School’s Native American Law Center. “The important thing is the actual work of meaningfully engaging tribes, so that they have real influence.” 

William Housty, a member of the Heiltsuk First Nations people in British Columbia, Canada and the conservation manager of the tribe’s resource management department, knows firsthand what a difference it can make when first inhabitants have decision-making power over their land, and how hard it is to reach that point. 

[Related: An Indigenous scientist’s perspective on conservation]

In Bella Bella, the ancestral homelands of the Heiltsuk in what’s now midcoast British Columbia, provincial maps based on insufficient data used to be the basis for managing native grizzly bears. The Heiltsuk, with biologists from University of Victoria and the nonprofit Raincoast Conservation Foundation, started collecting data on the bears’ range and movements in 2006 to build their own range maps that they now use for management decisions for bear habitat in their land. The group has since developed a model for incorporating Indigenous knowledge and voices into conservation decisions.  

As is apparent in the Heiltsuk’s monitoring project around Bella Bella, most traditional knowledge and Western science is rarely in conflict—particularly as Indigenous and First Nations science has gained legitimacy and acceptance in some academic corners. Housty, who draws on his university studies in natural resource management as well as traditional Heiltsuk knowledge, says that caring for wild areas would ideally weave these sources of wisdom together.

“The aim for the project was to use Heiltsuk knowledge to produce data from a Heiltsuk point of view, and use science to back up what we were seeing already from using traditional knowledge,” Housty says. 

Instead, the tension is with governments that don’t make decisions based solely—or even primarily—on optimal ecosystem health. States, and provinces in Canada, are also balancing financial and industrial interests that often conflict with conservation, such as when they lease public land for mining and drilling, or to ranchers whose cattle damage habitat. 

[Related: Indigenous farmers are ‘rematriating’ centuries-old seeds to plant a movement]

Under Secretary of the Interior and Laguna Pueblo citizen Deb Haaland, the Biden Administration’s Department of the Interior (DOI)—which manages over 70 percent of US public land, and also contains the Department of Indian Affairs—has made an effort to actively include Indigenous voices in the conversation. The long-term impact of bringing in traditional knowledge remains to be seen in many of these projects, but it’s well-established that globally, areas stewarded by Indigenous people are often ecologically healthier and home to an outsized portion of threatened and endangered species.

However, there’s a limited amount that the DOI, or state resource management agencies, can do. Given the history of treaties and Federal Indian Law, there’s a case that tribes should have co-managing power on equal footing with the federal government, but in the US “agencies are part of the executive branch, and may be hesitant to give co-decision making power to tribes without explicit direction from Congress,” explains Mills. 

But both Mills and Housty emphasize that many tribal governments have been able to regain at least partial control of the lands they and their ancestors have stewarded for centuries—something that may be to the benefit of nonnative people, too. 

“People need to realize that most of these places have been occupied by people for years and years—real, functioning governments have existed here, and they need to be acknowledged and part of decision making,” says Housty. “The days of making policy and ramming it down the throats of First Nations people, those days are over.”

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Tapping into green energy such as hydropower, wind, and solar energy is more important now than ever. But, these three powerhouses are not the only “renewable” energy sources on the scene. Compared to hydro, wind, and solar, biomass had the largest percentage share of total US energy consumption in 2021. 

Biomass refers to renewable organic materials from plants and animals, which include wood and wood processing wastes, agricultural crops, and animal manure, among others. Natural biomass resources can help fulfill energy demand, and unlike other renewable energy sources, they can also be converted directly into biofuels for transportation use.

In 2021, the United States produced about 17.5 billion gallons of biofuels. While this fuel source isn’t without controversy, the global biofuel demand is expected to increase by 28 percent by 2026. However, biomass feedstocks are not immune to the impacts of climate change. 

Climate change poses a direct threat to biomass sources

To have biomass, ultimately, we need plants to grow. In a sense, biomass supply and availability ultimately depend on the climate. 

“Increasingly dryer and hotter weather conditions pose a threat to successful cultivation, and ultimately, the yield of agro-derived biomass feedstocks,” says Victor Ujor, assistant professor of food science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “With a near-global drop in rainfall, plant growth and yield will fall dramatically, if this trend continues.”

Aside from having fewer agricultural residues for use as biomass, lower crop yields can also lead to more and more non-agricultural land being converted to use for food crops. This could lead to a reduction in non-agricultural biomass and increased use of fertilizers, says James Clark, professor of chemistry at the University of York in England.

Wildfires are also happening more frequently, becoming bigger and more intense, and spreading further thanks to climate change. These raging fires can eliminate forest-derived plant biomass, most of which takes longer to grow, says Ujor. 

[Related: Biofuels are having a government-funding moment.]

Overall, worsening climate change threatens the availability of biomass, affecting not only the supply of biofuels, but also the capacity of a negative emission technology called bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). Negative emission technologies refer to those that remove and sequester carbon dioxide from the air.

BECCS extracts bioenergy from biomass via combustion or processing, which may release emissions because plants absorb carbon from the atmosphere as they grow. However, these emissions are captured and stored through geologic sequestration, the method of securing carbon dioxide in underground geologic formations to prevent its release into the atmosphere. As of 2019, five facilities around the world were using BECCS technologies and capturing about 165,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year.

According to a new Nature study, the capacity of BECCS may decrease in the future due to the effects of climate change on crop yields and biomass feedstocks. Therefore, it must be utilized sooner rather than later, the authors argue.

If global mitigation strategies alongside large-scale BECCS are employed in 2040, global warming may reach 2.5 degrees Celsius in 2050 and 2.7 degree Celsius in 2100, says Clark, who was involved in the study.

Only by starting to use this strategy at a much larger scale by 2030 will we meet the Paris goal of limiting global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius by 2100, he adds. The study emphasizes that there is an urgency to use BECCS in the near future to mitigate climate change and avoid serious food crises, unless other negative emission technologies become available to compensate for its reduced capacity.

Bioenergy use still poses environmental risks—even when paired with carbon capture 

If BECCS can help blunt the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, what’s preventing its large-scale deployment today?

The cost may be the single most important factor, says Ujor, and we still need massive investments in research to develop cost-effective BECCS strategies. Estimates show that it may cost up to $200 per ton of CO2 sequestered. This is costly compared to another negative emission technology called direct air capture with Carbon Storage (DACCS), which can cost as low as about $94 to $232 per ton of CO2 from the atmosphere.

“The cost of trapping, storing and compressing CO2 is enormous,” says Ujor. “At present, the economics does not yet add up positively to warrant scale up at the level that we direly need the technology to work.”

Also, the energy sources of BECCS operations are, for the most part, fossil-based, so it could be counterproductive to put more CO2 in the air in an effort to trap and store CO2, he adds. Shifting energy sources away from fossil fuels may be necessary first.

Technical barriers also exist, specifically, the safe storage of carbon dioxide. The security of a storage site is crucial because the leak of highly concentrated carbon dioxide would be dangerous for public safety, the ecosystem of the site, and the Earth’s climate. Extensive studies need to be conducted to determine how well and how safely CO2 can be stored without harming the environment, says Ujor. 

[Related: Tech to capture and reuse carbon is on the rise. But can it help the world reach its climate goals?]

However, BECCS remains controversial because of concerns about the sustainable scalability of the technology. According to Nathanael Greene from the Natural Resources Defense Council, the amount of land, water, and nutrients needed to produce enough biomass may threaten biodiversity, water supply, and nutrient balances. 

Based on integrated assessment models, a massive deployment of BECCS in an effort to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius may require about 25 to 80 percent of current global cropland. Meanwhile, growing biomass crops for BECCS to meet the Paris goal of 2 degrees Celsius might require more than double the amount of water currently used worldwide in irrigation for food production. 

Given its potential impact on resources and biodiversity, the scale of BECCS deployment must remain within certain conditions where it is beneficial. For instance, the amount of carbon removed from the atmosphere through BECCS may be offset if there is a significant land-use change to meet a 1.5 degrees Celsius climate change target.

When it comes to bioenergy crops, there’s also the risk of taking arable land away from growing food. “If food is used to power cars or generate electricity or heat homes, either it must be snatched from human mouths, or ecosystems must be snatched from the planet’s surface, as arable lands expand to accommodate the extra demand,” says Guardian columnist George Monbiot.

Ujor says this may be mitigated by targeting reclaimed surface-mined lands for growing bioenergy crops, as well as continuing to develop strategies and plants that can do more with less. “We need to develop agro technologies that allow us to grow more with less,” he adds. “Breeding and engineering crops that generate greater yield whilst using less water and fertilizer—both for bioenergy and food crops—are particularly important to this quest.”

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American bison were once so numerous that in 1889 the superintendent of the National Zoo wrote that trying to count them would be like tallying “the number of leaves in a forest.” It’s much of the reason why the exact ecological impact of North America’s largest land mammals was never measured, before colonizers hunted them to near-extinction in the 19th century. But current efforts to restore them to their historic range have affirmed what conservationists and Native Americans have been saying for decades: Bison are critical to the prairie’s health.

New research on the long-term benefits of reintroducing bison shows that their presence makes the land more biodiverse and resilient to drought. A paper published this week in the journal PNAS measures the ripple effects of the giant grazers on the tallgrass prairie ecosystem that used to stretch from modern-day Texas to Minnesota and cover 170 million acres of North America. Today, only about 4 percent of the old-growth prairie remains, mostly in the Flint Hill region of Kansas where the study took place. The data, which spans multiple decades following the bison’s return, is unequivocal: The herbivores more than doubled the number of native species in tallgrass habitats.

[Related: Wolves and beavers can have magical ecosystem effects—if they have space to thrive]

“Bison are the type of organism you’d expect to have a large impact,” says Zak Ratajczak, a biologist at Kansas State University and lead author of the study. “They’re very large, travel long distances, and can consume plant species on a scale that changes competition.”

They also specialize in eating big bluestem and other tough grasses that are more likely to be passed over by other herbivores—including non-native cattle. These grasses grow fast and tall, shading out other plants that serve a wide range of functions, such as wildflowers that support pollinators and legumes that fix nitrates in the soil. Given enough time, says Ratajczak, “the cumulative, cascading impacts [of the bison] are large.”

Since the 1980s, scientists at the 8,616-acre Konza Prairie Biological Station in Kansas have documented changes to plant biodiversity with the reintroduction of the bison herd, whose numbers in recent years have held steady between 275 and 300. For comparison, they also tracked the health of areas of tallgrass prairie that were munched down by cattle, as well as parts that went entirely untouched. 

Besides the clear positive impact of the bison, they found a few other key differences. First, while cattle grazing wasn’t even half as effective as bison grazing, it was better for biodiversity than no grazing at all. And second, bison-occupied prairie was better able to weather periods of drought, thanks to greater variety in plant species and newly stimulated growth from grazing. 

“It’s heartening to see resilience that it could weather some degree of warming,” says Ratajczak, pointing out that this will be especially important with the predicted increase in intensity and frequency of extreme heat in the near future due to climate change.  

[Related: The secret to curbing farm emissions is buried in the Stone Age]

Eric Patterson, the head ranger at the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, sees the park’s herd of about 100 reintroduced bison having a similar impact on the variety and abundance of local plant species. He tells visitors of the nearly 11,000-acre site, which is located in same Flint Hills region as the research station, that “grazing is a fundamental component to maintain balance in the prairie ecosystem,” along with moisture, fire, and human use. 

Still, both Patterson and Ratajczak stress that, while returning bison to the prairie is fantastic as far as biodiversity goes, it’s not a conservation cure-all. Historically, the megafauna likely played a central role in balancing life on tallgrass prairie—but only about 4 percent of that ecosystem remains intact. Today, cattle grazing, agriculture, and urban development dominate the Great Plains. 

“I could see how people could see this as a cattle versus bison story,” says Ratajczak. “But an important thing I hope doesn’t get lost is that cattle can have a positive impact on native species, too.” 

To that end, Patterson says some biologists are using the knowledge they’re gaining from studying reintroduced bison to develop cattle-grazing practices that mimic the wild herbivore’s impacts. He and Ratajczak also point out that in recent decades, cattle ranchers have helped maintain the critical burn regimen previously sparked by lightning and Native Americans. 

[Related: For prairie flowers, fire is the ultimate matchmaker]

“Bison earn every accolade they get, but there aren’t many left,” says Patterson. Findings from pockets of intact prairie like the Kansas Flat Hills need to be adapted for the grazers—and landscapes—we still have. 

“Places like [the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve] are awesome,” Patterson adds. “But 11,000 acres is just a museum artifact if we fail in the larger mission to encourage better stewardship of everything else.” 

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Putting a price tag on necessities will always be a challenge. The climate crisis has shown us over and over how we struggle to estimate the actual worth of a product—whether it’s a cheap plastic bottle that ends up living for hundreds of years in the ocean or fossil fuels which are made affordable with heaps of subsidies.

According to a new report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), valuing nature through economics severely undercuts the actual worth of biodiversity. When we prioritize economic and political benefits, we sell nature severely short—which leads to biodiversity loss. 

The report was approved by all 139 IPBES member nation representatives in Bonn, Germany, on Saturday. It follows another IPBES study showing that billions of people worldwide rely on 50,000 wild species for ecosystem services such as food and energy. 

“Biodiversity is being lost and nature’s contributions to people are being degraded faster now than at any other point in human history,” Ana María Hernández Salgar, the chair of the international organization, says in a release. “This is largely because our current approach to political and economic decisions does not sufficiently account for the diversity of nature’s values.”

The paper, authored by 82 scientists across every region of the world, assessed more than 13,000 references, including over 1,000 studies and 50 approaches to value nature. They found that only 2 percent of the studies reviewed consulted stakeholders like indigenous populations at all on valuation findings, and only 1 percent consulted them at every step of the process.

“Valuation is an explicit and intentional process,” Mike Christie, assessment co-chair and professor of environmental and ecological economics at Aberystywth University in the UK says in the IPBES release. “The type and quality of information that valuation studies can produce largely depends on how, why and by whom valuation is designed and applied. This influences whose and which values of nature would be recognized in decisions, and how fairly the benefits and burdens of these decisions would be distributed.”

[Related: What is ‘degrowth’ and how can it fight climate change?]

When it comes to actually knowing how valuable something is, we tend to leave out certain factors on the list that don’t necessarily have the explicit economic costs—such as the expense of recycling or carbon removal. But this also can work in reverse, when something has more value than can just be captured with a dollar sign.

We’ve seen this happen repeatedly over and over again in the valuation of forests as carbon credits. This has happened recently, with Mexican communities being severely underpaid for their reforestation efforts to ‘cancel out’ emissions from energy companies like BP. 

For example, if we were to evaluate  nature’s worth based on contribution to gross domestic product, as is the predominant measure, the only thing really considered about nature is what can be bought or traded in the market, according to the authors. 

What gets left out are quality-of-life improvements for people who have access to nature and the risks of overexploitation due to short-term economic goals. Biodiversity policies rarely  incorporate the views of those who rely on nature for their livelihood, the authors write. At the end of the day, the groups making money off of nature are the only ones who have their “value” of nature represented. 

Additionally, the viewpoint held by some wealthy nations that nature and humankind are independent is not representative of how all cultures interact with the planet. “Almost all industrialized countries behave in nature like at a flat-rate party: you help yourself indefinitely—without thinking about the hangover the next morning,” says German politician and economist Jan Niclas Gesenhues in a statement.  “But this very logic at the expense of nature has brought us into a situation where not only are species dying out and ecosystems collapsing, but where the Earth is heading for unprecedented warming.” 

Luckily, the study isn’t all bad news—the authors found certain perspectives that can improve future valuations. These perspectives are living from, with, in, and as nature. To better put a price tag on biodiversity in nature, we need to consider what nature can provide for us, the rights of other species to survive independently of our needs, the crucial role nature plays in terms of a person’s place and identity, as well as how we humans are a part of nature ourselves. 

Some existing  policy ideas consider these perspectives and incorporate the diverse values of nature, including those related to the “green economy,” “degrowth,” and “Earth stewardship.” These policy ideas are different, and may have conflicting objectives: A degrowth economy means an economy that doesn’t grow at all, for instance, compared to a green economy that still emphasizes economic growth. But they all take into account more than just the monetary value of a biodiverse planet, says study co-chair Unai Pascual. 

In recent years, taking a non-economic stance has successfully defended nature from economic pressures, including the Indian government’s decision not to mine the biodiverse and culturally sacred Niyamgiri mountain for bauxite, the world’s main source of aluminum and gallium. 

It’s not too late to consider more than short-term profits when measuring the merit of nature. But this report is a warning against underselling biodiversity as the world continues to battle climate change.

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Not even a tenth of all the plastic ever created has been recycled. Instead, millions of tons of waste end up in our oceans yearly, according to the US Interior Department. The department acknowledges that the US drives a significant amount of that waste, with the government being one of the largest consumers of plastic products.

To that end, US Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland recently ordered her agency to phase out the purchase or distribution of single-use plastics on the hundreds of millions of acres of public land the department oversees. But, an official ban on single-use plastics wouldn’t hit until 2032.

Within roughly nine months, the Interior Department’s various bureaus and offices will need to submit draft plans for how and when they will gradually reduce their purchase and use of single-use plastic products, according to the order. The order will also require staff to file “annual reporting on progress” and other related administrative milestones.

“Plastic waste is a priority environmental problem. Less than 10 percent of all the plastic ever produced has been recycled, and recycling rates are not increasing,” the order, published on World Ocean Day (June 8), states. “Plastics, including unnecessary and easily substituted single-use plastic products, are devastating fish and wildlife around the world.”

Some ocean advocacy groups want the department to eliminate its use of such products much faster than that, criticizing the federal agency’s decade-long timeline for reaching that goal. “With over 11 million metric tons of plastic entering our ocean each year and plastic production expected to triple by 2060, we cannot afford to wait ten years,” Nicholas Mallos, senior director of Ocean Conservancy’s Trash Free Seas Program, stated in a press release.

The Interior Department can and should institute a ban with a much sooner deadline, says Alison Waliszewski, policy and outreach manager at the 5 Gyres Institute, a non-profit dedicated to plastic pollution reduction and research. Neither the National Park Service (NPS) nor the Interior Department, which oversees the NPS, have made an official available for an interview on the timeline for the ban.

“It is commendable that they are working to phase out the sale of single-use plastics on federal lands and US national parks,” says Waliszewski. “However, the timeline, I’d say it’s less than ideal.” After all, she says, significant scientific achievements like putting a human on the moon took less time than that.

Still, despite a push for faster timelines, Mallos tells Popular Science that vendor contracts may hold the department back from a more rapid transition. Vendor agreements may not give officials much flexibility to end deals early, and certain contracts might only allow the bureaus and offices to select from certain single-use plastic goods. Those contracts often have a fixed period as well. 

To that end, Haaland’s order requires department officials to review vendor contracts “to identify single-use plastic product reduction opportunities and challenges.” Essentially, officials must look for language in the agreements that either expedite or hinder progress toward the goal. But what a more aggressive timeline might look like is difficult to calculate without more information about the current contracts and the products, Mallos says.

“It’s hard to know with precision an appropriate timeline for eliminating single-use plastics [within the department’s purview] because we’ve never tried,” says Mallos. “It’s not dissimilar to [electric vehicles]—a decade ago every car maker said it was impossible, now we have three different EV pickup trucks on the market.”

However, he notes that single-use plastic water bottles “are the easiest to remove,” partly because water reuse and refill technology, like reusable water bottle stations, is already normalized outside federal lands.

Mallos explained that safe dispensers and bins already exist for hygienic storage and sale of dry goods and snacks “could likely be the next shift we see” within the department. Still, any individually wrapped foods (like single-serving, plastic-wrapped granola bars ubiquitous on any national park trip) would be “the hardest items” to go plastic-free.

[Related: Horrific blobs of ‘plastitar’ are gunking up Atlantic beaches.]

Haaland’s order also instructed the Interior Department’s bureaus and offices to analyze “nonhazardous, environmentally preferable alternatives” to single-use plastics, including compostable or biodegradable products. “Bags made of paper, bioplastics, and composite can replace single use plastic bags, as can reusable cloth or thicker plastic alternatives,” the order stated. “Bottles made of bioplastics, glass, and aluminum, and laminated cartons can replace single-use plastic bottles, as can reusable bottles made of glass, aluminum, or stainless steel.”

But not all products that aren’t wholly derived from fossil fuels will necessarily be better options. Mallos added that the department shouldn’t rush the transition—products that are often just as environmentally unfriendly as single-use plastics can’t simply be swapped in. He notes that many compostable products only break down as intended in industrial facilities. Many containers seemingly made of paper will still have plastic liners, so it’s critical to have the “back-end infrastructure [to ensure] materials chosen aren’t equally indisposable.”

Mallos and Waliszewsk specifically expressed concern over bioplastics as a potential replacement avenue. They are made at least partly from plant-based materials like corn or sugarcane, bioplastic single-use utensils, bags, bottles, and even packing peanuts. But Mallos notes that while bioplastics may have a climate benefit because of their lack of fossil fuels, they still break down and pollute ecosystems. 

Additionally, chemical toxicity concerns with traditional plastics aren’t necessarily avoided with bioplastics, as bio-based plastics and conventional plastics often contain several chemicals that make them similarly toxic, according to a 2020 study in the journal Environment International.

“I think what the most concerning aspect … is the multiple mentions of bioplastics as a solution and that’s really alarming,” says Waliszewsk. “It doesn’t matter if plastics are made from plants, they still end up having the same impact as plastics derived from fossil fuels [because] they still end up being single use items that are toxic or used for maybe 15 minutes and then break up into smaller pieces.”

While visitors to America’s federal lands and national parks can help by only bringing and leaving with durable, reusable packaging and goods, Mallos says that a combination of legislation and commercial innovation will be the most effective tools to deal with the dilemma.

“Industry-led innovation was a major contributor to the plastic pollution crisis and it is going to have to be part of the solution to getting out of it,” says Mallos, calling the new Interior Department policy “an important forcing function.”

“We just need policies and regulations to step up and force [commercial manufacturers of plastic products] to use this innovation to drive towards a more circular economy.”

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This gallery was originally published in bioGraphic, an independent magazine about nature and conservation powered by the California Academy of Sciences, and media partner of the BigPicture Photography Competition.

In a time when biodiversity is taking hits from all sides, whether it be climate change, human development, or pestilence, the California Academy of Sciences’ BigPicture Photography Competition both celebrates wildlife and brings the many issues it faces to the fore. This year’s winners and finalists span everything from the “insect apocalypse” to predator-people conflicts to fascinating mating behaviors. Here are our favorites from the judges’ savvy choices (we’ll never turn down the chance to share a good bee orgy). —PopSci editors

[Related: 7 animal mating rituals that make horseshoe crab orgies look tame]

Aquatic Life Finalist (above)

Three days before the full moon last July, photographer Tony Wu dove into a bay off the coast of Kagoshima, Japan, in search of a starry goby (Asterropteryx semipunctata)—a golf-tee-sized fish with bright, pin-prick dots scattered across its dark skin. He had been hoping to photograph the pretty, star-studded fish for weeks, and he expected to spend his whole dive focused on that task. But shortly after he spotted his first goby, Wu got sidetracked by a different stellar scene: A Leach’s sea star (Leiaster leachi) raised itself up onto the tips of its arms and began to spawn, shooting a Milky Way of sperm into the surrounding seawater.

Like many marine invertebrates, starfish reproduce by broadcast spawning—releasing large quantities of sperm and eggs into the water column within a short period of time. To maximize the chances of fertilization for these gametes, they synchronize their efforts with neighboring members of their species, using temperature, light, and lunar cycle cues to guide their timing.

Wu watched this particular starfish spawn for at least an hour. “At some point, I realized that the animal was not sending out gametes willy-nilly,” he says. “It timed its release of sperm for certain moments, perhaps as a reaction to current flow and strength.” As its gametes drifted off into the distance, he reflected on the experience of sharing such an intimate moment with a faceless, spineless creature. “I hope that capturing a dramatic scene depicting this species’ timeless quest for immortality can provide a way for others to see what I see—that we are all the same, despite our outward differences.”

Grand Prize Winner

On a warm spring morning in South Texas, a female cactus bee (Diadasia rinconis) emerged from her small, cylindrical nest in the ground, rising like ash from a chimney. Almost instantly, she was swarmed by dozens of patrolling males, their tawny bodies forming a buzzing, roiling “mating ball” as they vied for a chance to copulate with her. After a tumultuous 20 seconds or so, the ball of bees dissipated, and the female flew off—a single, victorious male holding tight to her back.

Because they make individual nests rather than living in a collective hive, cactus bees are considered solitary. However, the designation is somewhat misleading; the bees nest in close proximity to one another, and their mating aggregations can number in the thousands—a spectacular, highly charged sight for any lucky human observers. “Mating in the bee balls often takes place on extremely hot, bare ground,” says entomologist Avery Russell from Missouri State University, “so the grappling males might risk cooking themselves [to mate].” They also face stiff competition. “The sex ratio in this species is often wildly lopsided, with single females emerging occasionally, dozens of patrolling males finding her in seconds, and potentially thousands of males flying overhead,” he adds.

Mating aggregations only last for a little more than a week, so photographer Karine Aigner was fortunate to capture this particular mating ball. While rarely noticed or documented by humans, these native bees play a critical role as pollinators, especially for prickly pear (Opuntia spp.) cacti, a critical source of sustenance for many species in the dry American Southwest.

Terrestrial Life Finalist

In the pre-dawn hours of a cold winter morning in the French Alps, photographer Jose Grandío lay still in the snow, waiting for a stoat (Mustela erminea) to emerge from its burrow. He had spent the past few days waiting in the same manner, without payoff, but his patience was about to be rewarded. Shortly after the sun rose, the stoat climbed out into the pale, winter light and proceeded to put on a spectacular show. “He seemed to be playing with the fresh snow that had just fallen, making sudden jumps and crawling through the snow,” recalls Grandío.

Scientists have witnessed stoats engaging in similar displays on many occasions, and they refer to the behavior as dancing, although their opinions are divided about what motivates the leaps and twists. Sometimes, the dances are performed in front of a rabbit or large bird in a seeming attempt to confuse or distract potential prey—a strategy that has proven effective in a number of documented interactions. At other times, as was the case in the display Grandío photographed, there is no prey animal in sight, and the dance seems simply to be an expression of exuberance. A third hypothesis is that the dances are actually an involuntary response to a parasitic infection, since stoats are known to be hosts for cranial parasitic worms. Whatever the interpretation of the behavior, one thing scientists have learned is that when associated with an attack on a large prey species, these displays reduce the risk of injury to the stoat—likely because they provide an element of surprise. Such a benefit could eventually reinforce the behavior, whether it was originally intentional or not.

In this particular case, the stoat leapt and danced for about half an hour before returning to his den for the rest of the day. While the impetus for his energetic display is unclear, Grandío can’t help thinking it was “something like a game for him,” a joyful response to the pleasure of pristine snow.

Human/Nature Finalist

Two creatures face off through a woven-wire fence: one predator the other prey; one wild, the other, essentially, manufactured for our use. The moment is a manifestation of two worlds colliding, with no clear indication of which will prevail. Such images, of the natural world intersecting with one so heavily impacted by humans, have become a near obsession for Mexico-based photographer Fernando Constantino Martínez Belmar. And few places in the world present as many opportunities to capture the conflict first-hand as Martínez Belmar’s native Yucatán Peninsula, home to both the elusive jaguar (Panthera onca) and one of Mexico’s fastest-growing tourist hotspots, the “Maya Riviera.”

The largest predators in the neotropics, jaguars require a significant amount of space in order to find sufficient prey—the average home range of a male jaguar spans some 100 square kilometers (38 square miles). Inevitably, as human populations have expanded into the jaguar’s habitat, the species’ distribution has shrunk by more than half. Scientists are now working to identify conservation strategies and priorities to best support the remaining population. In Mexico, one of the most important regions of focus is the state of Quintana Roo on the Yucatán Peninsula, which is home to nearly half of the country’s 4,000 – 5,000 jaguars. Here, the cats are thriving in two protected areas: Yum Balam on the northern tip of the peninsula and Sian Ka’an some 225 kilometers (140 miles) to the south. Between the two reserves sit Cancún, Playa del Carmen, and Tulum.

Until recently, scientists had little hope that a viable ecological corridor could exist between the two protected areas, given the heavily developed land that links them. However, a radio tracking study published earlier this year suggests that jaguars are not only using this corridor—they are establishing home ranges along its route. While the cats prefer forested or secondary growth areas over profusely disturbed habitat, they are capable of capitalizing on opportunities presented by human development. One male, for instance, centered his home range on a landfill, where he found a plentiful source of prey in the form of feral dogs and other animals that scavenged at the site. It’s not an ideal scenario, but the resilience demonstrated by these individuals provides hope that with thoughtful planning around future development in the area, the Yucatán Peninsula’s jaguars can continue to thrive.

Art of Nature Winner

When photographer Pål Hermansen walked outside one brisk March morning in Ski, Norway and looked back at his house, he was dismayed. One of the outdoor lights had been left on all night, and within its bright shell, he saw the dark stains of dozens of insects, drawn to their death by the accidental beacon. As he cleaned out the fixture, Hermansen was inspired to photograph the collection of insects, hoping to shine a light on “the hidden creatures that are a foundation for our lives—creatures that we easily ignore.”

Insects are the most diverse group of organisms on Earth—scientists estimate that up to 30 million species currently exist. They are also staggeringly abundant, comprising more than half of the biomass of all animals on the planet. However, while insects still far outnumber other groups of animals, their populations have plummeted in recent decades. A 2019 paper analyzing the status and causes of these declines used the phrase “death by a thousand cuts” to summarize the crisis; climate change, deforestation, agricultural conversion, urbanization, pollution, and introduced species have all taken a toll on the planet’s insects.

While too often viewed as pests, insects perform a number of valuable functions for humans, including crop pollination, soil aeration, nutrient recycling, and disease control. They are also a critical food source for a wide variety of other species, many of which we also rely upon. As insect numbers dwindle, the potential for significant ecological and economic consequences grows. But a deeper public understanding of the decline and its ramifications may help to turn the trend around. The artfully arranged contents of Hermansen’s unintentional light trap serve as a reminder of both the plight—and the value—of these oft-unheralded inhabitants of our planet.

Aquatic Life Finalist

Each year, from August to early October, Atlantic goliath groupers (Epinephelus itajara) gather off the east coast of Florida to spawn. On dark nights when the moon is new, refrigerator-sized males produce low-frequency booming sounds by contracting their swim bladders, calling other groupers to congregate around shipwrecks or rocky reefs. Fifty years ago, more than 100 fish might answer the call. But by 1990, the slow-moving species had been fished almost to extinction, and mating aggregations were often reduced to just a handful of fish. That year, goliath groupers were protected under both federal and state fishing bans, and the population slowly began to recover. While Florida’s mating aggregations have not yet attained the numbers local fishermen recall from the 1970s, it’s now common to see 20 to 40 groupers together during the breeding season.

Photographer and coral reef ecologist Tom Shlesinger has witnessed this spectacle many times in recent years, but swimming with these 800-pound gentle giants never gets old. During one dive last September, he watched, captivated, as a large male swam calmly through a huge, swirling school of round scads (Decapterus punctatus). “It looked like he was swimming through a tunnel of fish,” Shlesinger recalls, “and I immediately knew this was the perfect moment to capture a unique perspective.”

Shlesinger cherished the experience, partly because he knows the species is once again in jeopardy. In March, despite heavy opposition from scientists who study the species, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission voted to reopen recreational fishing for goliath groupers beginning in 2023. Under the new plan, up to 200 permits will be sold each year for between $150 and $500, each of which will allow for the harvest of an adult grouper.

Goliath grouper experts Felicia Coleman and Chris Koenig from Florida State University have produced a litany of reasons why the decision is ill-advised, not least of which is that the population isn’t currently as stable as it might seem. While the number of juvenile groupers has increased in recent years, the number of breeding adults has actually declined, likely due to poaching and habitat degradation. Moreover, from an economic perspective, goliath groupers are worth much more alive than dead. As the mating aggregations have grown, a thriving ecotourism business has sprung up around them, generating revenue that far exceeds the price of the fishing permits. Additionally, goliath groupers prey on species that would otherwise eat juvenile lobsters; healthy populations of the fish have been linked to more robust lobster harvests.

“Opening the fishery for this iconic species under the current circumstances seems quite shortsighted,” Shlesinger laments. There is hope, though, in what scientists have learned since 1990—that if measures are adopted to protect the species, it is capable of recovering.

Winged Life Winner

Photographer Sitaram May used to think of wildlife photography as something he did while traveling. But when the COVID-19 pandemic swept the globe, he started to pay more attention to the wildlife in his own backyard. “One night, sitting on my balcony, I was looking out at a custard apple tree, and bats were coming frequently to eat the fruits,” he recalls. “The whole world was cursing bats, but I decided to observe them.” May spent three weeks watching the fruit bats, eventually learning to predict their behavior and identify gaps in the tree canopy where they were likely to make an entrance. At one such opening, he managed to capture this shot, perfectly framing the bat within a ring of lush, green foliage.

India is home to 12 species of fruit bats, all of which play a critical role in seed dispersal and forest regeneration. Because they are significantly larger than their Neotropical relatives, Indian fruit bats feed on a much wider range of flowers and fruits—from small eucalyptus flowers to large mangos and guavas—and are often responsible for the dispersal of old-growth and canopy tree species. A recent survey of their feeding habits revealed that the three most common species alone aid in the pollination and seed dispersal of more than 114 species of plants, many of which are economically, ecologically, and medicinally valuable.

While May developed a deep appreciation for fruit bats during his backyard observation sessions, the animals are often regarded as pests. Despite their ecological importance, 10 of the 12 species are classified as vermin under India’s Wildlife Protection Act and can be indiscriminately killed. Relatively little is known about fruit bat population levels in India, but surveys conducted by ecologist Shahroukh Mistry suggest that most species are dramatically declining. In the past, the animals lived in large colonies that often numbered in the thousands; today the average colony size is 500 or fewer. Additionally, more than 70 percent of the roosts Mistry visited faced some sort of threat, including deforestation and other human disturbances. To continue performing their valuable pollination and seed-dispersal roles in India, fruit bats need stronger protection—something a number of local conservation organizations are now lobbying the government to enact. 

Human/Nature Winner

While traveling in Romania’s Carpathian region several years ago, photographer Bence Máté came across a horrific scene. At a spawning site for common frogs (Rana temporaria), hundreds of frogs (and several toads) lay dead in the water, some still grasping partners, their hind legs notably missing. Poachers had plucked the amphibians from the pool as they attempted to breed, cut off their back legs to feed the frog-leg trade, and thrown them back into the water to die a lingering death among their spawn. “It was the cruelty that shocked me most,” says Máté, “but also the harm caused to local populations.”

Every year, millions of frogs are traded around the world as a source of food. The trade is fueled not just by the collection of wild animals on a local scale, as Máté witnessed in Romania, but also by industrial commercial farming in China and other countries. While poaching can imperil local populations, commercial farming actually poses an even greater threat to amphibians around the world. “Mass farming and international trade to supply the frog-leg industry are spreading deadly diseases and contributing to the current amphibian extinction crisis,” says herpetologist and wildlife trade expert Jonathan Kolby. “Two types of pathogens in particular, amphibian chytrid fungus and ranavirus, are being spread far and wide by the trade in frog legs and have already driven dozens of population declines and extinctions.”

If frog legs are to stay on the menu for humans, improved welfare and disease control measures are urgently needed to better protect amphibians globally.

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The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is moving to restore power to states and tribes to veto energy infrastructure projects that could pollute local rivers and streams. 

The Clean Water Act has guaranteed the ability for states and tribes to have a final say on projects like oil and gas pipelines for half a century. But the Trump administration weakened this authority two years ago, stripping local governing entities of their power to protect their region’s clean water supply. Now, the Biden administration is reversing the Trump-era rule.

“One pipeline may be fine, but multiple pipelines may not be,” says Lara Fowler, assistant director of Penn State Institutes of Energy and the Environment. “This ruling gives states a process to actually look at the local conditions and take them into consideration.”

Because of its long, skinny nature, pipeline infrastructure has a large footprint on the land, Fowler says. Depending on where a pipeline is being installed, the project can require the clearing of forests and other wildlife habitat. The construction also often infringes on wetlands and bodies of water that serve as communities’ drinking supply. If a pipeline leaks and pollutes the region’s freshwater, either while it’s being built or once it is operating, it could pose a health and safety hazard for local residents.

[Related: Climate change disasters cost the world over $100 billion this year]

The potential environmental harms of pipelines have long been proven. In 2018, a portion of the 40.5-mile Revolution Pipeline in Pennsylvania exploded after heavy rains caused a landslide. The resulting fire destroyed a nearby home, damaged power lines, and burned several acres of surrounding woodland. Energy Transfer, owner of the pipeline, was charged with nine counts of environmental crimes related to construction of the natural gas system this February.

In a more recent case, the 350-mile-long Mariner East Pipeline spilled more than 20,000 gallons of drilling mud into Pennsylvania’s Marsh Creek Lake. The August 2020 disaster was just one of several issues with the natural gas pipeline, also owned by Energy Transfer. Throughout its construction, the project caused dozens of drilling mud spills into wetlands and waterways, dangerous sinkholes, and drinking water contamination at 22 sites in 11 counties across Pennsylvania. Energy Transfer was charged with 48 crimes related to the construction of the pipeline in October 2021. But construction was able to continue, and the pipeline was completed this February.

These cases in Pennsylvania showcase why states and tribes should be able to conduct their own environmental impact analysis and veto potentially harmful projects. Section 401 of the Clean Water Act gives states and tribes the power to “prevent, reduce, and eliminate pollution of their waters,” says Jennifer McKay, policy director at Tip of the Mitt Watershed Council, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting water resources throughout the Great Lakes Basin. The Trump-era revision of this section “severely curtailed the ability for states and authorized tribes to carry out their duties,” she adds. “Ultimately, it threatened the ability for states [and tribes] to protect their own water quality.”

Specifically, the revision limits the time states and tribes have to review a project to one year. It also confines these non-federal governments from considering anything other than water quality when judging permits. These restrictions aimed to “curb abuses of the Clean Water Act that have held our nation’s energy infrastructure projects hostage, and to put in place clear guidelines that finally give these projects a path forward,” said then-EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler when he first announced the ruling back in June 2020. 

Although Section 401 does not explicitly target fossil fuel projects, some states have used their authority to stop or delay such developments. In 2017, Gov. Jay Inslet of Washington used the power granted by the Clean Water Act to deny a permit for a coal export terminal on the Columbia River, citing the risk of significant spills and negative effects on air quality. In 2020, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York used the same authority to reject a natural gas pipeline project, citing the company’s inability to demonstrate that it could comply with state’s water quality standards.

“The Trump administration had an order to promote economic development and encourage pipeline development, and they felt this particular rule—which had not been changed in 50 years—stood in the way,” McKay says.

[Related: Pollution kills 1 in 6 people worldwide]

The polluting of clean waterways is not the only concern around pipeline projects. The installation of such infrastructure can cause significant damage to nearby ecosystems, harming crucial wetland habitat and displacing threatened or endangered species. Pipeline projects can also detract from farmland health and tribal resources like wild rice. Several studies have found that in areas where pipelines are laid out, soil health deteriorates and crop yields decrease.

Once the EPA’s new rule is finalized, states and tribes will have the opportunity again to analyze the potential environmental impacts of energy infrastructure projects. Fowler says she is “heartened” to know that states will have that power back; in many cases, states have stricter environmental standards than those of the federal government. She also notes the importance for tribes to have this veto power, as they are considered to be sovereign governments by federal law.

The pipeline issue is one that pulls in the interests of many stakeholders, ranging from domestic to international, public to private, public health to wildlife conservation, and state to federal. “No state is blind to energy needs,” Fowler says. “Where we draw the line is a hard question, but one we need to be really creatively thinking about. How do you balance the various concerns and values that are at play for something like this? How do you facilitate energy production and development while minimizing impacts?”

The proposed rule still needs to go through a 60-day period of public comment and review before it is finalized. The plan is to have it finalized by spring 2023, McKay says. After that, the people living closest to pipelines and other disturbances would finally have the power of choice again.

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IN LATE OCTOBER 2019, a fire broke out at a recycling facility in Scottsdale, Arizona. The blaze consumed a 40,000-square-foot site, and 60-mile-per-hour winds blew a massive smoke plume across a nearby highway, forcing local officials to close the road. It took firefighters until the next day to extinguish the flames. In the aftermath, the company that operated the site had to suspend collection in nearby cities; the scorched compound had been equipped to handle 85,000 tons of waste a year, and now that junk had nowhere to go except a landfill.

The culprit? A lithium-ion battery like the ones found in phones and laptops. While these hyperefficient cells are generally safe, they continue to store volatile energy even after they die, which means that careless disposal can cause explosions and fires. A 2021 report from the Environmental Protection Agency found public records of such conflagrations in 28 states between 2013 and 2020, and flagged one facility that had had more than a dozen in a single year. The risk will only grow: The global lithium market can be expected to multiply by a factor of 20 by 2030, according to an estimate from research firm Rystad Energy.

The fact that so many batteries end up in scrap heaps poses an even more profound problem for the transition away from fossil fuels. Their contents are a key component of electric vehicles, but the metals they contain—lithium, cobalt, and nickel—are getting ever harder to obtain and often come from only a few countries. Powering the next generation of EVs will entail mining thousands of tons of lithium and cobalt from salt flats and ore deposits around the world, a process that is as ecologically destructive as it is expensive.

“We should try to recycle anything we can, but in the case of batteries, it’s become even more important,” says Fengqi You, an engineering professor at Cornell University who studies the life cycles of elements like lithium within energy systems. You points out that our domestic EV industry depends on lithium that is mined and refined in countries around the world, giving us little domestic control over the production of essential materials. If anything happens to the global supply chain, our access to these precious metals is disrupted, delaying efforts to turn to green technologies.

The good news, though, is that the dead can rise again. The key metals contained in old batteries like the one that started the fire in Scottsdale are ripe to be plucked out and pumped back into the supply chain. With the right infrastructure, we could drastically reduce the amount of mining needed to supply metal for new cells—all while cutting down the risk of literal dumpster fires.

As EVs take off in the US, a handful of startups are working to do just that. One of the most advanced, Ascend Elements, is opening a massive battery recycling facility in Georgia this summer where it will recover lithium, cobalt, and nickel, and its competitors aren’t far behind. Together these companies are racing to scale up before the first full generation of EVs gets scrapped. Their efforts have the potential to close the loop, creating a system that is less dependent on fossil fuels—and on unnecessary mining.

BRITISH-AMERICAN chemist M. Stanley Whittingham outlined the first conceptual framework for a rechargeable lithium-ion battery in the late 1970s, winning a Nobel for his efforts in 2019. Entities from NASA to Oxford University further developed his core technology over the next decade. But the concept didn’t go commercial until 1991, when Sony started using the cells to bump up the life of its camcorders. The energy density such batteries can hold has almost tripled since then, and the price of producing them has fallen by more than 97 percent within that same period, from around $7,500 in 1991 to less than $200 in 2018.

All batteries work by storing chemical energy and converting it to electricity. An ordinary cell contains different conductive metals in two terminals: the anode, or negative side, and the cathode, or positive side. These two components are separated by a chemical medium known as an electrolyte. When you turn on a device, the pent-up electrons in the anode stream out of the cell, through a circuit, and toward the cathode, attracted to its positive charge. The electrons’ movement through the circuit is what generates juice.

In an ordinary battery, there’s no way to reverse this process. When enough pent-up electrons have left the anode, the whole thing dies. Lithium-ion batteries, on the other hand, have a much longer life thanks to their titular element, which is one of the lightest and most reactive metals on the periodic table. In an uncharged state, a bunch of lithium atoms hang out in the cathode. When you plug your device into a power source, those reactive lithium atoms are quick to surrender their electrons, which move through the external circuit before coming to rest in the anode. The key advantage is that those departing electrons leave behind positively-charged lithium ions, which are then drawn by the negative charge of the power source through the electrolyte toward the anode, where they become trapped. When you disconnect your device from the power source and turn it on, the process reverses. The naturally unstable lithium ions move back through the electrolyte to return to the cathode, while the electrons move to join them, generating electricity along the way. The electrons and the ions now hang out in the cathode until the next time the battery charges.

The structure of this metal cathode is key to the battery’s longevity: It functions as an atomic lasagna of metals like nickel and cobalt, with layers thin enough that lithium ions and electrons get trapped between them. As the ions move back and forth across the battery, though, they distort this lasagna, causing the atomic architecture to swell and crack. Every charge cycle causes a number of other uncontrolled chemical reactions that degrade the battery over time, much as our own body degrades in the normal course of aging. You usually can’t see this decay with the naked eye, but over the course of a couple of years, the power cell has a harder time moving energy. The average lithium-ion battery is good for a few thousand charge cycles before it starts to wither away. (Even then, though, the battery retains charge, which is what makes them so flammable as they molder.)

The rapid growth of the EV industry has created a surge in demand for the metals that make this all possible—including the titular lithium. The result has been a mining boom in some of the countries with significant deposits, like China, Chile, and Australia. Worldwide production tripled from 31,000 tons a year in 2010 to 110,000 in 2021. But with the global EV market growing around 20 percent each year, demand is rising much too fast for any producer to keep up. The International Energy Agency predicts annual lithium production could fall short of demand by nearly 2 million tons by 2030. And while at least three or four continents have the potential to mine the metal, almost all the refineries and battery factories are in China, resulting in a classic bottleneck. If capacity does not increase, research firm Rystad Energy has said, the price of the material could triple by the end of the decade.

Soaring demand creates higher environmental costs too. Companies use tens of billions of gallons of water per year to pump the metal out of the ground, straining resources in already parched countries like Chile. There have been several reports of fish kills and freshwater depletion or contamination near lithium mines in Tibet, Argentina, and the United States.

All these factors strengthen the case for recycling. For their first few decades on the market, lithium-ion batteries weren’t valuable enough for anyone to bother turning spent ones into new material, but a few organizations still tried to keep them out of landfills—most notably Call2Recycle, Inc. Founded and funded by major battery manufacturers in the 1990s in the hopes of mitigating the environmental risks (and legal liability) posed by their products, the nonprofit has since spun up a collection program that draws refuse from three main sources: repair centers, municipal waste facilities, and a network of 16,000 public-facing drop boxes across the United States. Last year it collected more than 8 million pounds of discarded cells.

“When we first started, the predominant battery chemistry was nickel cadmium,” says Eric Frederickson, the program’s managing director of operations, referring to a type of cell often used in bulky, yet portable power tools. Now, he says, “lithium ion is the single largest chemistry of batteries that we collect.”

For a number of years, the US capacity for recycling lithium was so low that Call2Recycle had to ship its spoils abroad. Now, though, there’s a new customer on the scene, one that promises to turn these discards into ingredients for brand-new EV power cells.

ASCEND ELEMENTS’ research and development facility sits in a nondescript office park just outside Worcester, Massachusetts. If you stood outside, you’d likely guess that everyone within spends their days tapping away on computers. The reality is a bit messier: The front office leads back into a warehouse where the company has been fine-tuning its lithium-ion battery recycling process and preparing to scale it up.

Ascend’s system is based on the company’s own spin on a process called hydrometallurgy, which involves dissolving crushed-up metals in a chemical solution and leaching them back into solids again. It’s an improvement on an older and less elegant technique known as pyrometallurgy, which requires smelting batteries and separating out the superheated components—creating toxic gases like dioxins and furans.

After handing me a pair of safety goggles, Ascend’s co-founder and chief technology officer, Eric Gratz, shows me the works. Shouting over the constant whine of a generator, he ushers me into a high-ceilinged space dominated by a dozen interconnected tanks and machines. There are three steel vats towering over us, a pair of 10-foot-long contraptions that look like accordions, and a set of several smaller tanks connected by pipes and tubes.

All together, Gratz says, the machinery functions like a giant French press coffee maker. Ascend buys dead batteries from collectors like Call2Recycle or from EV manufacturers, then grinds them up in a fine-toothed shredder. The residue arrives at the Worcester facility as a dark powder—“black mass,” in industry parlance—that takes the place of java beans in this chemical brew. The goal is to liquefy the dead metal, remove impurities like plastic and unwanted metals, alter its chemical structure, then condense it back into powder so it can be used for new manufacturing.

First Gratz leads me to the trio of vats, behind which sits a hopper holding the shredded batteries. Step one is to pipe the black mass into the vats, where it dissolves in a proprietary chemical mixture, loosening the atomic structure of the lithium, nickel, and cobalt inside. That part isn’t all that difficult. The trick is turning it back into powder again.

Ascend wants to produce material for new cathodes—the positive side of the battery—since that’s the hardest to come by. But because pulverized batteries contain several different metals, some of which aren’t useful, Ascend first has to separate out any it doesn’t need. Tiptoeing around lab techs as they bustle back and forth, we reach the accordion-like machines. These pump the black-mass slurry through a set of filter panels to strain out irrelevant solids—the equivalent of pushing down the grounds in a French press. Fragments of graphite and copper stick to the filters, leaving black and greenish-yellow stains; Ascend later packages and sells these to traditional recyclers.

The next step is to separate the remaining mixture into two key components: the lithium and a melange of nickel, cobalt, and manganese. The exact method by which Ascend does this is proprietary—part of what separates the company from its competitors—but Gratz allows that it takes advantage of lithium’s unique chemistry. While most metals are more likely to dissolve when heated, lithium is less soluble at higher temperatures. This means the team can isolate the all-important metal by heating the mixture. The resulting granules look a lot like the salt you’d keep in an ordinary shaker.

Then they precipitate the black mass back into powder, another proprietary process, this one taking place in a set of machines that look like older-generation droids from Star Wars—big, boxy trapezoids with little doodads on top. The team at Ascend can adjust the concentrations of nickel and cobalt in each batch to the specifications of buyers: A battery with more nickel, for example, has a shorter shelf life but can hold more energy, making it ideal for vehicles that need to travel hundreds of miles. Once a mixer recombines the powder with the extracted lithium, the final product looks just like the one that came in, as evidenced by the before-and-after jars Gratz hands me. But the molecular structure of the recycled powder is rejuvenated, ready to again store hyperreactive lithium ions.

The process is remarkably efficient: Ascend recovers 98 percent of the most expensive metals, nickel and cobalt. For lithium, Gratz says, that figure is more like 80 percent. The black powder that leaves the factory is quite literally ready to roll. Battery manufacturers usually spray the substance on foil and roll or fold the material into fresh battery cells.

COMPLICATED AS Ascend’s operation in Worcester may seem, it’s just a prototype for a 154,000-square-foot battery recycling plant set to open near Atlanta in the summer of 2022. The operation will sit at the nexus of an EV boom in the Southeastern US. Volkswagen will soon start up an electric vehicle division at its plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Ford is building an assembly plant and multiple battery factories, including in Kentucky and Tennessee. Ascend’s facility won’t start up for another few months, but manufacturers like SK Battery America, which helps power heavy hitters like Ford and Volkswagen, have already begun to ship over pallets of manufacturing scrap. It’s piling up by the ton, just waiting to hit the road.

When it’s up and running, Ascend’s Georgia plant will be able to turn around 33,000 tons of dead batteries and other waste per year, resulting in enough recycled metal to spark up to 70,000 EVs. Auto manufacturers will be able to sign a simple one-way contract to buy the reconstituted material from dead EV cells, vice president of marketing Roger Lin explains, or they could do a two-way deal to provide excess scraps from their factories and get them back in revived form. Ascend could also take the dead batteries from auto manufacturers and then create new material for anyone who wants it.

Ascend CEO Mike O’Kronley is confident the old EV batteries his plant will depend on won’t end up like so many forgotten cell phones stashed in drawers. “One EV battery is equivalent to a thousand from cell phones,” he says. “It’s much easier to collect and transport to a recycling center.” Auto shredders and junkyards, he contends, have an incentive to sell them to companies like Ascend.

Though Ascend may have the head start in lining up customers, it does face strong competition: Li-Cycle, a Canadian recycler building a plant near Rochester, New York, and Redwood Materials, a company founded by Tesla’s former CTO. Both firms are scaling up their own systems, using hydrometallurgical processes similar to Ascend’s.

Right now, not enough EVs have been retired to supply the quantity of batteries needed to meet the demand for reclaimed metals. “If we recycled every battery in the world, the most recycling can provide is maybe 20 to 30 percent of the demand,” says Ascend CTO Gratz. As long as the total number of EVs on the road continues to increase, we’ll need to keep mining significant amounts of lithium, cobalt, and nickel.

However, Ascend is banking on the majority of the population eventually driving EVs and turning in their old ones for new models. “Then,” Gratz says, “we can just keep recycling the same nickel and cobalt and lithium atoms over and over again.”

This story originally ran in the Summer 2022 Metal issue of PopSci, as the third in a three-part series about batteries. Read part one and part two or more PopSci+ stories.

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Stellantis, the company in charge of US auto brands Jeep, Chrysler, Dodge, Ram, Fiat, and Alfa Romeo, announced on May 24 that it would be partnering with Samsung to build a new $2.5 billion electric vehicle battery manufacturing facility in Kokomo, Indiana. Stellantis has its sights set on selling five million battery-electric vehicles per year by 2030, and it is going to need a serious boost to achieve that goal; the international conglomerate doesn’t currently offer any electric vehicles for sale in the US. 

The location in Kokomo is centrally located for several of Stellantis’ midwest-based vehicle assembly plants, and in close proximity to the company’s supplier base. Construction is scheduled to begin later this year, with production capacity online by 2025. The company projects the new assembly plant will create around 1,400 new jobs, and will be operated as a joint venture alongside brand partner Samsung. 

“Just under one year ago, we committed to an aggressive electrification strategy anchored by five gigafactories between Europe and North America,” said Carlos Tavares, CEO of Stellantis, in a release. “Today’s announcement further solidifies our global battery production footprint and demonstrates Stellantis’ drive toward a decarbonized future outlined in Dare Forward 2030.”

So how do Stellantis’ plans stack up against what’s already going on in the EV production landscape?

Tesla currently has the largest EV battery plant in the world, operating its Gigafactory in conjunction with Panasonic outside of Reno, Nevada. So-called Giga Nevada was opened in 2016, and currently produces battery packs for many Tesla vehicles. The $5-billion facility was designed and built by Tesla with around $1.5 billion coming in the form of state aid and deferred taxes. The plant is intended not only to produce new Tesla 2170 nickel manganese cobalt lithium ion battery cells (21mm diameter, 70mm length), but also to recycle used cell materials into new battery packs. Tesla also produces its 4680 batteries at the recently opened Giga Texas plant near Austin, though this factory’s primary purpose is vehicle construction, and will allegedly be the home of Cybertruck production, if that vehicle is produced.

Other automakers are busy in the field, too. General Motors is building its own battery plant with LG in Lansing, Michigan. Ford, likewise, is working with SKI to build an EV battery lab in southeast Michigan. Volkswagen is considering installation of a new battery plant near its US production facility in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Hyundai is spending some $5.5 billion to build a dedicated electric vehicle and battery plant outside of Savannah, Georgia. 

Stellantis itself recently announced the construction of a $4.1 billion joint venture plant with LG in Canada. Even newcomer Rivian is looking to expand operations with a new $5 billion plant near Atlanta, Georgia for battery production and vehicle assembly. These new battery production facilities are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to investment in the future of automobile production.

Many electric car manufacturers buy their battery packs from outside suppliers, like A123, Panasonic, LG, Samsung, and Amperex. In fact, Stellantis already contracts with Amperex, LG, and Samsung to build battery packs for its various global EV and hybrid products. That said, many automakers are following Tesla into the business of producing their own batteries in stand-alone battery factories. This method helps reduce production bottlenecks and decreases cost per unit substantially. 

The Stellantis plan for transitioning to an all-EV lineup is led by its European brands: Fiat, Citroën, Peugeot, and Opel in particular. By 2030 the company pledges to only sell EVs in Europe, and at least 50 percent EVs in the US market, with an individual plan for each of its automaker brands to achieve this transition. According to Stellantis, it will have at least 75 BEV nameplates globally, and 25 of those will be available in the US. 

The first new battery electric model from the company is scheduled to hit the US market in 2023 as a small urban Jeep, based on its Compass compact crossover. Jeep is, of course, currently seeing lots of success in its plug-in hybrid Wrangler 4xe models, selling them as quickly as it can produce them. During last year’s Stellantis EV Day, Jeep was rebranded with the tagline “Zero Emissions Freedom” and it looks like the company is prepared to deliver on that promise. 

Stellantis’ Chrysler brand recently announced the re-introduction of the Airflow model after an 86-year hiatus, as a luxury electric crossover with between 350 and 400 miles of range. The winged brand’s new tagline was introduced last year as “Clean technology for a new generation of families.” Similarly, Ram was rebranded as “Built to serve a sustainable planet” and performance-oriented Dodge now holds the tagline of “Tear up the streets, not the planet.” 

This plant in Kokomo will be one of five Stellantis EV battery facilities worldwide. The company’s original plan called for production of around 140 gigawatts of battery storage, but this was expanded to about 400 gigawatts as demand and markets have changed. Not only will Stellantis need all five of these plants to meet growing EV demand, but it will continue to purchase battery packs from outside suppliers. 

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Across the Western United States, there’s a network of cameras streaming images of mountain peaks, coastal communities, quiet suburbs, and thick forests, revealing dramatic sunrises and the occasional wildlife encounter. The 24/7 feeds are free and accessible online, provided with the hope that the public will not only tune in but also look out for signs of smoke or a spark, potentially helping alert authorities about blazes before they pose a threat to communities. 

Over the past decade, this ALERTWildfire network has grown from a few cameras around Lake Tahoe to about 1,000 in seven states, as well as some in Australia. The goal is to provide  officials with an easily-accessible source of intel in fire-prone areas, often offering a multi-angle view of wildfires and, as of recently, utilizing AI to act as an additional analysis tool. With a hot, dry summer and high-fire risk forecasted for the region, the system’s operators and partners are in the process of a multi-million dollar expansion in Oregon, and eyeing opportunities in  Washington and Colorado, states that have all experienced record-breaking wildfires in recent years.

“You can get that situational awareness, you can look at the wind patterns and see how it’s going in many places—you can look at it from three, four, five, ten different angles, so you kind of can see what’s happening every minute-by-minute,” explains Graham Kent, founder of the ALERTWildfire system.

In 2003, the Cedar Fire burned through Kent’s San Diego neighborhood. What stuck with him the most from the experience was the lack of reliable fire intel he felt was accessible to the public—a common concern of wildfire evacuees and even to the firefighters themselves. 

Kent, who is also the director of the seismological laboratory at the University of Nevada, Reno,  had experience setting up microwave links to collect and communicate seismic data in the West. So, he decided to leverage that knowledge and network, setting up cameras on it that could be used to monitor the landscape for fires. The first ones were installed in Lake Tahoe in 2013.

“Early on, I think people thought we were crazy, except for about three firefighters,” Kent says.

But today, ALERTWildfire has become a go-to resource for numerous government agencies, first responders, researchers, everyday folks on “Fire Twitter,” and residents in camera-covered regions. A consortium of three universities— the University of Nevada Reno, the University of California San Diego, and the University of Oregon—run it, with cameras stationed in each of their states, as well as Washington, Colorado, Utah, and Idaho. Partnering with state, county, and private utility services, ALERTWildfire installs cameras on existing microwave network infrastructure. The Bureau of Land Management, local governments, and utility companies are among the public and private sources supporting its expansion across the region. 

“These camera systems are another tool in the decision-maker’s toolbox to improve decision-making based on real or near-real-time information,” a representative from the Forest Service, which also helps fund the initiative, tells Popular Science. 

For example, the Forest Service utilizes the cameras to observe changes in weather and forest conditions, confirm smoke reports without having to deploy any aerial equipment, and help firefighters determine how to mount their response to growing wildfires, among other uses. ALERTWildfire claims its cameras were used to provide “critical information” about more than 1,000 wildfires between 2016 and 2019. Kent says cameras are positioned based on intel from local fire authorities, and officials are given access to “pan, tilt, zoom, or move cameras around” virtually to best monitor any unfolding events. Meanwhile, Kent and his team are in charge of troubleshooting and trying to keep the cameras online as wildfires burn around them. To avoid having them shutoff during power outages, some run on solar power, while others are backed up by generators. 

In recent years, ALERTWildfire has folded additional players into this process, including collaborating with artificial intelligence and machine-learning companies. Kent says they are currently working with Alchera, a South Korean company using AI to scan the camera feeds for smoke. Last summer, he says the AI issued a warning about the River Fire “within a minute of ignition,” beating the alerts officials received through 911. He’s quick to add this tech isn’t currently being used to replace other means of notification, but to provide another layer of verification and insight for firefighters. 

“If you have a 911 call [reporting a fire] and an AI hit, or you have a Twitter hit and an AI hit, the fact that you have two hits pretty much tells you that’s a fire, right?” Kent says, offering some examples of ways firefighters might learn of an ignition. “So, by having two forms of confirmation or more as a fire professional, you know it’s time to really try to go in there and make sure it gets the attention it needs.”

Along with their utility for informing officials, Kent hopes the cameras can help give residents in these areas more utility to observe and understand their wildfire risk.

“We encourage people to start their own fire watch groups,” Kent says, describing a scenario in which community members get together on “red flag,” or high fire-risk days, and utilize the cameras to monitor their surroundings. “It’s all about whatever it takes to get any edge we can get on fire starts so we can knock ‘em down. So, instead of feeling hopeless, there is some sense that we can actually make a difference.”

Curious to check out some of the camera feeds yourself? Head to ALERTWildfire’s website and select from the drop-down “Regions” menu to choose views from across the West.

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This article originally appeared in Nexus Media News.

When Hurricane Ida dumped more than 3 inches of rain on Central Park in a single hour, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) called it a “1-in-500 year rainfall event.” 

The downpour broke the park’s previous rainfall record, set just 11 days earlier. It damaged scores of trees, flooded the Loeb Boathouse, transformed the area surrounding Bethesda Fountain into a massive pool and rendered much of the park inaccessible for days. It illustrated just how vulnerable the city’s parks are to the effects of climate change—and how little is understood about the relationship between parks and shifts in weather patterns.

“We have been witnessing the increasing impacts of climate change throughout Central Park for some time now,” said Michelle Mueller Gamez, manager of climate change research at Central Park Conservancy, the nonprofit that manages Central Park. Those impacts include harmful algae blooms during the summer, extreme and frequent heat waves, and intense rain over short periods of time that cause flooding, she said. “The damage that’s caused to Central Park during these extreme events makes it increasingly harder for our staff to maintain and care for all 843 acres.”

Earlier this year, the Central Park Conservancy, together with the Yale School of the Environment and Natural Areas Conservancy, launched the Central Park Climate Lab. The goal, Mueller Gamez said, is to collect data on ways in which the park is changing so its custodians can care for it accordingly. “Other urban parks are facing similar challenges,” she said. “We hope our findings can be a resource to exchange and share information with other urban landscapes.”

More than half of the world’s people now live in cities, and parks are the primary way many of them experience nature. In New York, half the population reports that their only exposure to the natural environment is through the city’s parks. They help keep residents cool (and happy); their soils absorb rainwater and runoff, and their trees improve air quality and capture carbon dioxide.

But many are in trouble. The U.S. lost more than 24 million acres—the equivalent of nine grand canyons—of natural areas, including parks, between 2001 and 2017 to land conversion. Many, including Central Park, have experienced tree die-offs due to invasive species, like the emerald ash borer, porcelain berry, lesser celandine and Japanese knotweed, which thrive in warmer weather. U.S. cities lose millions of trees each year.

“The health of the park and its forest are at risk,” said Clara Pretziger, deputy director of conservation science at the Natural Areas Conservancy. “If it’s hotter, if the lawn is flooding, if the lake itself has algal blooms, it will just be a less pleasant place to visit.”

Pretziger studies the ways urban forests soak up carbon. In a paper published this year, she found that urban forests store carbon at similar and, in some cases, higher rates compared to rural forests. “I think natural areas as a type of parkland are undervalued in their contribution to climate change mitigation and approach to adaptation,” she said. 

But pests, flooding, storms, drought and high temperatures all put those trees at risk. In 2012, Superstorm Sandy, which was made more destructive due to climate change, damaged or uprooted some 800 trees in Central Park. “Some of those trees have been there for 300, 400 years. You have these large oak trees—they are really magical and they make the park beautiful—and if they topple over they’ll take a generation to [replace],” Pretziger said.

Central Park contains a multitude of microclimates—lawns, natural areas, wetlands, forests, to name a few—and caring for the entire park means understanding the different stresses affecting each area.

“We actually don’t know what the changes in rainfall and temperature [have been throughout] the park,” said Karen Seto, a professor of geography and urbanization science at the Yale School of the Environment. She said most temperature readings of the park don’t account for variability in climate conditions; a shady wooded area can be expected to be cooler than a grassy lawn.

This spring, in one of the center’s first experiments, Seto and a team of scientists took light measurements using a spectroradiometer—a tool that can help scientists assess the health of a plant—throughout the park to collect data on the park’s varied microclimates. Using satellite data, they’ll monitor changes to the park’s flora over the years.

“The goal of the project is to understand how climate change manifests itself across the entire park and to understand what are the best practices to manage the park under those conditions,” Seto said. Those practices could mean planting species that are more adaptive to flooding or warmer temperatures, or increasing the amount of spongy surfaces to soak up more rainwater, she said. 

Mueller Gamez and her team are collecting data on temperature variances throughout the park by installing solar-powered sensors in the park’s lawns, forested areas, playgrounds and meadows, among other areas. She said this information will help planners think about ways to keep New Yorkers cool during increasingly frequent and intense heat waves. 

“The idea is to understand the benefits of natural and forested areas and how we can enhance them if we understand we’re getting more cooling benefits,” said Mueller Gamez. Though it’s intuitive that shaded areas are naturally cooler on hot days, the sensors will quantify just how much cooler. 

Parks don’t just keep cities cooler and improve residents’ well-being; people who spend time in parks and nature are more likely to engage in “environmentally friendly behavior.” 

Pretziger said part of the lab’s mission is simply helping visitors understand how climate change relates to their daily lives. “Central Park is so iconic, and I think people really connect with it,” she said. “Learning about natural climate solutions in your own backyard can be very powerful.”

Note: This story was updated to clarify that Central Park is one of the biggest parks in New York City.

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As restaurants, bars, and international travel remained limited during the pandemic, many Americans turned to the country’s national parks to satisfy their cravings for solace and adventure. But some of these protected areas are now feeling the pressure of increased demand for outdoor recreation.

In the past few years, the National Park Service (NPS) has cracked down on recreational activities of all sorts in an effort to manage human impact on natural environments. Most recently, the agency denied a request by the South Dakota governor’s office to allow Fourth of July fireworks at Mount Rushmore, citing tribal opposition and wildfire risk as reasons for its decision.

This verdict is in line with others the NPS has made lately that aim to regulate recreational activities, including hiking, biking, and scenic air tours. Such restrictions will likely continue to increase as public lands face more stressors, both from human use and from the changing climate, says Robert Manning, an expert in parks and outdoor recreation at the University of Vermont.

“It’s disappointing anytime the National Park Service has to restrict access to the parks,” Manning says. “But unfortunately, it seems to be needed more and more today.”

[Related: Don’t blame national forests for America’s massive wildfires]

Overcrowding has been a significant issue, especially for some of the most popular protected areas. In 2021, the national park system received nearly 300 million recreational visits, nearly half of which took place in just 25 of the country’s 423 units. Forty-four parks set visitation records in 2021, including Great Smoky Mountains and Yellowstone National Park.

Visitation density has harmful impacts not only on the environment, but also on visitor experience. An excess of cars creates issues of congestion, pollution, and collisions with wildlife. Overcrowding on trails can lead to higher risk of hiking accidents and illegal off roading.

Although the popularity of national parks has been rising over several decades, soaring demand during the pandemic has exacerbated issues of overcrowding. In an effort to curb unsustainable visitation numbers, two Utah national parks announced last year that they would start requiring reservations. At Zion National Park, people will now need a permit to hike the famous Angels Landing route. Meanwhile, those who hope to visit any part of Arches National Park will have to book timed entry tickets during its high season.

These reservation systems have become more common in recent years, Manning says. Besides the two Utah sites, the NPS has implemented similar systems at Rocky Mountain and Glacier National Parks, as well as Cadillac Summit Road in Acadia National Park, the Kalalau Trail in Kauai, and Muir Woods in Marin County.

“The national parks are supposed to be preserved and protected, but the legislation that created the National Park Service also says that the parks are supposed to be used for people’s enjoyment,” Manning says. “Balancing these two objectives has always been difficult, but it’s become much more so over the last several years.”

The NPS has also been putting its foot down on specific recreational activities. In 2021, the agency gave park superintendents the authority to ban e-bikes if they adversely impact natural resources or other visitors. In the same year, the agency proposed stricter rules for scenic air tours, prohibiting these flights from taking place at dawn or dusk, or within a half-mile of the ground.

“Sunrise and sunset are important times of the day for wildlife and visitor use and experience,” the draft plan states. “Biologically important behaviors for many species occur during this time, such as prime foraging, mating, and communication. The hours of operation provide quiet periods of the day during which visitors can enjoy natural sounds and preserve opportunities for solitude in designated wilderness areas.”

To further protect vulnerable species and animals’ breeding grounds, many national parks issue annual rock climbing route closures. Acadia and Zion announced the temporary closure of some popular climbing sites starting this month to ensure that peregrine falcons can nest without disturbance. 

These falcons—known to be the world’s fastest animal for their ability to dive at more than 240 miles per hour—build nests in spots along the park’s iconic cliff faces, which also happen to be locations where humans like to rock climb. Although the species is no longer federally listed as endangered, they are sensitive to disturbances during nesting season. So, protecting their native habitats remains necessary.

[Related: A beginner’s guide to visiting national parks]

In Canada, Jasper National Park extended its seasonal closures to protect caribou herds and also banned backcountry travel in areas considered critical habitat for the species. 

Balancing environmental protection and outdoor recreation is not an easy task, and as climate change introduces additional stressors to the environment, the NPS will have to consider how it deals with the risks of wildfires and extreme weather events as well.

The agency’s decision to deny fireworks at Mount Rushmore this year follows a March 2021 wildfire that was the largest in the memorial’s history and forced a three-day closure of the site. Public lands closures due to wildfires have become common occurrences, especially in the West. Last year, the US Forest Service took the drastic step of temporarily closing all of California’s national forests, a response to the more than 6,800 wildfires that burned through 1.7 million acres of the state.

The burden shouldn’t fall completely on visitors, however. If the NPS wants to competently manage future risks, it will need significantly more support for staffing and funding, Manning says. The agency’s permanent workforce rests around 20,000—fewer than the number of people employed by the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim—and its annual budget accounts for less than 0.05 percent of total federal spending for the year.

“There’s a big gap that needs to be bridged,” Manning says. “The national parks are enormously important, and they need more help.”

Manning notes that national parks could benefit from solutions such as Zion’s low-emission shuttle bus system, which has been successful in reducing the impacts of personal vehicles and is set to be replaced with new electric transit buses. But the lack of resources remains a major barrier for the NPS. In the meantime, it seems like restricting access is the most realistic way to preserve the precious spaces where humans can coexist with the wilderness.

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Throughout history, nature has proven time and again that it has the capacity to restore itself. Even in some of the most disastrous situations the world has ever seen, from oil spills to nuclear meltdowns, it has shown that healing is possible. But, of course, there’s only so much that one ecosystem can take before it hits a tipping point.

For the Amazon rainforest, which forms a 2.1 million-square-mile oasis across the upper half of South America and for years has acted as a massive carbon sink, that tipping point could be here devastatingly soon. A new study out today in the journal Nature Climate Change reveals just how adaptable the forest really is—and how massive climate events and human activity have damaged its ability to bounce back from catastrophes.

The researchers used a special satellite technique, called Vegetation Optical Depth, to determine how much biomass the massive rainforest held from 1991 to 2016. Using these findings, along with statistical indicators of stability that have been used to assess other rapidly changing ecosystems like the Greenland ice sheet, the team determined that since 2000, 75 percent of the forest has become less resilient to disruptions like wildfires and droughts. Areas of the forest that are near farms, urban areas, and roads are losing their stability at the quickest rate. 

[Related: World leaders promise to end deforestation. Is that even possible?]

“Reduced resilience—the ability to recover from perturbations like droughts or fires—can mean an increased risk of dieback of the Amazon rainforest. That we see such a resilience loss in observations is worrying,” author Niklas Boers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the Technical University of Munich said in a release. 

Dieback is the process by which large groups of trees get sick and perish without obvious cause. This can often be linked to increased dry periods—the Amazon has experienced three “one-in-100 years” droughts since 2005. “”Resilience dropped during the major droughts of 2005 and 2010, as part of an ongoing decline from the early 2000s to the most recent data in 2016,”  author Chris Boulton, of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute, said in another release. “As a result, we would expect the forest to recover more slowly from a drought now than it would have 20 years ago.”

If the Amazon rainforest withered up and eventually turned into savannah, it would be devastating on multiple levels. In addition to the forest’s staggering biodiversity containing ten percent of the world’s total species, the mass tree dieback would release up to 90 billion tons of carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere, making the hurdle of limiting climate change even more difficult to overcome. The new research makes it clear  that the Amazon is standing on the brink of disaster. “It raised my level of anxiety,” Carlos Nobre, a senior scientist at the National Institute of Amazonian Research in Brazil who was not involved in the study,  told the New York Times. 

Strangely enough, however, the study did not measure much of a change in the Amazon’s biomass and total rainfall levels. According to the paper, biomass only decreased slightly from 1991 to 2016. This shows that the “state” of a forest might not reflect its ability to bounce back from disasters, Boers said in a press release, making it hard to know when it’s at its tipping point.  “When it will be observable, it would likely be too late to stop it,” he says.

[Related: Why forests in the Andes are crucial to fighting climate change.]

However, the fate of the Amazon isn’t set in stone; resiliency can be restored if nature is left alone to heal. For the rainforest, that would require ending deforestation. The current rate of deforestation in the Amazon is higher than previous decades—a November analysis from Brazilian research institute Imazon showed that from January to October of 2021, deforestation increased by 33 percent compared to all of 2020. 

“Given the recent declarations on the importance of rainforests at COP26 in Glasgow (by 141 countries), this reemphasizes the urgency for policy makers and the public to protect and restore this globally important ecosystem before it is too late,” Jo House, an environmental science and policy expert at the University of Bristol who was not involved in the study, said in a release. The time is now for the world to get its act together when it comes to saving the “lungs of the planet,” no matter if the Amazon is in your backyard or miles away. 

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In the southern edge of the Amazon basin lies a huge grassland, the Llano de Mojos. It’s something in between dry land and water, carved up by rivers and swamps, the entire landscape floods every year during the wet season. But in spite of the power of those waters, new research suggests that the key features of the landscape, from its plants to its floods, were shaped more by humans than the geography, or even the climate.

“What is the Amazon?” says John Walker, an archaeologist at the University of Central Florida. “It’s not just one thing.”

It’s long been clear that the landscape was made by humans, says Walker, who has worked in the region for decades and was an author on the recent study, published in the journal PNAS.

There are three key human structures in the Mojos: long, narrow fields that stick out of the floodplain just a handful of centimeters, fish traps that cut across waterways, and “forest islands” that loom over the flat horizon. Three quarters of those forest islands—which were likely built out of the flat plain by humans—contain unambiguous signs of human habitation, from the remains of fires to ditches and ceramics.

The researchers set out to understand how that landscape had transformed over time.

They took soil cores from two sites in the swamp about 13 miles apart. In each of them, the soil showed the same story: thousands of years ago, the region was relatively dry. Then, traces of wetland plants and aquatic microorganisms showed that regular floods had occurred on the landscape, as they do today. At the same time as the floods, charcoal fragments began to appear. When the fire was most intense, the soil contained traces of crops like corn, squash, and sweet potato.

But that progression happened at different times at the two sites. At one, fire and floods began 6,000 years ago. At the other, those became dominant 1,500 years later. And that suggests to the researchers that the landscape was transformed into a swamp not because of increased rainfall, but because of human management.

“This is really weird,” says Walker. “It’s very difficult to imagine a climate explanation or some kind of geographic explanation. To me, the obvious suspect is all these artificial earthworks that are everywhere.”

The research is the latest in a body of work that suggests that even the “wildest” ecosystems on the planet, like the Australian outback and the Amazon basin, are not the product of untouched nature, but of human cultivation. And often that cultivation has gone on for thousands of years longer than scientists have recognized.

In the case of the Mojos, the researchers believe that the high ground of the forest islands may have been inhabited since at least 8,900 BCE. That’s in line with other research that argues the region was a hub of early agriculture, and may have even been a domestication hotspot on par with the Ganges, Mediterranean, and Papua New Guinea.

When most people think “what is the Amazon,” Walker says, “It’s Nature with a capital N. It’s something that has to exist in the universe because it’s a contrast to culture or the city, or something like that… I think that idea is sometimes more influential than what we really know about the Amazon.”

The Mojos region is now mostly cattle ranches. And the study suggests that those cattle have also shaped the landscape: before they were introduced in the 1600s, the plains were full of shrubs and trees, a bit like Africa’s Serengeti.

Still, Walker cautions, it’s not easy to know how to interpret the earthworks. The first European accounts of the region describe people fishing in the area’s shallow waters, but the existing indigenous society was quickly destroyed by colonization and disease, and many of the landscapes were abandoned or converted to ranchland. Pollen from the soil cores show that the forest islands grew back over with heavy tree cover at that time. (The entire Amazon basin experienced such a catastrophic population collapse that the regrowth of the continent’s forests led to a dramatic dip in global carbon.) The forest islands show clear signs of human use, while the fields look like agricultural land, but without firsthand accounts it would be a step too far to think of them as villages and farms.

[Related: Humans are pushing into animals’ homes, but nature is as rebellious as ever]

“I’m scared of the European-farming-style bucket,” Walker says. “I’m less interested in saying, ‘okay, [the inhabitants] were on this island and nowhere else.’ Those islands might have been useful even when people weren’t living on them.”

For one thing, the islands support plants and animals in surprising ways. While excavating, the team found a burrowing fish living in the mud at the bottom of a ditch on the island. “That’s just to hammer home the point that the things people did are affecting plants and animals today. Those forest islands are great places for all kinds of animals.”

Walker makes the point that pre colonization societies may have farmed, hunted, and fished in ways that wouldn’t be obvious to Europeans. And even if people don’t actively inhabit the forest islands anymore, Walker says that his local research partners who grew up in the area “have all kinds of knowledge of plants and animals and historical changes” at the sites. On one cattle ranch, he remembers, one partner knew that there was a howler monkey living on a forest island alongside several dozen workers.

“The interplay between what we think of as nature, and the people living there, is complicated. And it’s probably been complicated for thousands of years.”

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It’s a given that tropical rainforests and other large portions of forests around the world provide life-providing oxygen for millions of people across the globe. Not only are forests the lungs of the world, but they protect biodiversity and provide a multitude of natural resources. 

Forests also act as carbon sinks by sucking up more carbon dioxide than the forests produce—regulating some of the CO2 in the atmosphere. The carbon is deposited in parts of the forest biomass, like roots and leaves, and in the soil. 

A new international study that was recently published in Nature found that intact tropical mountain forests in Africa store about 150 tonnes of carbon per hectare, over 1.5 times more than they were originally thought to absorb. A single hectare of those rainforests, which is about the size of two and a half football fields, absorbs the equivalent of emissions from powering 100 homes with electricity for a year. 

This means that some African rainforests actually store more carbon per unit area than the Amazon rainforest. African mountain rainforests were previously thought to absorb about 89 tonnes of carbon per hectare, which underestimated their importance to global carbon sequestration and climate regulation.

[Related: ‘Ghost forests’ are spreading across US coastal regions.]

Lead author Aida Cuni-Sanchez, a postdoc at the University of York’s Department of Environment and Geography and at Norwegian University of Life Sciences, explains that one of the more exciting findings from the research was discovering that forests found in mountains are expected to absorb lower levels of CO2 due to lower temperatures, more cloud coverage, and slower tree growth. The scientists measured the diameter, height, and species of more than 70,000 trees in 44 mountain sites across a dozen African countries including Guinea and Ethiopia to understand how the different trees absorb CO2. 

Researchers also found that these tropical mountain forests were able to store almost 70 percent more carbon than mountain forests elsewhere in the tropics. 

“But unlike other continents, in Africa we found the same carbon store per unit area in lowland and mountain forests. Contrary to what we expected, large trees remain abundant in mountain forests, and these large trees (defined as having diameters over 70 cm) store a lot of carbon,” Cuni-Sanchez said in a press release. 

[Related: Why forests in the Andes are crucial to fighting climate change.]

However, the researchers are concerned with the ongoing loss of these forests due to deforestation in the continent. Trees are cleared for a variety of reasons including commercial logging, rapid urbanization, and commercial agriculture. 

“This carbon store is endangered: we estimate that 0.8 million hectares of old-growth African montane forest have been lost since 2000,” they wrote in the study’s abstract. 

An estimated five percent of the continent’s tropical mountain rainforests have been cleared since 2000. Deforestation in Africa not only disrupts the ability to regulate CO2 levels, but is also connected to an increased risk of landslides, which could endanger more people if the rate of deforestation continues. 

“While we know what makes African forests special,” Cuni-Sanchez says, “we don’t yet know why they are different.

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Ever since we were children, we’ve learned in grade school and from Ranger Rick about the cutting down of the rainforest. We learned that it’s bad—that lots of animals and trees are killed and people’s livelihoods are turned upside down. We’ve been told random facts and figures about how many acres are destroyed every second. We eventually start to become numb to it.

So what’s really going on there? There are 15,000 known species of trees in the Amazon. How are those species of trees—the lifeblood and kings of the Amazon—faring? A large international team of researchers set out to find answers to just these questions. Perhaps not surprisingly, their findings were grim: up to 57 percent of all Amazonian tree species are likely to qualify as globally threatened.

What We Knew Before

The rainforests of Amazonia are estimated to have originally covered 2.2 million square miles—a staggering number. Amazonian forests have lost approximately 12 percent of that since industrialization began. Most of this has occurred in the southeastern part, in a region known as the “arc of deforestation.”

Many people have tried to understand and explain the consequences of massive forest loss at an ecosystem level i.e. soil erosion, diminished ecological services (not the least of which is oxygenation of the atmosphere) and climatic patterns gone haywire. But, no one has really attempted to figure out what is going on at a species level. In other words, we roughly know how much forest is being cleared, but what tree species are being destroyed, which ones are in the most danger, and how will that affect the overall destruction of the Amazon? Will the collapse of certain species have a domino or exponential effect on the process? That is precisely what tropical forest ecologist and leader of the study Hans ter Steege wanted to figure out.

Two Future Scenarios

Ter Steege and his team took highly a detailed model of tree abundance across Amazonia, developed from 1485 different forest inventories and overlaid two other models representing different deforestation scenarios. Each scenario combined historical, current, and projected rates of cutting. One scenario predicted what would happen if “business as usual” (BAU) or current rates of clearing continued. The other, titled the “improved governance scenario” (IGS) showed how much forest might be cleared if the integrity of indigenous peoples territories and protected areas were strictly maintained.

Under the BAU scenario, approximately 40 percent of the original Amazon forest would be destroyed by 2050, and under the less drastic IGS scenario, about 21 percent of original forest would be lost. Overall, and perhaps more startling, ter Steege and his team concluded that one-quarter to one half of all Amazonian tree species may experience population declines of over 30 percent. This affects all trees, including iconic species like the Brazil nut (63 percent could be lost by 2050) and wild populations of major food crops like cacao (which would see 50 percent population decline) and acai palm (which would experience a 72 percent loss).

Traditional slash and burn agriculture

A positive outcome of this study, note the researchers, would be to officially classify up to 57 percent of all Amazonian tree species as threatened on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List (the highest regarded and most accurate database on the status of biodiversity all around the globe). “It’s [the IUCN Red List] a political instrument that has been used across a wide array of areas and situations” for conservation purposes and carries significant weight.

Ter Steege goes even further to suggest that most tropical tree species on earth may be eligible for official Threatened classification by the IUCN, considering that Africa and Asia have lost about 55 percent and 35 percent of their tropical forests respectively. And while it’s important to assess all species of flora and fauna, plant species can get overlooked. “Mammals and birds create more attention, but there are many more plant species, and our data on them is much less” says ter Steege.

What It Means

Ultimately, for the IUCN to be able to officially list a species in any category it must be fully assessed which requires a much more thorough hashing out of each species’ current state. But, since over 90 percent of all tree species on Earth are tropical, it might be a good idea to heed this advice. Despite the gloomy results, ter Steege remains hopeful. “Though 11% of the Amazon has been lost, more than 80 percent of it is still there. And around 50% of it has some conservation status. So while we might not be able to stop all deforestation we still have huge possibilities for comprehensive conservation in one of the richest terrestrial regions in the world.”

Caxiuana, Brazil

It’s also important to remember that these estimates do not represent exactly what is going to happen. If the late Joe Strummer had anything to add when it comes to conservation it would probably be that “the future is unwritten.” This study presents a warning that most certainly requires our attention, for sure, especially with climate change exacerbating all environmental challenges of the present and future (climate change enhances the effects of deforestation like soil erosion and desertification), but it’s also a check up. It lets us know where we are, and what we need to do to avoid ending up somewhere we don’t want to be.

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This article originally featured on Field & Stream.

Wisconsin’s controversial wolf season might look a lot different next year. The recent weeklong February hunt closed after just three days as hunters and trappers exceeded the harvest quota by 82 percent, prompting outrage from far beyond the state’s borders and creating national news headlines. An op-ed in yesterday’s Washington Post titled, “Wisconsin’s Brutal Wolf Hunt Shows Hunters Have Too Much Sway Over Conservation Policy,” for example, didn’t pull any punches. The result has been a black eye for the Wisconsin DNR and hunters alike.

With the Biden administration reviewing the gray wolf’s delisting under the Endangered Species Act and a lawsuit filed by EarthJustice on behalf of several environmental groups, the future of the hunt, particularly in its current form, is far from assured. There are calls to ban traps and the use of hounds (which was particularly effective in the recent hunt’s snowy conditions). There are even calls to revisit or repeal Wisconsin’s Act 169, which requires a wolf hunt to be held in any year gray wolves aren’t protected under the endangered species act.

For its part, the Wisconsin DNR is accepting applications this month for membership in a new Wolf Management Committee to make recommendations for a scientifically and socially supported management plan.

The current plan hasn’t been updated since 2007, and it sets a population target of 350 wolves, which is less than a third of the current population estimate. Members of Wisconsin-based hunting, wolf advocacy, and agricultural groups will each be allowed up to six seats on a committee that will also include representatives from the DNR and other state agencies as well as the Ojibwe tribes of northern Wisconsin, who consider wolves to be sacred. Although the new Management Committee hasn’t been chosen yet, much less met, it’s unlikely that any new season it may recommend will resemble the rushed 2020 February season.

Wisconsin held its last wolf hunt in 2014. The Obama administration had delisted the gray wolf, only to have a federal judge put it back on the endangered species list until it was delisted again in October, 2020. Following the delisting, the DNR planned for a November 2021 season in order to develop a new quota and to work with the public and with the Ojibwe. However, a lawsuit by the Kansas-based hunter’s-rights group Hunter Nation forced the weeklong February season. Since the actual delisting took effect on January 4, 2021, the suit argued that the season should commence immediately. “There is a substantial possibility that Wisconsinite’s time to hunt wolves is limited,” the lawsuit stated, pointing to the Biden administration’s executive order on climate change, which includes a review of existing regulations and policies. After a judge ruled for Hunter Nation, the season was set for the last week of February.

Aided by snow that made wolves more vulnerable, hunters, especially those using hounds, enjoyed high success rates. The DNR not only admits failing to keep on top of the harvest, it was also hamstrung by a state law requiring 24 hour notice of any season closing. As a result, hunters far exceeded the harvest quota, and the hunt attracted national attention.

Unless the new administration relists the gray wolf or Wisconsin repeals Act 169, there will be another hunt in Wisconsin next year, and the only thing we know for sure is that no matter which of the committee’s recommendations the DNR accepts, they won’t make everyone happy.

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This post originally featured on Outdoor Life.

Wolf hunters in Wisconsin exceeded the state’s harvest quota just three days into their first wolf hunt since 2014. The hunt was supposed to last a week, but it was called early because of the fast and furious harvest. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources said non-native hunters had checked in 182 wolves as of 3 p.m. Wednesday when the state closed the season. The quota for non-native hunters was 119 wolves; native Ojibwe Tribes were also allocated 81 tags, in accordance with treaty rights ceded to the United States in the 1800s. The total number of harvested wolves stood at 216 (in non-native zones) as of noon on Thursday, according to the Associated Press.

Gray wolves were removed from Endangered Species Act protections in January, and the Wisconsin DNR estimated in April 2020 that the state had about 1,195 wolves. Its management goal is 350 wolves on non-tribal reservation land. Proponents of the hunt and state management say the high population of wolves — more than triple the management goal — is a clear sign of recovery, and they also point to declines in game animals due to wolf predation.

Despite the healthy wolf population in the state, the harvest goal of 200 wolves is not supposed to be met if the tribal hunters do not meet their harvest quota. There are no requirements to fill a tag. Native hunters have expressed disdain for the late-winter hunt, citing it as “especially wasteful and disrespectful,” the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission said in a statement to the Wisconsin State Journal.

DNR spokeswoman Sarah Hoye told the State Journal that the quota was set with a goal of keeping the population stable.

“The wolf population in Wisconsin is healthy, capable of sustaining harvest, and remains well connected to neighboring wolf populations in Michigan and Minnesota,” she said.

Tribal officials said the hunting and trapping season was rushed. A Kansas-based hunting group sued the Wisconsin DNR for failing to follow state law—Wisconsin state law mandates that the DNR hold a wolf hunt between November and February if there are no federal protections on wolves. As with many twists and turns in the Great Lakes wolf saga, the decision ended in court with a judge ruling in favor of the hunt.

More than 27,000 people applied for licenses, and 1,486 tags were issued, including 21 to non-resident hunters.

Predictably, animal rights activists weighed in, with Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action, calling the hunt “cruel and unjustifiable.” Pacelle is a long-time opponent of wolf hunting and formerly lead the Humane Society of the United States until his resignation in February 2018. (He was accused by former HSUS employees of sexual assault and harassment.)

Pacelle dipped into his well-worn playbook of frightening prose to describe the hunt: “Is there anything as diabolical as unleashing thousands of trophy hunters and commercial trappers to kill endangered wolves during their breeding season, armed with night-vision equipment, lights, packs of dogs, and steel-jawed leghold traps?”

The decision to remove wolves from federal endangered species protections is being challenged in court. And while other Great Lakes states like Minnesota and Michigan mull over potential wolf hunts during fall 2021, the Biden administration has ordered a review of the USFWS’ decision to delist gray wolves.

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Virologists, epidemiologists, and medical researchers have been working hard through the pandemic to figure out how COVID-19 spreads and what it does to the body, but scientists in other fields around the world are keeping a close eye on it too. They want to understand how the pandemic might impact their areas of study, now and further down the line.

The result, says Steven Cooke, a conservation biologist at Carleton University in Canada who studies fish, is a “tidal wave” of science think pieces in peer-reviewed journals that analyze, from an evidence-based perspective, COVID-19′s impact on the globe.

“I think it’s a good time for reflection, and as we think of economic investment in the post-COVID transition, trying to think about what that looks like,” Cooke says.

One of the newest of these papers, out this week in the journal PeerJ, looks at the importance of tropical peatlands in facilitating disease spread and the impact of the pandemic on tropical peatland conservation and human health. Twenty-three scientists from around the globe, mostly in countries with large tropical peatland areas, contributed to the paper.

“We tried to get as diverse a group of people together as possible,” says author Mark E. Harrison, a conservation scientist at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom.

Tropical peatlands are swampy forests that are found in regions around the Equator whose peat is composed mostly of dead tree matter, rather than moss as in other latitudes. Although they comprise a small amount of the Earth’s landmass, they are home to many species of plants and animals (including orangutans) and are major carbon sinks (areas that absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and offset carbon emissions and greenhouse gases). The countries that have tropical peatlands are also mostly low- or middle-income countries. Wildlife harvesting, peat wildfires, and habitat degradation are three things that really affect the peatlands, but they’re all more likely to happen in countries with fewer resources.

Harrison and his colleagues reviewed well over 100 papers related to tropical peatland conservation and COVID-19 impacts. They concluded that sustainably managing tropical peatlands “is important for mitigating impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, and reducing future zoonotic emerging infectious disease emergence and severity.”

Originally, Harrison says, he thought that the paper would be a short literature review. It ballooned as he and his colleagues started to consider the myriad ways that human health interacted with the tropical peatlands. For instance, peatland fires, which are often set deliberately during land conflicts, cause air pollution that the authors say will increase COVID-19 susceptibility for locals.

“To me, this just reiterates how dependent people are on the environment. The health of the environment and the health of people all interact together,” Harrison says. He’s quick to acknowledge that tropical peatlands are just one place where this is true.

Richard Kock, a veterinary scientist at the University of London, is concerned that too much focus on wildlife as potential vectors for infectious disease transmission masks the real dynamics of disease transmission. “Pathogens are mostly a product of our disturbance of the environment,” Kock says. In the case of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, researchers are learning that the viral lineage it is part of likely bounced around for a long time, between bats and other species, before eventually making its way to us. It may have even infected humans during that time.

The solution to these problems “is in the human domain,” he says. “We just have to leave nature to get on with it.”

For that reason, he says the perspective of papers like Harrison’s is “an overstatement” of the risk posed by nature. However, he says, “I’m all for conservation of these habitats, because that creates stability.”

The glut of papers focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic’s impacts on a huge range of subjects forms a unique body of work, says Cooke, which policy-makers should look to as they start thinking about the future. Each individual paper, including Harrison’s, forms a data point in a huge network of research oriented around a specific subject that unites fields. “I like the fact that it’s forcing people to work across boundaries,” he says.

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Ed Stoddard is a Johannesburg-based journalist with a focus on resource industries, wildlife, economics, and the environment in Africa. A Reuters correspondent for 24 years, he is now a regular contributor to the South African news site The Daily Maverick. This story originally featured on Undark.

The short-tailed chinchilla, a high-altitude South American rodent, was hunted almost to extinction in the 19th and 20th centuries for its highly-prized fur. Now endangered, a small colony of the species is worth far more alive than dead, skinned, and dried.

The colony in question sits atop 3.5 million ounces of extractable gold, a resource set to be developed by Gold Fields, a South African-based gold mining company. Gold Fields’ CEO Nick Holland said in 2017 at a mining conference in Cape Town that the chinchillas were one of the main obstacles to the project but the company was determined to find a way to protect the colony.

Big mining initiatives take years to roll, with conservation compliance an increasingly crucial part of the package. Gold Fields’ environmental permit for the Salares Norte mining project—which has an $860 million construction price tag—hinged on it finding a way to move the chinchillas, which are protected under Chilean law. The result is a kind of mini Noah’s Ark initiative high in the mountains of northern Chile.

But not everyone is sure the project will protect the rodents. Its success—or failure—will offer one test of how mining companies are responding to renewed government and investor pressure to account for conservation impacts.

Started in August, Gold Fields’ conservation operation—expected to take nine-months—aims to trap and move 25 chinchillas from the mine site to an area with suitable habitat around two and a half miles away. Their fate is linked to a project that could generate billions of dollars down the road. On the other hand, the cost of the chinchilla project to date is $400,000, including population surveys using satellite technology in rough country.

Gold Fields hails from South Africa, where conservationists pioneered techniques for the capture and relocation of megafauna in the 1950s. Captures of lion, elephant, and rhino typically involve darting, often from helicopters, leaving little room for error. Such methods were initially developed with aims that included the repopulation of the Kruger National Park with white rhinos from KwaZulu-Natal, at the time the pachyderms’ last refuge.

Operation chinchilla will hardly have the drama of an elephant capture. The short-tailed chinchillas are being moved via small traps to an area that scat and other evidence suggest was once a part of their range, according to Luis Ortega, the Chilean environmental manager overseeing the rodent removal. The animals are easy prey: Fur hunters can scoop the rabbit-sized rodents by hand from their shallow dens, Ortega said.

“We use a trap that is baited inside and closes when the chinchilla enters,” he adds. The device, a Tomahawk trap, sounds fearsome but is non-lethal. The bait is a mix of almonds, nut shells, and grass, with an added sweetener the rodents curiously find irresistible: vanilla extract.

“The entire process must be carried out for each of the nine rocky areas where the animals will be removed during the construction of the mine,” Ortega says. “According to the government approved process, two attempts to capture specimens must be made on each rocky area, each lasting 10 days.” If the attempt is unsuccessful, the operation must be suspended for 20 days before it is attempted again, to minimize disturbance.

When each chinchilla is trapped and taken to its new territory, it will be placed in a wire-mesh enclosure for a few weeks to adapt to its new surroundings, and then monitored with radio collars—techniques also often used with transfers of megafauna like rhinos and Cape buffalo.

The operation will take place in arduous territory between 12,800 and 15,400 feet above sea level by a team of experts who know the area. While the chinchilla is protected by law, its new habitat is only protected through the duration of the project, during which the company will monitor the species.

Outside experts have some reservations. “Yes, live-trapping in Tomahawk traps will be a negative experience for chinchillas, and mortality/death is possible,” writes Curtis Bosson, a Canadian wildlife biologist who has studied small mammal trapping and relocation, in an email.

“Relocation will be a highly negative experience for them,” Bosson adds. “Chinchillas are a social, colonial species, they are not used to large disruptions in their daily routine. They know where to find food and who their neighbor is on a daily basis. Relocation would disrupt all of this.”

Relocations for animals big and small have a mixed record. In 2018, for example, conservationists relocated six rare black rhinos from South Africa to a national park in the Central African nation of Chad, part of the species’ former range. Four of the animals died within months of the transfer.

Closer to the chinchillas in size and habitat is the American pika, a mountain-dwelling relative of rabbits and hares. A 2015 study in the journal Biodiversity found experimental translocations of the species between alpine habitats in the 1970s had “mixed results.” But it concluded pikas were “a good candidate species” for relocation projects in cases where the animals’ habitats were threatened by climate change.

Ortega said the chinchilla relocation team will be transparent about the success or failures of the project, with collaboration and oversight from the Center for Applied Ecology, a Chilean environmental consultancy. The team has invited researchers from the University of Chile and the University of La Serena to study the chinchillas, and Gold Fields says that researchers will take genetic samples from the rodents in order to help map their relationship to other populations.

There is little published scientific research about the species. A new population was discovered in southern Bolivia in 2017, the first confirmation of the animal there in 80 years. The International Union for Conservation of Nature’s authoritative Red List classifies the short-tailed chinchilla as “endangered” and decreasing, noting that the population is “severely fragmented” and that research is required on its size and distribution. The Red List also warns that “mining represents a large threat to the species’ habitat.”

The project comes amid increased pressure on mining companies to limit environmental impacts. More investors now say that they will factor environmental, social, and governance issues—also called ESGS— into their decisions. A global survey by FTSE Russell, a British analytics firm, found that 53 percent of asset owners incorporate ESGs into their investment strategies. Recently, investor-driven initiatives under the ESG banner have made it more difficult for the coal industry to access funding for new projects. And, in September, angry shareholders forced out the CEO and two other top executives at the mining giant Rio Tinto, after the company destroyed two ancient Aboriginal heritage sites in Australia in order to access iron ore. (The destruction was legal.)

In Chile, the world’s top copper producer, government regulations have also tightened on mining permits. Its environment ministry was only established a decade ago, when Chile became the first South American country to join the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which requires member states to meet international regulatory standards.

According to a 2017 discussion paper by the Institute of Economic Structures Research, a consulting firm, “obtaining an environmental permit has become a slower, stricter, and a more uncertain process for mining companies” in Chile as the government has “reacted to environmental concerns of the public and organizations like OECD.” Holland, the Gold Fields CEO, told reporters in August that the permitting process had taken three years and required the company to answer hundreds of questions from regulators.

In an email, Ricardo Bosshard, Chile director for the conservation group World Wide Fund for Nature, writes that, environmentally, the Chilean public is “very aware, and pressurizes companies and government to change.”

Certainly, pressure from mining companies on fragile habitats is likely to continue. As the chinchilla relocation project begins in Chile, with the gold price near record highs, producers of the precious metal are paying out hefty dividends. Time will tell if the chinchilla relocation project pays conservation dividends in turn.

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Roger Bales is a distinguished professor of Engineering at the University of California, Merced. Martha Conklin is a professor of Engineering at the University of California, Merced. This story originally featured on The Conversation.

As California contends with its worst wildfire season in history, it’s more evident than ever that land management practices in the state’s forested mountains need major changes.

Many of California’s 33 million acres of forests face widespread threats stemming from past management choices. Today the U.S. Forest Service estimates that of the 20 million acres it manages in California, 6 to 9 million acres need to be restored.

Forest restoration basically means removing the less fire-resistant smaller trees and returning to a forest with larger trees that are widely spaced. These stewardship projects require partnerships across the many interests who benefit from healthy forests, to help bring innovative financing to this huge challenge.

We are engineers who work on many natural resource challenges, including forest management. We’re encouraged to see California and other western states striving to use forest management to reduce the risk of high-severity wildfire.

But there are major bottlenecks. They include scarce resources and limited engagement between forest managers and many local, regional and state agencies and organizations that have roles to play in managing forests.

However, some of these groups are forming local partnerships to work with land managers and develop innovative financing strategies. We see these partnerships as key to increasing the pace and scale of forest restoration.

Dry, crowded forests

Many conifer forests in the western US contain too many trees, packed too closely together. This crowding is a result of past management practices that suppressed wildfires and prioritized timber harvesting. In recent years, climate warming, accumulation of dead wood on the forest floor and a buildup of small trees—which serve as “ladder fuels,” moving fire from the forest floor up into the canopy—have led to hotter, larger wildfires.

Under contemporary conditions, trees in California’s forests experience increased competition for water. The exceptionally warm 2011-2015 California drought contributed to the death of over 100 million trees. As the forest’s water demand exceeded the amount available during the drought, water-stressed trees succumbed to insect attacks.

Funding is a significant barrier to scaling up treatments. Nearly half of the Forest Service’s annual budget is spent on fighting wildfires, which is important for protecting communities and other built infrastructure. But this means the agency can restore only a fraction of the acres that need treatment each year.

The benefits of restoration

Forest restoration provides many benefits in addition to reducing the risk of high-severity wildfires. It reduces tree deaths and provides a foundation for sustaining carbon stored in trees and soil. Removing trees reduces water use in the forest, making more water available for the remaining trees, for in-stream flows and for food production and urban areas downstream.

Increased streamflow also enhances electricity generation from hydropower plants, offsetting use of fossil fuels to produce electricity and contributing to state greenhouse gas reduction initiatives.

Restoring forests reduces the erosion that often follows wildfires when rain loosens exposed soil, damaging roads, power lines and ecosystems and depositing sediments in reservoirs. And it improves rural mountain economies by supporting local jobs.

Mountain headwater forests are an integral part of California’s water infrastructure. They store winter snow and rain and release moisture slowly to rivers for downstream irrigation and municipal supplies during the state’s dry summers. That’s why supporting forest restoration is also gaining traction with downstream water and hydropower providers.

Residents across the western US had weeks of unhealthy air this summer owing to smoke from wildfires. Short of curbing climate change that is making forests more flammable, reducing fuels is the best tool to lower smoke emissions.

Like many others, we both find that spending time in mountain conifer forests is a great source of renewal. We believe that many people who live in, visit, or wish to sustain healthy mountain forests would be willing to support public investments in forest restoration.

Finding ways to monetize the value of less obvious benefits, such as ecological health and biodiversity, could help drive that investment.

Expanding partnerships

What’s the best way to create more public-private partnerships to scale up forest restoration? Two current ventures in the American and Yuba river basins of the central Sierra Nevada offer lessons to build on.

First, it takes a dozen or more dedicated partners to plan, fund and carry out these projects. Under contracts called stewardship agreements, the Forest Service—which owns the land—does the environmental assessment and provides oversight. Project partners plan, carry out and finance forest treatments.

Second, depending on what kind of treatment they use, restoration can cost from $700 to $4,000 per acre. This funding may come from state grants, foundation grants and loans, timber revenue or local agency contributions. Local agencies may repay loans with water and hydropower revenues.

Third, a major restoration project may stretch over five to 10 years and involve water agencies, county governments, the Forest Service, nongovernmental organizations, state agencies and the University of California.

Doing a project right involves much more than just cutting trees. From our experience, there are three key ingredients: accurate data for planning restoration treatments, credible methods for projecting and verifying the benefits that these treatments will produce, and incentives to bring parties together for the duration of the project.

Building public support

Current projects in California have relied heavily on state grants. Going forward, the state will need more funding sources to match the goal in an August 2020 Shared Stewardship agreement in which California and the Forest Service set a target of treating 1 million acres per year for 10 years.

At even $1000 per acre, treating 1 million acres will cost $1 billion per year. This figure does not include repeating treatments as forests regrow, which will be required in many areas to eventually restore a natural fire regime.

California is increasing the pace and scale of forest restoration, but needs to step up this effort considerably. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s new Executive Order to use California land to fight climate change, conserve biodiversity and boost climate resilience signals a strong intent, but meeting this multi-billion-dollar challenge will require more partners. We also see an important role for organizations working to educate and engage larger segments of the public through news stories, films, social media, and agency outreach.

A warming climate is intensifying risks to forests that are already stressed by wildfires, drought, and pests. Sustaining California’s iconic mountain forests requires acknowledging the multiple values they provide, and including the many groups who benefit from them in finding and implementing solutions.

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As bushfires rage across Australia, scientists are speaking out about what it will take to recover from this year’s catastrophic fire season and prepare for the future.

“We need national and international efforts to halt climate change,” says Stephen Kearney, a PhD student at the University of Queensland and the Australian Mammal Society’s communications director. “If we do not, these events will be the new normal, and the consequences of this for Australian species will be catastrophic.”

The Australian government has been criticized for a slow and under-funded response to the fires. Rolling protests are planned against Prime Minister Scott Morrison, the leader of the country’s right-leaning Liberal Party, and his government. Morrison has downplayed the link to climate change, but these historic fires are driving home the point that what’s happening in Australia, which is on the front lines of climate change’s effects, is far from business as usual.

In statements compiled by the Australian Science Media Center and released late Monday, leading climate and conservation scientists from across the country called for new efforts to halt climate change—but also to adapt and prepare for the fire seasons to come.

“The current bushfire crisis impacting multiple states and territories simultaneously represents a ‘new normal’ of what climate-related disasters in Australia will look like,” says disaster management scholar Dale Dominey-Howes of the University of Sydney.

Critics say the government has not invested in preparing for lengthening bushfire seasons, which are a near-inevitability as Australia gets drier and hotter. Australia’s network of firefighters is a patchwork of professional and trained volunteer units, but the group has been stretched thin by this year’s historic blazes.

Beyond that, the country is also vulnerable to other kinds of climate-related extreme weather events such as droughts, heat waves, flooding, storms, and cyclones, as documented in a report by the Climate Council of Australia published last month.

“We need new approaches to disaster management: A professional, paid workforce, capable of round-the-clock, round-the-year, and around-the-country deployment, capable of responding to multiple disaster types,” says Dominey-Howes.

For the moment, the fires continue to rage. “Whether in the Amazon, Borneo, or Australia, out-of-control wildfires are a signal of forests in crisis,” Bill Laurance, a conservation scientist at James Cook University, said in the prepared statement. “These forests are being shattered by human land-uses and stressed by droughts and rising temperatures.” We shouldn’t be surprised by these fires, he says. “We should realize that they’re exactly what we’d expect when we abuse the land and our planet so egregiously.”

More than 20 humans have died in the fires so far and estimates put the number of animal casualties in the hundreds of millions. But it’s hard to know what the indirect impacts on Australia’s wildlife will look like, Kearney says. For some regions, it’s likely to be devastating. And as PopSci has previously reported, the interruption of local flora and fauna will only make environmental catastrophe more likely in the future. Rehabilitating the land and reintroducing animals and plants will reduce the likelihood of future fires at this season’s apocalyptic scale, but until a reckoning is had, it’s hard to know how or how much.

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Liberty Vittert is a professor of the practice of data science at Washington University in St Louis. This story originally featured on The Conversation.

This year, I was on the judging panel for the Royal Statistical Society’s International Statistic of the Decade.

Much like Oxford English Dictionary’s “Word of the Year” competition, the international statistic is meant to capture the zeitgeist of this decade. The judging panel accepted nominations from the statistical community and the public at large for a statistic that shines a light on the decade’s most pressing issues.

On December 23, we announced the winner: the 8.4 million soccer fields of land deforested in the Amazon over the past decade. That’s 24,000 square miles, or about 10.3 million American football fields.

This statistic, while giving only a snapshot of the issue, provides insight into the dramatic change to this landscape over the last 10 years. Since 2010, mile upon mile of rainforest has been replaced with a wide range of commercial developments, including cattle ranching, logging, and the palm oil industry.

This calculation by the committee is based on deforestation monitoring results from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, as well as FIFA’s regulations on soccer pitch dimensions.

Calculating the cost

There are a number of reasons why this deforestation matters—financial, environmental, and social.

First of all, 20 million to 30 million people live in the Amazon rainforest and depend on it for survival. It’s also the home to thousands of species of plants and animals, many at risk of extinction.

Second, one-fifth of the world’s fresh water is in the Amazon Basin, supplying water to the world by releasing water vapor into the atmosphere that can travel thousands of miles. But unprecedented droughts have plagued Brazil this decade, attributed to the deforestation of the Amazon.

During the droughts, in Sao Paulo state, some farmers say they lost over one-third of their crops due to the water shortage. The government promised the coffee industry almost $300 million to help with their losses.

Finally, the Amazon rainforest is responsible for storing over 180 billion tons of carbon alone. When trees are cleared or burned, that carbon is released back into the atmosphere. Studies show that the social cost of carbon emissions is about $417 per ton.

Finally, as a November 2018 study shows, the Amazon could generate over $8 billion each year if just left alone, from sustainable industries including nut farming and rubber, as well as the environmental effects.

Financial gain?

Some might argue that there has been a financial gain from deforestation and that it really isn’t a bad thing. Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, went so far as to say that saving the Amazon is an impediment to economic growth and that “where there is indigenous land, there is wealth underneath it.”

In an effort to be just as thoughtful in that sense, let’s take a look. Assume each acre of rainforest converted into farmland is worth about $1,000, which is about what U.S. farmers have paid to buy productive farmland in Brazil. Then, over the past decade, that farmland amounts to about $1 billion.

The deforested land mainly contributes to cattle raising for slaughter and sale. There are a little over 200 million cattle in Brazil. Assuming the two cows per acre, the extra land means a gain of about $20 billion for Brazil.

Chump change compared to the economic loss from deforestation. The farmers, commercial interest groups and others looking for cheap land all have a clear vested interest in deforestation going ahead, but any possible short-term gain is clearly outweighed by long-term loss.

Rebounding

Right now, every minute, over three football fields of Amazon rainforest are being lost.

What if someone wanted to replant the lost rainforest? Many charity organizations are raising money to do just that.

At the cost of over $2,000 per acre—and that is the cheapest I could find—it isn’t cheap, totaling over $30 billion to replace what the Amazon lost this decade.

Still, the studies that I’ve seen and my calculations suggest that trillions have been lost due to deforestation over the past decade alone.

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This article originally featured on Outdoor Life.

The Tongass National Forest in southeast Alaska is the largest temperate rainforest in the world and the largest national forest in the US. At almost 17 million acres, it’s a wonderland for hunting and fishing. The U.S. Forest Service announced plans last Tuesday to open up 9.2 million of those acres to potential logging and development. The service would do this by exempting the Tongass from the Clinton-era Roadless Rule, which regulates punching new roads into undeveloped forest service lands. The public comment period for this plan is now open (you can leave your comment by clicking here).

I spent a week last month hunting, hiking, and fishing the Tongass and, more importantly, hanging out with the folks who make their living off the forest. In this country, mountain goats roam the alpine, Sitka blacktail deer slink through the old growth forests, moose and ducks are scattered throughout costal marshes, and brown and black bears are…everywhere. The fishing is even more robust. The Tongass’ rivers and creeks support more salmon than all other national forests combined, and the fishing and tourism account for more than 25 percent of local jobs in the region. The Tongass produces 28 percent of Alaska’s commercial salmon catch and Tongass salmon fishing generates $1 billion annually, according to Trout Unlimited.

Now, if you think this post is going to devolve into an anti-logging diatribe…not so fast. I’m from the Midwest, where good logging practices generally help the wildlife and the hunting. New growth means habitat and food for deer, grouse, and turkeys. I’ve killed plenty of critters (including one big bull moose in Canada) in old logging cuts, and I like logging at the right place and time. Besides, the trees we print our magazine on don’t knock themselves down.

But Tongass isn’t the Midwest. It’s an old-growth cathedral of evergreen rainforest. Spruce, cedar, and hemlock thrive in steep terrain that’s often many miles from any established road.

And it’s important to note that old-growth logging isn’t the booming industry that it used to be in Southeast. In fact, reigniting the old-growth logging here would likely require some serious federal subsidies. The Forest Service lost about $600 million through its management of the Tongass National Forest, according to a new report from the Taxpayers for Common Sense. The nonpartisan group calculated the Forest Service’s losses through road-building and timber sales and found that the average net loss was about $30 million annually over the past 20 years.

Building new logging roads through vast wilderness is expensive. What’s more, Tongass timber is a mix high-value sawtimber and low-quality trees. “Alaska has the most valuable and some of the least valuable softwood trees in the world,” writes Orions Schoen in “North Pacific Temperate Rainforests.” In other words, for loggers to get to the good stuff, they’ve got to churn through a ton of low-value timber. And according to one 2013 study, about 66 percent of the large-tree old-growth forest on the Tongass has already been logged.

The whole ecology of the Tongass relies on two key factors: giant coniferous trees and clean, cold water. The massive trees force the creeks and rivers to meander, which creates ideal spawning habitat for salmon (the place is nicknamed the Salmon Forest).

Those salmon die after they spawn, and those rotting fish carcasses put tons of nutrients back into the forest. Black and brown bears gorge on the salmon, but so do eagles, ravens, wolves, and even ducks (local waterfowlers don’t like shooting mallards during the later stages of the salmon runs here because they taste fishy after gobbling salmon eggs and carcasses). Blacktail deer need those old-growth forests for wintering habitat. And locals rely on all these critters for subsistence hunting and fishing, as well as the dollars they bring in from traveling outdoors people.

When you compare that existing, thriving economy to the potential new one from a resurgence in old-growth logging, the smart bet is on conserving this habitat for hunting, fishing, and tourism. Austin Williams, Trout Unlimited’s Alaska legal and policy director, wrote in a statement:

The proposed repeal of the Roadless Rule caters to the outdated old-growth, clear-cut logging industry and shows blatant disregard for everyday Alaskans who rely on and enjoy salmon, wildlife, clean water, abundant subsistence resources, and beautiful natural scenery.

The Tongass is all of ours. Repealing the Roadless Rule would cast aside years of collaboration and thriving businesses that depend on healthy forests, and usher in a new era of reckless old-growth clear-cut logging that pollutes our streams, hurts our salmon and deer populations, and spoils the forest and scenery. This proposed rule is a complete about-face from the direction we should be headed and reflects the fact that special interests and not common sense are guiding this decision.

People throughout Alaska and the rest of the country depend on the productive rivers and wild fish of the Tongass for food, jobs, and recreation. We urge anyone who shares these values to comment to the Forest Service and urge them to uphold the Roadless Rule and conserve key areas of the Tongass, including the highest quality salmon-producing watersheds within the Tongass 77.

Lastly, the ‘Roadless Rule’ is poorly named. It makes it sound impossible to get new development into the forest. But that’s not totally true. About 58 development projects have been proposed in Roadless areas in the Tongass and Chugach national forests, and 100 percent of those projects have been approved by the Forest Service, according to Williams.

“There’s just no good reason to take the Tongass out of Roadless,” he says.

If you agree, click here to leave your official comment with the Forest Service. The USDA has outlined six options for the forest, ranging from no action (in other words, leaving the Tongass in Roadless) all the way to removing 9.2 million acres from Roadless protection.

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The fires raging across the Brazilian Amazon have captured the world’s attention. Meanwhile, South America’s second-largest forest, the Gran Chaco, is disappearing in plain sight.

The Gran Chaco, which spans from Bolivia and Brazil to Paraguay and Argentina, is extremely biodiverse, with more than 3,400 plant and 900 animal species—including quebracho blanco trees, tapirs, and jaguars. It is also home to at least 30 indigenous peoples, including the Ayoreo, some of whom live in voluntary isolation in their historic homelands, as well Mennonite colonies.

Now, due to the some of the fastest deforestation in the world, this once enormous ecosystem may soon be gone outside of protected areas. Since 2001, more than 31,000 square miles of forest were felled to make way for agriculture and cattle ranching in the Gran Chaco.

More than half of that deforestation took place in Paraguay, a small South American country of 7 million.

As in the Amazon to the north, cattle ranching and farming are the primary drivers of deforestation in Paraguay’s Gran Chaco.

But beyond beef and soy, the cleared land of the Gran Chaco produces some pretty unexpected stuff, too: everyday products that are exported and sold abroad to consumers who may never know their purchases contribute to the destruction of South America’s second largest forest.

Growing pains in the Chaco

I have investigated the spread of export-oriented agriculture in Paraguay since 2011. Paraguay, the eighth largest exporter of beef globally, sells 350,000 tons of beef each year to Russia, Israel, Chile and beyond.

There are at least 14 million head of cattle in the Paraguayan Chaco and over 4 million hectares of land devoted to cattle ranching—an area larger than Belgium.

The Paraguayan government hopes to climb into the top five of global beef exporters in the next 10 years. To meet that goal, ranchers will need more land—a lot of it—since Paraguay’s beef industry is based on grazing, rather than the feedlot model prevalent in the U.S.

To clear forest land for grazing, both legally and illegally, Paraguayan cattle ranchers use what’s called “chaining.” That means leveling the forest with tractors that drag heavy chains. Then they burn the fallen trees.

Increasingly, some Paraguayan ranchers are realizing that there’s money to be made off those felled trees, too. Rather than just incinerating the wood in their fields, they turn it into carbón—or charcoal, in English.

Across the Paraguayan Chaco, large brick kilns located off of main roads slowly bake the wood cleared from nearby forests, transforming it into charcoal that fuels weekend cookouts worldwide.

That charcoal is then stacked high on trucks that carry it to Paraguayan exporters, who ship it to Europe, the Middle East and the United States, among other major markets.

Weekend cookouts and luxury leather

In those places, Paraguayan charcoal is often labeled it as “natural” or “environmentally certified“, suggesting that they are sustainable.

Paraguayan charcoal may be a “natural” product, but it’s hardly environmentally friendly. That’s because making and selling charcoal from recently cut trees—trees that previously went to waste—makes deforestation more profitable.

As a result, purchases of this product indirectly contribute to the deforestation of the Chaco, sometimes turning environmentally minded consumers into unknowing accomplices in the decimation of South America’s second-largest forest.

A similar problem arises with another Chaco good that’s sold far and wide: leather.

Paraguay exported nearly 9 million pounds of leather—a byproduct of its beef industry—last year.

Paraguayan leather is refined and used in numerous industries across the world, particularly in Europe.

Car companies BMW, Citroën, Peugeot, Renault, Porsche and Ferrari all use leather from the Chaco to wrap everything from seats to steering wheels.

Playing a pickup game of soccer this weekend? Your shoes could be made of the same stuff.

Leather and charcoal don’t just make environmental degradation of the Paraguayan Chaco forest more profitable—sometimes, they are produced using forced labor.

According to recent complaints filed with the Paraguayan attorney general’s office and labor department, some Chaco cattle ranches exploit indigenous people, paying extremely low wages for jobs like fence building, clearing land, or herding cattle. Some workers must buy food from expensive ranch stores using systems of credit that entrap them in debt.

A September 2018 United Nations report on contemporary forms of slavery in Paraguay shows that forced labor on Chaco cattle ranches and related industries is slowly improving due to increased compliance with labor laws, but affirms that it remains prevalent.

Going, going …

It can be overwhelming, I know, for consumers to investigate whether their leather, say, or the charcoal for their BBQ is ethically sourced.

There are so many worrying environmental problems in the world, and global supply chains are incredibly complex. So for consumers living far from the places that produce the goods they buy—even very conscientious ones—it is easier to focus on extraordinary events like the Amazon fires than to contemplate the unintended consequences of a weekend cookout.

But commonplace consumption habits matter when it comes to global environmental health. The things we buy may support the harmful underlying practices and industries that lead to acute crises like Amazonian fires or generalized problems driven by climate change.

That said, there’s no “out of sight, out of mind” when it comes to social and environmental justice. If South America’s great Gran Chaco forest continues to be leveled at the current rates, it will recede before most people even knew it existed.

Joel E. Correia is an assistant professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Florida.

This article was originally featured on The Conversation.

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Fires in the Amazon rainforest have captured attention worldwide in recent days. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who took office in 2019, pledged in his campaign to reduce environmental protection and increase agricultural development in the Amazon, and he appears to have followed through on that promise.

The resurgence of forest clearing in the Amazon, which had decreased more than 75 percent following a peak in 2004, is alarming for many reasons. Tropical forests harbor many species of plants and animals found nowhere else. They are important refuges for indigenous people, and contain enormous stores of carbon as wood and other organic matter that would otherwise contribute to the climate crisis.

Some media accounts have suggested that fires in the Amazon also threaten the atmospheric oxygen that we breathe. French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted on Aug. 22 that “the Amazon rain forest—the lungs which produces 20 percent of our planet’s oxygen—is on fire.”

The oft-repeated claim that the Amazon rainforest produces 20 percent of our planet’s oxygen is based on a misunderstanding. In fact nearly all of Earth’s breathable oxygen originated in the oceans, and there is enough of it to last for millions of years. There are many reasons to be appalled by this year’s Amazon fires, but depleting Earth’s oxygen supply is not one of them.

Oxygen from plants

As an atmospheric scientist, much of my work focuses on exchanges of various gases between Earth’s surface and the atmosphere. Many elements, including oxygen, constantly cycle between land-based ecosystems, the oceans and the atmosphere in ways that can be measured and quantified.

Nearly all free oxygen in the air is produced by plants through photosynthesis. About one-third of land photosynthesis occurs in tropical forests, the largest of which is located in the Amazon Basin.

But virtually all of the oxygen produced by photosynthesis each year is consumed by living organisms and fires. Trees constantly shed dead leaves, twigs, roots, and other litter, which feeds a rich ecosystem of organisms, mostly insects and microbes. The microbes consume oxygen in that process.

Forest plants produce lots of oxygen, and forest microbes consume a lot of oxygen. As a result, net production of oxygen by forests—and indeed, all land plants—is very close to zero.

Oxygen production in the oceans

For oxygen to accumulate in the air, some of the organic matter that plants produce through photosynthesis must be removed from circulation before it can be consumed. Usually this happens when it is rapidly buried in places without oxygen—most commonly in deep sea mud, under waters that have already been depleted of oxygen.

This happens in areas of the ocean where high levels of nutrients fertilize large blooms of algae. Dead algae and other detritus sink into dark waters, where microbes feed on it. Like their counterparts on land, they consume oxygen to do this, depleting it from the water around them.

Below depths where microbes have stripped waters of oxygen, leftover organic matter falls to the ocean floor and is buried there. Oxygen that the algae produced at the surface as it grew remains in the air because it is not consumed by decomposers.

This buried plant matter at the bottom of the ocean is the source of oil and gas. A smaller amount of plant matter gets buried in oxygen-free conditions on land, mostly in peat bogs where the water table prevents microbial decomposition. This is the source material for coal.

Only a tiny fraction—perhaps 0.0001 percent—of global photosynthesis is diverted by burial in this way, and thus adds to atmospheric oxygen. But over millions of years, the residual oxygen left by this tiny imbalance between growth and decomposition has accumulated to form the reservoir of breathable oxygen on which all animal life depends. It has hovered around 21 percent of the volume of the atmosphere for millions of years.

Some of this oxygen returns to the planet’s surface through chemical reactions with metals, sulfur, and other compounds in Earth’s crust. For example, when iron is exposed to air in the presence of water, it reacts with oxygen in the air to form iron oxide, a compound commonly known as rust. This process, which is called oxidation, helps regulate oxygen levels in the atmosphere.

Don’t hold your breath

Even though plant photosynthesis is ultimately responsible for breathable oxygen, only a vanishingly tiny fraction of that plant growth actually adds to the store of oxygen in the air. Even if all organic matter on Earth were burned at once, less than 1 percent of the world’s oxygen would be consumed.

In sum, Brazil’s reversal on protecting the Amazon does not meaningfully threaten atmospheric oxygen. Even a huge increase in forest fires would produce changes in oxygen that are difficult to measure. There’s enough oxygen in the air to last for millions of years, and the amount is set by geology rather than land use. The fact that this upsurge in deforestation threatens some of the most biodiverse and carbon-rich landscapes on Earth is reason enough to oppose it.

Scott Denning is a Professor of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University. This article was originally featured on The Conversation.

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Dark skies over Sao Paulo this week were just a local hint of an unfolding global catastrophe centered in Brazil. This year, the Amazon rainforest is burning at an unprecedented rate, after historic deforestation in the wake of the election of right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro.

Around 74,000 fires have been recorded in the Amazon in 2019, up from 40,136 fires in 2018. Records of the number of fires only stretch back to 2013: in the years since, the second-worst fire year was 2016, with 68,484 fires.

Bolsonaro, who was elected on an explicit platform of destabilizing the systems put in place to protect what remains of Brazil’s 60-percent share of the Amazon, has said he’s skeptical of those numbers and that he thinks the fires have been started by non-governmental organizations that are upset by being defunded. What’s being done by the Brazilian government to halt the fires is unclear.

This is big news, because what happens to the Amazon will affect the global climate. Here’s what you need to know:

They aren’t wildfires

The fires currently raging in the Amazon aren’t wildfires: they’re the last step in deforestation, Ane Alencar, scientific director of the Brazilian NGO Institute of Environmental Research in Amazonia (IPAM), told Mongabay. Landowners “cut the trees, leave the wood to dry and later put fire to it, so that the ashes can fertilize the soil,” she says. That cleared land becomes pasture grass for beef cattle.

A report authored by her organization notes that these fires are directly related to humans. “Its incidence in the region is directly related to human action,” the report says in Portugese, “and the flames usually follow the trail of deforestation: the more felled, the more hot spots.”

Deforestation in the Amazon has had unpredictable effects

Clearing swathes of the Amazon rainforest for farming like cattle ranching among other reasons like logging has fundamentally changed the environment of the rainforest. Parts of the Amazon do experience dry seasons, and can have forest fires, but nothing on this scale, says University of Florida anthropologist Michael Heckenberger.

Heckenberger does research in a region in the southern part of the Amazon that has been hardest-hit in terms of deforestation. “I work with indigenous peoples on an indigenous reserve,” he says. “They do pre-burns and other fire control things, and it has had an extremely important effect.”

Because the reserve lands are maintained using indigenous land use practices, there’s very limited deforestation, he says. It’s still threatened, however, “because the general ecological systems are drying out. Even in areas where there isn’t physical deforestation, there’s die-off and susceptibility to fire.”

The Amazon, in its pristine form, creates its own weather. But Heckenberger says “ what we’re seeing this year is further evidence that deforestation and climate change are conspiring to essentially create an oscillation from what was formerly fairly dense tropical forest to something else, some open woodland or savannah regime.”

Government police and deforestation are directly linked

Brazilian government fire management services (and the Brazilian environmental protection agency generally) have been significantly defunded in the wake of Bolsonaro’s election, something Heckenberger says is making it harder to manage fires.

Deforestation itself has more than doubled against last year’s numbers, according to satellite data from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research. Bolsonaro fired the head of the space agency over this data on Aug. 2, saying the data was false.

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On the Big Island of Hawaii, a fungus called ceratocystis is murdering ‘Ōhi‘a trees—at least 1 million in the past eight years. Local forest experts had no idea how to contain the quick-killing pathogen, until an aerial survey from ecologist Greg Asner revealed a pattern they could distinctly see only from above. At the edge of Hawaii ­Volcanoes National Park, fences drew a sharp line between dead trees and healthy ones. The barriers kept out feral pigs, which, they realized, would gash the trunks with their tusks, enabling the infection. If the scientists could bar the ungulates, the ‘Ōhi‘as might survive.

This type of insight from Asner, 51, has helped arboreal managers plot and maintain the health of forests for nearly a decade. “Doing good conservation requires knowing what you’ve got, where it is, and how it’s doing,” Asner says. His lab, aboard a twin-prop Dornier 228, produces maps that reveal the structure of the canopy, indicate how much carbon trees trap, and even estimate hydration to see how forests cope with drought. From his seat near the navigation console, 7,000 feet up, Asner directs the crew to capture swaths of land too large to take in from the ground and with greater detail than far-away satellites.

This career in the sky began at sea. A six-year tour as a deep-sea diver in the Navy in the late ’80s and early ’90s started his journey into ecology. “I saw a lot of cool environments that I didn’t know existed,” Asner recalls. His work above the surface began as a field tech with the Nature Conservancy in Hawaii, and eventually netted him a Ph.D. in biology in 1997, a seat on the faculty at the Carnegie Institution for Science, and one fancy airplane. Today, he’s airborne as the director of the Arizona State University Center for Global Discovery and Conservation Science.

His customized plane hauls more than 5,000 pounds of equipment, including cameras and racks of computers, but Asner’s unique analyses rely most on two key sensor systems. The first is a pair of powerful 18-watt lasers that reflect off the trees to create a 3D view. The second is a set of high-fidelity spectrometers, which measure the light—from ultraviolet to ­infrared—​that the trees reflect. Chemicals in the leaves, such as chlorophyll and carbohydrates, create a spectral signature that indicates, among other metrics, the trees’ hydration, health, and species. Artificial intelligence helps Asner’s team interpret the data.

Over the past decade, his colorful surveys have illuminated forests in a dozen locations, including orangutan habitats in Borneo and lion hunting grounds in South Africa. Soaring over Peru in 2013 produced a map that encodes the country’s carbon stocks—the amount of the element its trees store. The research helped managers plan protected areas, which ensures a sufficient carbon sink and preserves a variety of species as a safeguard against a shifting climate. “A biodiverse ecosystem is much more resilient to change than one that’s made up of one species,” he says.

Closer to home, in the drought- and fire-prone American West, Asner’s most focused on hydration. Flights over California since 2015 tallied 120 million severely dry trees, of which at least 100 million are dead. In places like Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks, preserves rich with sequoias, ponderosa pines, and white firs, foresters could use his data to plan burns to thin out trees and relieve stress on the remaining ones. As a rapidly changing climate brings more-frequent droughts and other extreme weather, land managers increasingly will rely on Asner’s input to make these kinds of hard choices. “Some of that,” he says, “is what lives and what dies.”

This article was originally published in the Summer 2019 Make It Last issue of Popular Science.

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Anyone lucky enough to visit Ghana could do worse than order a plate of boiled yam and red-red—a stew made with beans and tomato paste. A Sunday morning treat in Europe might be homemade crepes and hazelnut chocolate spread. Both of these meals—though part of very different cuisines and eaten in different places—contain palm oil, an edible vegetable oil extracted from the fruit of the oil palm (Elaeis guineensis).

The link between palm oil production and deforestation in the tropical regions where it is grown is well known, but few people realize how prevalent palm oil is in items consumed every day, such as cleaning products and biodiesel.

Global production of palm oil has increased rapidly since the 1990s, with plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia supplying around 85% of the global trade.

Many of these plantations have replaced natural forests and drained carbon-rich peatlands. In Indonesia alone, palm oil is cultivated by more than 4 million smallholder farmers, employing more than 7 million laborers throughout its supply chain, and in 2017 exports contributed over $23 billion to the country’s economy.

The European Parliament issued a resolution in 2017 to phase out and eventually ban biofuels made from palm oil. The EU ban could reduce demand for palm oil, but many, including the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, aren’t sure it will be effective in stemming deforestation. Malaysian farmers meanwhile argue it will harm their livelihoods.

The ban could even harm the environment by ending efforts to work with countries that are developing sustainable palm oil production that can also reduce poverty.

More harm than good?

Just under half of the EU’s palm oil imports are used for biodiesel. Despite the importance of palm oil to Indonesia’s economy, the impact of an EU ban is likely to be small. Indonesia exports two-thirds of its biodiesel production, but only around one-fifth of that goes to EU countries.

Indonesia may compensate for lost sales in the EU by increasing sales to large importers such as India and China. The EU ban could set back Indonesia’s efforts to manage its forests and palm oil trade more sustainably as these customers aren’t currently committed to sustainable sourcing. Unintended consequences like these highlight why bans can be crude policy instruments.

The EU ruled that renewable fuels such as biodiesel must comprise 10 percent of transport fuel by 2020. This was intended as an implicit ban on fossil fuels comprising the final 10 percent of vehicle diesel, but banning particular crops like palm oil for biofuels and keeping a biofuel requirement simply diverts the problem. This is particularly so if the EU continues to meet the 10 percent requirement using “first generation” biofuels—those derived directly from food crops, such as soy or rapeseed.

Replacing food crops to meet increased demand for bio-ethanol production places pressure on land and could increase global food prices, hurting low-income households most.

Better approaches would target the interconnected problems of carbon emissions, deforestation, and poverty. EU countries could support the sustainable cultivation of palm oil, breaking the link between oil palm expansion and deforestation in producer countries. One way to do this is planting on degraded land rather than replacing forest. This avoids the negative impact of a ban on the livelihoods of millions of farmers.

Demand for fossil fuels could be reduced more effectively by making public transport more accessible, affordable and reliable. Incentives for people to buy electric cars, through subsidy and a higher density of charging points, could also help.

Indonesia and the EU have already worked together on this issue with some success. A voluntary partnership agreement between the two in 2003 helped Indonesia reduce illegal logging and export timber to the EU. But given that most of Indonesia’s palm oil exports go to countries outside of the EU, a global approach is needed.

The UN Environment World Conservation Monitoring Centre investigates the sustainable trade in forest products. It hopes to understand how incentives for supplier and producer countries can ensure trade improves livelihoods, prosperity and the natural environment.

In an increasingly interconnected world, seemingly sensible decisions made in one place can have unintended consequences elsewhere. An EU palm oil ban, designed to protect tropical forests, could instead harm the livelihoods of farmers and increase forest loss if countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia switch to markets with fewer environmental checks and balances.

Elizabeth Robinson is a Professor of Environmental Economics at the University of Reading, and Herry Purnomo is a Professor of Forest Management and Governance at the Institut Pertanian Bogor. This article was originally featured on The Conversation.

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On Sunday, Brazil elected a new president: Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro has been compared to President Donald Trump for his far-right politics. Like Trump, his election is a sign of dissatisfaction with the status quo in Brazil, but also like Trump, his actions on matters like the environment will have consequences that reach around the globe. In this, he might beat the United States president, because he now governs an incomparable resource—the Amazon.

“There’s really nothing that Bolsonaro is putting on the table that makes conservationists and scientists happy right now,” says noted conservation biologist William Laurance of James Cook University in Australia.

Among his many controversial statements, Bolsonaro vows to open up indigenous lands to resource exploitation, ban environmental NGOs like the World Wildlife Fund, place Brazil’s environmental ministry under the control of its ministry of agriculture, and relax laws safeguarding the Amazon from development. Earlier in the election cycle, he threatened to back out of the Paris climate accords, a stance he has now relaxed. But remaining part of the accords won’t mean much if all of his election promises come to pass.

Of course, election promises are one thing and in-office action is another. The issues surrounding the Amazon are important far outside Brazil, though, and they’re connected.

When it comes to the environment—and specifically, the Amazon—the world is watching Bolsonaro closely. “This is one political entity, the federal government of Brazil, that has control over 70 percent of the Amazon,” says Emilio Bruna, a University of Florida ecologist who studies the Amazon. What Brazil decides to do with that territory has global implications.

Brazil is home to about 70 percent of the Amazon rainforest, one of the planet’s greatest sinks of biodiversity and a key carbon storage site. Protecting it is essential if we want to mitigate the effects of climate change and the associated mass extinction currently taking place. Rates of deforestation fell to historic lows in 2012, but they’ve been rising since. With a government that’s open to resource exploitation and actively hostile to conservation, we can expect that to continue.

A sign of the times is the fact that Bolsonaro plans to dismantle the governmental ministry of the environment and place it under the purview of the ministry of agriculture, Bruna says. “Obviously, [these two ministries] have different teams and goals, and in fact, the ministry of the environment is also responsible for enforcement of environmental legislation,” he says. That includes things like policing farmers to make sure they’re not illegally deforesting to use the land to grow soybeans or herd cattle. “By sinking the ministry for the environment into the ministry for agriculture, it really tells you about what their priorities are,” he says.

But merely considering deforestation in terms of its climate impacts leaves out some of the most important players in Brazilian politics, people for whom the Amazon isn’t just a jewel of the planet—it’s home.

“This scenario is totally heartbreaking,” Dinamã Tuxá, Coordinator of Brazil’s Association of Indigenous Peoples (APIB) says in a press release from the organization Amazon Watch. “Bolsonaro has made clear and consistent declarations about ending the titling of indigenous lands, which are completely opposed to our rights.”

Bolsanaro has described the Amazon as “like a child with chickenpox,” comparing indigenous reservations with diseased lesions. Ending indigenous titling and opening up indigenous lands for mining were among his campaign promises. He’s also talked about expanding nuclear and hydroelectric power in the Amazon—which means more dams, some of which will displace indigenous peoples.

The indigenous peoples of the Amazon play a vital role in protecting the rainforest and tracking the progress of illegal deforestation. But beyond their utility in protecting the region, it is their home. Removing protections that safeguard the Amazon also endangers their most basic rights.

An APIB release published on October 22 asks the national and international human rights community “to stay alert, aiming for the protection of our lives as well as the rights guaranteed both by the federal constitution and international treaties signed by Brazil.”

Indigenous reserves have “really crucially augmented traditional protected areas” in the Amazon, says Laurance. Together with those protected areas and government-controlled logging sites, which are environmentally managed, they create conservation corridors wending their way through crucial parts of the jungle, he says. Taking away power from indigenous reserves—many of which are not fully defined, leaving them politically vulnerable—would fragment these corridors and leave only patches, which are far less effective for preserving wildlife.

“A lot of the indigenous reserves in the Amazon are smack in the path of a lot of development pressure,” he says. Take a pro-development president who explicitly threatens indigenous self-governance, and who knows what could happen.

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Forests don’t get a lot of credit in the fight against climate change. Left alone, they soak up a huge volume of carbon from the atmosphere. They are what scientists call a “carbon sink.” But, when people burn down forests to clear land for farming or grazing, those trees become a liability, bleeding their vast stores of carbon into the atmosphere.

Right now, countries are putting more money toward expanding agriculture than they are toward safeguarding forests. The challenge for governments is to create policies to protect existing forests and grow new ones. Doing so could put a big dent in climate change, according to a series of new reports.

Managed smartly, forests could offset ten years of pollution from fossil fuels.

Successfully controlling climate change will require countries to remove at least 100 billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere, perhaps even several times more than that, according to Philip B. Duffy, president and executive director of the Woods Hole Research Center.

“The only CO2 ‘technology’ currently available that works at anything like that scale is landscape restoration,” he said. “We have to stuff as much carbon into these natural reservoirs as they will hold. We cannot meet the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees C without utilizing the potential of forests.”

By 2100, forests could soak up an additional 100 billion metric tons of carbon, the equivalent of ten years of carbon pollution from burning fossil fuels, according to a new report prepared by the Woods Hole Research Center. Currently, deforestation is dumping more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than existing forests are soaking up.

“It’s as if we’re charging $200 a month on our land carbon credit card, and only paying $100 a month off,” said Michael Wolosin, president of Forest Climate Analytics, which recently issued a report describing successful reforestation efforts in South Korea, China and India.

Deforestation can also harm the climate in the short-term. “Forests play so many important ecological roles, including protecting drinking water supplies, cooling the Earth’s surface and regulating rainfall patterns,” said Deborah Lawrence, professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia. Forest loss, she added, threatens “hunger and malnutrition for those who can least afford it.”

Countries are investing more in developing agriculture than in protecting forests.

A new report on forest preservation found that governments, businesses and donors invested far more in agriculture and land development — at least $777 billion since 2010 — than they invested in reforestation — just $20 billion over the same period.

“It will take at least ten times more than the $20 billion that forests are currently receiving” to achieve a deforestation-free economy, said Charlotte Streck, cofounder of Climate Focus and coauthor of the report. “However, this doesn’t necessarily mean we need to raise ten times more. It is absolutely essential to redirect existing financial flows.” The dollars currently invested in agriculture and land development need to be made “conservation proof,” she said.

The perception that deforestation is necessary for economic development “is no different than the perception that fossil energy is needed for economic development,” Wolosin said. “In both cases, this perception causes business-as-usual thinking that will devastate the climate if [it’s] not changed, and in both cases is false.”

Ultimately, it will be essential to decouple economic development from deforestation, Streck said. “This requires a shift in attitude and an appreciation of natural ecosystems,” she said. “It also requires law enforcement combined with economic development opportunities away from the forest frontier.”

One way to protect forests would be to put a price on carbon.

Duffy believes the solution to saving forests must be economic. “Policies that put a price on carbon would create economic incentives to preserve forests,” he said. “Right now, the incentives run in the other direction, which is why forests continue to disappear.”

With the right policies, countries can spur economic growth and increase their agricultural output while slowing or stopping deforestation, he said. Also, developed countries should work with developing countries to implement these changes. “If you care about the climate, you need to care about the forests,” Wolosin said. “We can’t achieve our climate goals without slowing and reversing forest loss.”

Currently, many countries pay little attention to forests in discussions of climate change. “In Europe — a crowded continent with little pristine nature left — climate change was always dominated by energy and industry policy,” Streck said. “With a shift in power in climate negotiations away from Europe, things have started to change over the last years, but getting proper recognition for the mitigation potential of forests remains an uphill battle.”

Marlene Cimons writes for Nexus Media, a syndicated newswire covering climate, energy, policy, art and culture.

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During the waning days of August 2014, workers in northwestern Washington State finished dismantling the Glines Canyon Dam on the Elwha River; the largest dam removal project in U.S. history.  Over the past 20 years, more than 865 dams have been dismantled—72 came down in 2014 alone. A combination of infrastructure issues (including breaches), a recognition of the dams’ negative environmental effects, and the fact that many dams had failed to live up to their energy promises has moved the idea of dismantling dams from the fringes to the mainstream. In the United States, anyway. Forty-five hundred miles away, Brazil is still in the midst of a dam-building frenzy in one of the Earth’s most delicate and vital ecosystems—the Amazon. And a study released this week in the journal Nature suggests that the environmental impact of all of this dam building will be far worse than predicted.

The issue, say the study’s authors, is that existing scientific reviews of Amazonian river dams have focused mainly on the immediate area around the construction. “Nobody considers the teleconnections,” says lead author Edgardo Latrubesse, a Professor at the Department of Geography and the Environment at University of Texas at Austin. “If I build the dam here, what is happening upstream, what is happening downstream? And if you build the dam in multiple places along a river, the impact is magnified. This isn’t considered when they build the project.”

It’s important to understand the scale of the dams we’re talking about. When completed in 2019, the 11,233 megawatt Belo Monte dam will reach 295 feet high—a bit shorter than the Statue of Liberty—and stretch more than 2 miles across. That will make it the fourth largest dam in the world (by installed capacity) behind China’s controversial Three Gorges Dam. It will not, however, be the largest dam in Brazil: that questionable honorific goes to the Itapúa dam along the border. Developers have proposed building a total of 428 hydroelectric dams in the Amazon basin, and at least 140 of them are either completed or currently under construction.

Indigenous communities along the rivers say that the dams harm fish and disrupt fresh water supplies—a particularly disconcerting proposition given that the Amazon is home to between 16 and 18 percent of the world’s fresh water supplies. And the roads that are built to support these massive construction projects open up the rainforest for illegal logging, speeding up deforestation. All of these are known regional problems. The study authors created what they call the Dam Environmental Vulnerability Index (DEVI), however, to assess the ripple effects of dam building. They combined three indexes: The Basin Integrity Index (BII) which measures the vulnerability of a river basin to existing and potential land use change, erosion, and runoff pollution; the Fluvial Dynamic Index (FDI) which looks at how the river changes over time, how it floods, and its sediment load; and the Dam Impact Index (DII) which measures how much of the river system will be affected by the planned and built dams.

The study suggests that dams in the Madeira basin will be particularly impactful. The region is home to the largest tributary of the Amazon and provides almost half of the total sediment to the river system, which will now be trapped behind dams. This won’t just be felt locally, but also regionally—the sediment that the rivers carry provides nutrients that sustain wildlife, help sustain regional food supplies, and modulate river dynamics far beyond Brazil’s borders.

“The Amazon’s rivers contribute millions of tons of sediment both to the Amazon and to the sea that are then distributed by marine currents to the northwest coast of Brazil, to Surinam and to French Guiana,” says Latrubesse. “This area has the biggest mangrove forests in South America. If we modify all this sediment flux with dams we’re going to modify all of this marine system, including the coastal mangrove in Suriname. These countries weren’t involved in the decision-making process and have no clue that this could happen.”

Mangrove forests, which are recognizable by the dense tangle of prop roots that give them a stilt-like appearance, only exist at tropical and subtropical latitudes near the equator. In addition to being a diverse ecosystem, these forests play a huge role in stabilizing coastlines, reducing erosion from storms. The loss of sediment, which is essentially their soil, would be devastating, and Latrubesse draws parallels to what the United States did to the Colorado River. Because of the dams we built, the river barely flows to Mexico. While that affects just one country, the sediment that the Amazon ordinarily releases into the Atlantic Ocean also affects the paths of tropical storms across the Caribbean and into the Gulf of Mexico. Removing this one key part of the ecosystem has the potential to harm many.

Two huge dams have already been constructed on the Madeira: the Santo Antônio and Jiaru dams, which led to a 20 percent decrease in the average sediment concentration in the Madeira despite unusually high flood discharges in 2014 and 2015. Even more sediment will be trapped by the additional 25 dams planned further upstream.

“The U.S. and Europe, even in countries where water is very precious like Australia, they don’t want to build these kinds of dams because they produce high impact on the environment,” says Latrubesse, noting that many of these dams were originally conceived in the 1970s. “They are resurrecting old projects with no study to select the places where the dams can be built. We need to study where the dams can be built with smaller impacts.”

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We know that the forests of the Amazon have a long history of human interference. Scientists have been studying the region’s ancient geoglyphs—large designs traced into the ground with rocks and other debris—since the 1960s, when deforestation by cattle ranchers first revealed the stunning shapes. Because the geoglyphs only appeared once forests had burned away, it follows that the ancient artists must have burned their own trees to the ground to build them.

But according to new research, this knowledge shouldn’t give us hope that it will be easy to bounce back from modern deforestation—which, in the past half a century, has destroyed around 20 percent of the Amazon rain forest.

The geoglyphs have been cited as a sign that Amazonian forests aren’t meant to be kept “pristine”. Some forests have evolved to occasionally burn. If the Amazon rain forest has been influenced by humans for thousands of years—and grew back just fine when swaths sat unoccupied for a few centuries—then is it right to say we should leave it alone entirely?

New findings suggest that indigenous farmers cleared their surroundings on a much, much smaller scale than today’s cattle ranchers. So while the area might not be adapted to total seclusion, we should still worry that our excessive meddling will kill the forest for good.

“In our records, we didn’t find any ancient parallels for this kind of vegetation deletion,” says Jennifer Watling, a post-doctoral researcher at the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography, University of São Paulo. Watling led the study, published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, back when she was a PhD candidate at the University of Exeter.

The team did find evidence of ancient controlled burns in the geoglyphs of Acre, a state in western Brazil that’s currently experiencing heavy deforestation. They analyzed the charcoal in surrounding soil, as well as searching for carbon stable isotopes and microscopic plant fossils called phytoliths. This data enabled them to reconstruct 6,000 years of the area’s ecological history. Unsurprisingly, they found charcoal layers heavy enough to suggest that humans cleared the area with a blaze when they first moved in about 4,000 years ago.

But these indigenous peoples didn’t keep on slashing and burning all willy-nilly. Instead, according to Watling’s findings, they selectively encouraged the growth of palm trees while burning down bamboo.

And when it was time to build a geoglyph—a mysterious practice that began about 2,000 years ago, the purposes of which are still unknown—the locals did clear the land with fire, but kept the burns contained to small areas around the design’s intended location.

“Indigenous peoples managed their environment through mixed subsistence strategies, many of which involved concentrating useful tree species,” Watling says. “The lack of evidence of large-scale deforestation in the past means that we cannot assume Acre’s forests will recover from the unsustainable land-use practices of today.”

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It isn’t often that environmental scientists get good news. But a new study in Nature Climate Change found that for the past few years, the earth has been getting a little bit greener, accumulating an additional 4 billion* tons of biomass (vegetation) between 2003 and 2012. That’s a good thing, because plants take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, locking harmful greenhouse gas away in the new growth.

Now to burst your carbonated bubble; this study wasn’t looking at a direct connection between the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and plant growth. Even if the extra plants make a difference, the fact is carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been rising steadily for decades.

The additional green came from a few places: In former Soviet countries, forest started to grow back over farmland, while in China, massive tree planting campaigns seemed to do the trick. The researchers also found that more arid areas had a lot of vegetation as well, including shrubs in savannas in Africa, Australia, and South America.

The researchers used numerous satellites to look at changes in vegetation over the years. They looked at microwave radiation bouncing off the Earth’s surface, and by pulling together data from the different satellites, they were able to get a month-by-month idea of how much living plant matter was on our planet for the past 20 years.

While in recent years it seems like things are looking up, the prognosis isn’t entirely rosy. The team still found huge amounts of deforestation in the rain forests of South America and Southeast Asia. Those findings line up with another report from earlier this month that noted that deforestation in rain forests seems to be increasing. Not only that, but the areas where vegetation is spreading (like the savannas) are highly sensitive to changes in climate. A particularly dry year (or years) could kill off the new vegetation and put us right back where we started.

Update 2/29/2016: This article has been updated to note the correct amount of biomass increase was 4 billion tons, not 4 tons as was originally written. We regret the error.

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In the last 40 years, nearly one-third of the rainforest on Borneo have been cut down. That’s nearly twice as fast as the average deforestation rate for tropical rain forests worldwide. That raises the question: What’s going on?

In part, it’s because of the high-quality forests on Borneo, the world’s third-largest island, an incredibly biologically diverse landmass that is divided between Brunei, Indonesia and Malaysia, and is one of only two remaining habitats for orangutans. Between 1980 and 2000 more wood was harvested from Borneo than from Africa and the Amazon combined, for example.

This logging can take place because many areas of the island are not protected, or their protections are not well enforced. Protections are “often inadequate or are flagrantly violated, usually without any consequences,” the environmental group WWF noted. Illegal logging has also become a way of life and source of income for many communities, they added.

Many areas of Borneo are also perfect for growing palm oil plantations, and as demand for this oil has increased–especially in the last decade–more land has been cleared for this purpose. About 10 percent of the entire island now consists of single-crop monocultures such as these plantations, according to the study that documented the deforestation, published in PLOS ONE.

The study documented forest loss by using satellite images, which can gauge by how much light is reflected what type of vegetation exists over an area. The study was done in part because deforestation isn’t well-documented by local governments, and some statistics kept by the Indonesia, for example, are highly suspect, underestimating forest loss, the authors wrote. Borneo also has large coal deposits, as well as abundant minerals–including tin, copper, gold, silver, coal, diamonds–which are increasingly being mined, and land developed to allow for this activity.

In semi-related and less depressing news, a new species of ground squirrel was recently discovered in Borneo, which breaks a record for tail size and may eat deer’s hearts.

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Scientists trekking through the Suriname rainforest, one of the last road-free wilderness areas in the world, turned up a host of animals that conservation biologists believe are new to science. This little guy was just one of them.

This khaki-colored frog has white fringes on its legs and a spur on the heel, earning it the nickname “cowboy frog.” It looks pretty similar to another tree frog, the “convict tree frog,” but it doesn’t have the convict’s black and white stripes. Scientists from Conservation International discovered the cowboy frog on a small branch during a night survey in a swampy area of the Koetari River.

A new type of spiny catfish, henceforth known as the “armored catfish,” was about to be eaten as a snack until one of the scientists noted its unusual appearance. The local guide who was about to chow down was instead told to preserve the fish as a specimen. The team found a couple other types of catfish, too.

The team also found a new species of katydid, which they nicknamed the “Crayola katydid” for its bright colors. They are the only katydids known to employ chemical defenses, according to Conservation International. There’s a shiny water beetle and some damselfies to round out the list.

Speckly Katydid

[Conservation International via BBC]

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The full ramifications of the Industrial Revolution on this planet may never be known, not because the scope of the those changes can’t be measured but because the same rapid, spastic technological changes that hurled industry forward into a new era did the same for science. As such, pre-industrial science didn’t possess many of the instruments and technologies that allow modern science to happen. So how do you, say, find out what air quality was like before the Revolution wrecked it? You climb up into the canopy in the remotest part of the Amazon rainforest and take a deep breath.

That’s exactly what an international team of researchers recently did in order to get a sample of what air was like before human activity crowded it with particulate pollution. Deep in the Amazon Basin of Manaus, Brazil, the team climbed up 130 feet into the air to find pristine air that had blown two days’ travel away from the nearest contaminating sources. This is where the atmosphere is thought to most closely resemble pre-Revolution conditions.

It was the first time anyone has ever captured unblemished aerosol particles in this way, and what the researchers found was surprising. For starters, droplets created from the oxidation of plants made up something like 85 percent of the particles in the air. That’s basically opposite the way it is in industrialized atmospheres. Which basically means the way these droplets interact with aerosols in unadulterated environments could be completely different than scientists have always thought.

Moreover, and perhaps not as surprising, the researchers found just a few hundred particles per cubic centimeter of pre-industrail air. In industrialized areas of the world, that number is usually more than 10,000. Which means when we measure changes to atmospheric conditions in our cities and measure them against the earliest (but still post-Revolution) particulate counts that we have, we’re not really getting a good reading, but one diluted with a lot of particulate noise.

Put another way: we’ve already got so much foreign stuff in our industrialized urban air that it’s very difficult to keep tabs on changes in atmospheric conditions. But having our first look at untouched aerosols should pave the way for better models of the water cycle and the effects of atmospheric pollution on global climate change.

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