August 2025 science summary & advice for scientists

Hey,

Thanks to those of you who sent in your advice for scientists! If you don't care about that, wait until September - I figured there was too much here to cram in normal reviews. In addition to summarizing your advice, I also added some of my own advice, and have a case study I love with a novel and effective way to communicate risk to inform medical decisions (the "micromort").

YOUR ADVICE FOR SCIENTISTS:
There was a lot of agreement in the advice for scientists. Copilot gave me a summary (unasked for) and it picked up on the same trend I noticed; while most people focused on improving communication, people identifying as non-scientists emphasized clarifying how to use the results, while scientists focused more on helping people to understand the results.
 
Here’s the Copilot summary:
“The analysis reveals two key insights:

• Scientists: The advice emphasizes improving communication and ensuring it resonates with scientific understanding and accessibility.
• Non-scientists: The focus is on providing actionable insights, clarity in implications, and supporting decision-making processes.

These findings highlight the importance of tailoring communication strategies to the audience's needs and expectations.”
 
Here is a bit more of what you all shared:

• Before starting research, meet w/ the people you hope to inform to understand their needs and constraints. Iterate with them as research progresses to get feedback and check for understanding.
• Be super clear about "directive" (but not "prescriptive") messages. What decisions can your work inform and what do decision-makers need to know and do? Too much nuance and complexity can be paralyzing.
• Consider if "less data" could be enough to meet the decision needs of the problem you’re researching. Only collect more data if it can accelerate action (not delay it), e.g. by providing rigor or clarity decision-makers require.
• Communicate more often in the language your audience needs. Get training on how to communicate to different audiences and practice what you learn. Don’t forget to "talk less, smile more" (and I’d add “listen more” as something many scientists don’t do enough of, I have to work really hard at it to be even mediocre).
• Write with less jargon & more context. Explain trends, compare abstract numbers to things people understand (note: see the case study I include below for a great example).
• Be more open w/ sharing data and tools to support collective learning.
• Adapt when things aren't working - don't hold onto pet theories.

MY ADVICE FOR SCIENTISTS:
I was struck when reading the above that some of it overlaps pretty well with the advice in a paper I co-authored (on helping scientists have impact) that many of you contributed to. The paper has a nice decision tree for scientists, and here’s a simple graphical abstract of the paper:
https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/cms/asset/f0f15c79-e734-4f7c-ab83-4708e9b25fe3/csp2210-fig-0001-m.jpg
 
In the spirit of communicating for different audiences, we made a lot of companion products for that paper (http://impactblog.sciencejon.com ), from a 2-page high-level overview aimed at college students (one of my moms requested a version of the paper she could give to her gerontology students “without all that science bullshit”), a video recording of a webinar, a panel discussion w/ research impact experts, and more.

Finally, someone also recently reminded me that I wrote a blog when I left TNC in 2019 w/ some advice for scientists; it's missing plenty but think it holds up pretty well! https://sciencejon.blogspot.com/2019/02/tips-for-being-more-effective-scientist.html

A CASE STUDY OF REALLY EFFECTIVE SCIENCE COMMUNICATION:
Given the focus on not only thinking about your audience but improving both their understanding AND their ability to make informed decisions, I wanted to share a great example of that I just learned about (via this video overview). People struggle to understand the risk of relatively safe medical procedures (like anesthesia). The “micromort” is an activity with a one in a million chance of resulting in death (Howard 1989, “Microrisks for Medical Decision Making”), allowing you to compare risks between activities you understand and those new to you. Table 1 in Keage and Loetscher 2018 has a nice comparison of understandable risks, from 1 micromort (walking 27 miles), to going under anesthesia once (10 μmorts = walking 270 miles), to giving birth (120 μmorts), and even climbing Mt Everest (12,000 μmorts). Doctors can use this to explain risk, as in Sieber and Adams 2017 which note the risk of getting lymphoma from breast implants is lower than a day of skiing or drinking 500 mL of wine. Table 1 in Ahmad et al. 2015 has a table comparing the risk of a range of medical procedures, making a great complement to the “everyday risk” table in Keage and Loetscher (e.g., elective open heart surgery is risky, but 5 times safer than emergency open heart surgery).

FULL RESPONSES OF ADVICE FOR SCIENTISTS:

• Adapt. Too many people in the science/conservation world choose what works best for them & not the collective. Too many people in this profession refuse to use tools that would make their data/knowledge broadly accessible, opting for private file sharing in an artisinal, hand-shared way. Our profession, our progress toward our goals, can't operate in a vacuum - we are dependant on others & the longer we continue to operate in a me-first way, the less likely our needs & goals are met. Adopting a group-focused/sharing-first mentality is critical at this moment in time.
• Communicate in a way that resonates with the scientific understanding and language accessibility of the general public.
• Before starting a new science project or initiative, meet with those you are intending to inform through your work to understand their needs and constraints. Continue to use these connections to iteratively test your thinking and deliverables throughout the process of undertaking your work.
• Less jargon, more focus on directional implications (rather than the third decimal), make the "why" of your research not a research-focused 'why' (e.g. i'm looking into this because it will tell us whether x impacts y) but a real-world 'why' (e.g. I'm looking into this because it will tell us whether we should allow / support / restrict / include / exclude xyz in this or that policy / discussion / legislation / budget etc.)
• Realize that many land managers are spread extremely thin and actually benefit from directive messaging, which is a careful balance to not lean towards prescriptive messaging, but is a different approach than only presenting very nuanced or complex statements that leave people with very little clarity as to what they should be doing or not doing as land managers. I would like to see scientists speaking with precision about what's know and not known, and then verbally distinguishing that they are stepping into a different space to offer clear advice on key decision-points.
• Recognize the opportunity cost of more or better information: only ask for more data when you are certain that it will accelerate, rather than delay, action.
• Present information in context. Absolute numbers (especially large ones) in isolation mean very little. Present enough historic or comparative context to explain trends. Scale numbers to human-scale (millions or billions are incomprehensible in everyday life).
• Communicate, communicate, communicate. Find ways to disseminate findings (published and unpublished) and package in ways your audience can understand and can inform policy or action. Also, science is slow, but try to find ways to move quicker while still maintaining accuracy and scientific integrity.
• Practice communicating the key messages of your science to non-scientists frequently! Do less: explaining the finer details or process. Do more: breaking it down into 1. The problem 2. What solution your science offers 3. Why the listener / reader should care, and why now. 4. What you’d like them to do (call to action).
• My advice for scientists is simple: communications training. Get as much practice as possible explaining your work to all kinds of audiences - talk to journalists, visit elementary school class rooms, post on social media, get on a university podcast. The more you talk about your science, the better you'll be at doing so. Authenticity is key - don't be afraid to be funny, earnest and geeky. It is more important than ever for "regular people" to get exposed to scientists of all kinds. This is necessary to build trust in the scientific community writ large.
• I’m not sure “effective” is meaningful outside of a specific decision context, but I strive to be plain about my values, biases, and assumptions in the hope that candor builds a foundation of trust for better communication. But “talk less, smile more” also isn’t necessarily bad either…

Sincerely,
 
Jon
 
p.s. Since my mushroom dinner at a meal during a work event came in a little cauldron for some reason, I was asked to look like a wizard and this was the result
p.p.s. If you'd like to keep track of what I write as well as what I read, I always link to both my informal blog posts and my formal publications (plus these summaries) at http://sciencejon.blogspot.com/

July 2025 science summary

 Happy July,

In addition to the usual summaries, I have a request the non-scientists among you (or at least people doing policy or implementation and not JUST science). I have a one-question open-ended survey asking "What one piece of advice would you give scientists to be more effective? What should they do more or less of?" I'd welcome the input and will also share what I hear back in the next summary (and will split the results by advice from scientists and non-scientists if people self-identify). https://forms.cloud.microsoft/r/DXG1n76Q9V  Please reply by Friday July 25 to give me time to read and summarize everything.

The seven summaries cover conservation priorities for birds and people in the US, fire, how fire influences water quantity, and four covering various topics in the Pantanal.

If you know someone who wants to sign up to receive these summaries, they can do so at http://subscribe.sciencejon.com (no need to email me).

CONSERVATION PRIORITIES IN THE U.S. (BIRDS AND PEOPLE):
Neugarten et al. 2025 analyzes overlap of places in the US important to birds with places important for ecosystem services (ES, with climate mitigation broken out separately). They use the 37% of the US producing the most ES (as per Chaplin-Kramer et al. 2023, and from the same paper the 44% of the US storing 90% of vulnerable carbon as carbon priority areas) and bird abundance data form eBird. My TL;DR for this paper is that the natural places people need most help birds better than average, BUT they perform badly for wetland birds and generalists so we need to conserve places good for people AND places good for birds that people don't need as much. Longer take-aways 1) places good for ecosystem services are better than random places for a slight majority of bird species, 2) only 42% of species did better than random w/ carbon priority areas (mostly forest birds as you'd guess), 3) most of the 57 "tipping point" species (who lost 1/2 of their population size over 50 years and are on track to go extinct) don't do well with either ES or carbon priorities, 4) wetland birds and generalists (and to some degree aridland birds) are poorly represented by ES and carbon priorities, 5) "Regions with especially high co-benefits for birds, ES and carbon include the Appalachian Mountains, the southeastern U.S., New England, the Ozarks, and the Sierras and Cascade mountain ranges (Fig. 2a)". This news article has a good summary (although note that my quote about this research being useful to inform where and how conservationists work cut off the end of the sentence which was "along with other strategic considerations" since feasibility and other factors are key). https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2025/05/study-identifies-us-regions-that-benefit-birds-people-climate-the-most/


FIRE:
Siquiera et al. 2025 has a helpful reminder that finer data isn't always better. They found free MODIS data (which is relatively fast and easy to process due to 500m resolution) actually did a little better at detecting areas that had burned in the Pantanal than Sentinel 2 data (also free but needs more babying and at 10m [2500* finer resolution] it takes a ton more processing time). LANDSAT (at 30m) did worse than either. The only caveat is that their validation for “burned areas” is fire foci which are partly derived from MODIS which likely biases the results somewhat. But anytime we can get away with using coarser data to save time and money it’s good news! One of my papers (https://zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/rse2.61) has a table about when coarser vs. finer data may be better, and that table is in a blog here: https://rsecjournal.blog/2017/08/25/how-much-data-is-enough-investigating-how-spatial-data-resolution-impacts-conservation-decision-making/


FIRE AND WATER QUANTITY:
Guzmán-Rojo et al. 2025 is an interesting model of how fires in the Bolivian Chiquitano dry forest affect water availability, focusing on soil changes (crusting, ash deposition, and reduced porosity which can decrease infiltration and increase runoff) rather than vegetation loss. They found ~40% lower recharge in the first year after a hypothetical very severe fire, returning to ~10% lower than pre-fire after two years. However, they note that field data showed that moderate to severe fires actually reduced soil porosity by 39%, while their hypothetical very severe fire assumed a 70% reduction which is probably an upper bound for how much soil permeability could be reduced. They also note that if they had accounted for vegetation loss in their model, the recharge may have been lower in some areas where dense vegetation transpires more water than it intercepts. While they had limited data to validate their model they used other studies and proxies where they could.


BIODIVERSITY OFFSETTING / PANTANAL:
While Lourival et al. 2025 ponders 10 questions for biodiversity offsetting in the Brazilian Pantanal and its watershed (listed at the top of the 3rd page), it's relevant to biodiversity offsets in general. I especially like Fig 4 with different ways to think about equivalence for offsets (area, economic value, ecosystem value, or a mix). So for example if you clear high-value land in the Cerrado, you could need to protect a much larger lower-value area in the Pantanal. They find 57% of properties in the highlands feeding the Pantanal are out of compliance with the Forest Code (Table 1, Fig 3). Properties WITHIN the Pantanal are only 22% out of compliance, so considering the whole river basin could offer opportunities BUT ecological equivalence may be low and state regulations restrict what is possible. One could argue that's a huge market for offset purchases OR evidence the law is toothless and demand will be low.


PANTANAL:
Guerra et al. 2025 looks at how ecosystem services in the Pantanal and its highlands will change by 2050 under three scenarios (S1 - business as usual (BAU), S2 - increased expansion of ag and industry, and S3 - sustainable intensification). The sustainable scenario could cut soil runoff into rivers almost in half (Figs 4 & 5) and reduce habitat loss by a third compared to BAU (Fig 3). The authors point to some promising new policies that could help the sustainable path, including the growth of the FPS system for ranching and payments for ecosystem services (PES) at national and state (Mato Grosso do Sul) levels, altough there are no PES programs in the Pantanal yet.

Tomasella et al. 2025 found that over recent decades (the time periods are weirdly overlapping and of different length, e.g., 1981-2000 vs 1991-2020) the Pantanal has seen a 4.8% drop in precipitation, 2.9% increase in potential evapotranspiration, and the aridity index (the ratio of those two – with a lower aridity index meaning drier conditions) decreased by 7.5% (brown areas in Fig 5 at right). Fig 3 shows that a chunk of the Pantanal (11,500 km) has dried out enough to change biome from humid to “dry sub-humid.”

Fernandes et al. 2025 uses remote sensing to see how changing sediment loads affected river geomorphology (how the river channel moves over time) in the Cuiabá river in the Pantanal. Stream ecologists often focus on sediment as a pollutant coming from deforestation and agriculture, and that is an issue here (as it is in the nearby Taquari river). But in this case, the construction of the large Manso dam in 2002 has reduced sediment load more than land use change has increased it, perhaps below healthy sediment levels (see Fig 9) for 500km downstream of the dam.


REFERENCES:
Chaplin-Kramer, R., Neugarten, R. A., Sharp, R. P., Collins, P. M., Polasky, S., Hole, D., Schuster, R., Strimas-Mackey, M., Mulligan, M., Brandon, C., Diaz, S., Fluet-Chouinard, E., Gorenflo, L. J., Johnson, J. A., Kennedy, C. M., Keys, P. W., Longley-Wood, K., McIntyre, P. B., Noon, M., … Watson, R. A. (2022). Mapping the planet’s critical natural assets. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 7(1), 51–61. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-022-01934-5

Fernandes, B. S., de Oliveira, S. C., & Pupim, F. N. (2025). Anthropogenic disturbances drive the morphological and sedimentary changes of the Cuiabá River, Pantanal, Brazil: a remotely sensed approach. Earth Science, Systems and Society. https://doi.org/10.1144/esss2024-007

Guerra, A., Resende, F., Bergier, I., Fairbrass, A., Bernardino, C., Centurião, D. A. S., Bolzan, F., Marcel, G., Rosa, I. M. D., da Silva, J. C. S., Garcia, L. C., Larcher, L., de Oliveira, P. T. S., Chiaravalloti, R. M., Roscoe, R., Louzada, R., Santos, S., Tomas, W. M., Nunes, A. V., & de Oliveira Roque, F. (2025). Land use and regulating ecosystem services scenarios for the Brazilian Pantanal and its surroundings under different storylines of future regional development. Conservation Science and Practice, August 2024, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1111/csp2.70012

Guzmán-Rojo, M., Silva de Freitas, L., Coritza Taquichiri, E., & Huysmans, M. (2025). Groundwater Vulnerability in the Aftermath of Wildfires at the El Sutó Spring Area: Model-Based Insights and the Proposal of a Post-Fire Vulnerability Index for Dry Tropical Forests. Fire, 8(3), 86. https://doi.org/10.3390/fire8030086

Lourival, R. F. F., de Roque, F. de O., Bolzan, F. P., Guerra, A., Nunes, A. P., Lacerda, A. C. R., Nunes, A. V., Alves, A., Filho, A. C. P., Ribeiro, D. B., Eaton, D. P., Brito, E. S., Fischer, E., Neto, F. V., Porfirio, G., Seixas, G. H. F., Pinto, J. O. P., Quintero, J. M. O., Sabino, J., … Tomas, W. M. (2025). Ten relevant questions for applying biodiversity offsetting in the Pantanal wetland. Conservation Science and Practice, July 2022, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1111/csp2.13274

Neugarten, R. A., Davis, C. L., Duran, G., & Rodewald, A. D. (2025). Co-benefits of nature for birds, people, and climate in the United States. Ecosystem Services, 73(May), 101733. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoser.2025.101733

Siqueira, R. G., Moquedace, C. M., Silva, L. V., de Oliveira, M. S., Cruz, G. D. B., Francelino, M. R., Schaefer, C. E. G. R., & Fernandes-Filho, E. I. (2025). Do finer-resolution sensors better discriminate burnt areas? A case study with MODIS, Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 spectral indices for the Pantanal 2020 wildfire detection. International Journal of Remote Sensing, 00(00), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/01431161.2025.2496000

Tomasella, J., do Amaral Cunha, A. M., Zeri, M., & Costa, L. C. O. (2025). Changes in the aridity index across Brazilian biomes. Science of The Total Environment, 989(March), 179869. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2025.179869


Happy reading,
 
Jon
 
p.s. The photo above was an especially vivid winter sunset in Wildwood, NJ

June 2025 science summary

Hi,

It occurred to me that since I focused on fire in April and water in May, I should continue with the elemental theme and cover terrestrial papers this month. Doing air/wind in July is unlikely :) It's still a bit of a mix with papers on global threats, forest degradation, protected areas, and wildlife migration.

If you know someone who wants to sign up to receive these summaries, they can do so at http://bit.ly/sciencejon (no need to email me).

GLOBAL THREATS:
Oakleaf et al. 2024 is a long-awaited global analysis of likelihood of short-term (by 2030) habitat conversion (1 km resolution, see Fig 5 for the results). They include not only cropland and city expansion, but also land use change for energy (fossil or renewable) and mining, and considered several suitability factors (like slope and land cover). Their approach assumes recent trends (2000-2015) will continue rather than modeling different scenarios of economic development. Like any global data you can find places where it seems wrong, but it's a great resource nonetheless. You can grab the data at https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/Conversion_Pressure_Index/25340668 or view the data in a web map at https://tnc-ps-web.s3.amazonaws.com/GDRA/CPI/index.html There's also a blog about the paper at https://blog.nature.org/science-brief/mapping-global-land-conversion-to-support-conservation-planning/


FOREST DEGRADATION:
Bourgoin et al. 2024 is a global analysis of degradation of tropical moist forests using LiDAR satellite data (from GEDI) along with Landsat optical imagery. It's worth reading the whole paper, but a few key findings: 1) degradation is hard to sense but a) a good predictor of deforestation in addition to b) being inherently meaningful. 2) Forest height is reduced by selective logging (15%) and fire (50%) and recovery is low after 20 years. 3) Expansion of ag and roads leads to a 20-30% drop in canopy height and biomass at the edge, with effects up to 1.5km in from the edge. Fig 1 has maps of global results - it's a bit confusing but the x-axis of the charts is height in meters, so lower numbers mean more degradation or younger forests. There's an article about this one at https://phys.org/news/2024-07-reveals-human-degradation-tropical-forests.html#google_vignette


EFFICACY OF PROTECTED AREAS:
Huais et al. 2025 looked at the impact of protected areas (PAs) in the Chaco (across Bolivia, Argentina, and Paraguay) in slowing deforestation both within their boundaries and nearby. The bad news: only 34% of PAs actually reduced deforestation within the area, and 9% of PAs actually saw MORE deforestation than expected (with the other 58% seeing no impact). Most of the effective area was in Bolivia (see Fig 3a), although Bolivia also had a lot of PAs they couldn't analyze due to a lack of suitable control / counterfactual areas. In good news, only 4% of PAs saw leakage (deforestation shifting from within a PA to a nearby area - they didn't consider long-distance leakage), and better yet 21% of PAs seemed to decrease deforestation in nearby areas. In other words ~2/3 of the PAs that actually slowed deforestation within their borders ALSO had a broader positive impact (Fig 3b), likely by a) discouraging infrastructure and access to the nearby areas, b) the presence of some Indigenous territories near PAs, and c) buffer areas around each PA.


WILDLIFE MIGRATION:
Aikens et al. 2025 has a nice summary up front already! They found that during a very bad snowstorm (see Fig 1), pronghorn died more when they couldn't get away from deep snow fast enough (Fig 2D). Roads and fences blocking their way meant they were exposed to snow longer (and thus at higher risk). 1/2 of monitored pronghorn (they had GPS collars) died from the storm, and they moved up to 400 km to try and get away! Pronghorn tend to crawl under fences so when snow is deep they may be unable to cross them at all (Fig 3D has a photo).

Haworth et al. 2025 (non-peer-reviewed) looked at a handful of roadways with different kinds of medians (e.g. vegetated, just paint, cable, concrete, or metal guardrail) to compare how medians affected wildlife crossings for different species (see Table 3 on p22). They assert that some species were impacted by median types, and that in general constructed medians lead to fewer animals entering the roadway at all (so less permeability may also reduce collision risk). But when you get into the results it’s less convincing – the pairwise comparisons don’t have any clear trends (except a weak tendency of fewer collisions from harder barriers). Figure 4 also has some weird findings for mule deer (painted stripe saw the most collisions, cable and gravel the lowest, but oddly concrete and metal beam are closer to the painted stripe) and then Figure 5 for coyote shows that painted stripe had the least collisions! My take-away is that either 1) it’s easy for small studies to show effects due to uncontrolled variables, especially for wildlife movement which can vary a lot and/or 2) the relationship is complicated and there’s not a simple policy answer (like X median will best reduce risk of WVC while also allowing wildlife movement).


REFERENCES:
Aikens, E. O., Merkle, J. A., Xu, W., & Sawyer, H. (2025). Pronghorn movements and mortality during extreme weather highlight the critical importance of connectivity. Current Biology, 35(8), 1927-1934.e2. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2025.03.010

Bourgoin, C., Ceccherini, G., Girardello, M., Vancutsem, C., Avitabile, V., Beck, P. S. A., Beuchle, R., Blanc, L., Duveiller, G., Migliavacca, M., Vieilledent, G., Cescatti, A., & Achard, F. (2024). Human degradation of tropical moist forests is greater than previously estimated. Nature, 631(8021), 570–576. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07629-0

Haworth, L., Hodgson, B., Hecht, L., See, M., Henderson, A., Lemieux, S., Morris, L., Waetjen, D., Shilling, F., Haworth, L., Hodgson, B., Hecht, L., See, M., Henderson, A., Lemieux, S., Morris, L., Waetjen, D., & Shilling, F. (2025). Wildlife Connectivity and Which Median Barrier Designs Provide the Most Effective Permeability for Wildlife Crossings. https://doi.org/10.7922/G2BV7DZ6

Huais, P. Y., Kuemmerle, T., Nori, J., Tomba, A. N., Cordier, J. M., & Baumann, M. (2025). Only one-third of protected areas in the Chaco effectively curb woodland loss, but their impact extends beyond their boundaries. Biological Conservation, 308(March), 111196. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2025.111196

Oakleaf, J., Kennedy, C., Wolff, N. H., Terasaki Hart, D. E., Ellis, P., Theobald, D. M., Fariss, B., Burkart, K., & Kiesecker, J. (2024). Mapping global land conversion pressure to support conservation planning. Scientific Data, 11(1), 830. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-024-03639-9

Sincerely,
 
Jon
 
p.s. this is a lovely mushroom I saw in West Virginia

May 2025 science summary

Merry May,

This month I've got four articles on freshwater, plus one on whether climate mitigation can be harmful to wildlife if done wrong (spoiler: yup).

If you know someone who wants to sign up to receive these summaries, they can do so at http://bit.ly/sciencejon (no need to email me).

FRESHWATER:
Petry et al. 2025 has predictions of changing streamflow and flooding across South America by 2100 under a moderate climate change scenario. Figure 4 has the key findings about how much more or less frequent floods may be. Note that “RP” means “return period” as in a “5 year flood” or “100 year flood” (the magnitude of flooding you’d expect on that frequency / rarity, so higher numbers mean more severe flooding). RPCF means how much more or less frequent those floods would be (with negative sign indicating less frequent flooding, e.g. the -2 on the Paraguay river in the Pantanal means half as often). But much more flooding is expected in Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, and Southern Brazil, and parts of the Amazon will see 1/10 as much flooding as they historically have. They find Pantanal floods (in the Paraguay River and some tributaries like Cuiaba and Negro) will be roughly half as frequent and half as severe, they don’t have a clear trend in the Chaco, and in Chile the area from roughly Santiago to Valdivia has some rivers where flooding will be ~2-3 times less frequent while the northern part of Chile will only see slightly less flooding.

Lehner et al. 2024 is a summary of a new "Global Dam Watch (GDW)" open dataset of 41,000 river barriers and 35,000 reservoirs (see Fig 1 for a map). While national and regional datasets are more complete (e.g., NID has 90k points in the US, AMBER has 630k in Europe), this is the most comprehensive free global dataset (see Table 2) and it includes estimated reservoir volumes mostly for reservoirs >10 km2.

Cho et al. 2023 did a ton of modeling (Fig 7) to estimate how conservation (mostly reforestation along streams) could have affected the water supply of São Paulo. They found the increased habitat could serve as an "invisible reservoir" for water in soil, and in a highly idealized scenario (lots of new forest in all the right places among others) streamflow could be boosted by 33% (and drought costs reduced by 28%). They don't report numeric results for their less ideal scenarios, and all scenarios exclude the water consumption of growing trees. In a conversation with one of the study's authors, they mentioned that it likely took about 30 years (I think) for the "water savings" of nature (fog capture plus slowing down runoff during high rain events) to outweigh the water consumption of growing trees. In other words, in this case in the short term adding trees could result in lower streamflow even though in the long run it would increase streamflow. Understanding the timeline and tradeoffs is key so people who live there know what to expect. From chatting w/ other hydrologists about this, it's clear that results like this vary a lot depending on things like soil type, weather and climate, type of forest, and much more. There's an article about this one at https://www.nature.org/en-us/about-us/where-we-work/latin-america/brazil/stories-in-brazil/invisible-reservoir/

Pompeu 2025 quantitatively models how different drivers have impacted total water surface area (as a decent proxy for total flow / water quantity) in the Pantanal. The paper found the biggest driver of water level was 1) the presence or absence of having natural vegetation at least 50m around springs, followed by 2) natural veg riparian buffers along rivers (buffer width increasing w/ river width as per the Forest Code), followed by 3) replacing conventional monoculture ag w/ something w/ deeper root systems (agroforestry, permaculture, full restoration if feasible, etc.), followed by 4) preventing more dams.


CLIMATE MITIGATION AND WILDLIFE:
Smith et al. 2025 asks what the net impact of climate mitigation on land (including bioenergy crops, reforestation, and afforestation) is on the total habitat area for 14,000 vertebrate species. Fig 1 summarizes the idea well - climate change can reduce suitable habitat, but climate mitigation can also either add or remove habitat directly. Fig 4 has their global recommendations - basically leave most ecosystems alone, reforest several areas (SE Asia, Eastern US, Mexico, and much of Europe) and in a few tiny places grow bioenergy crops. In other words, typically planting trees on grasslands or other habitat types destroys more habitat than it saves through climate mitigation. But planting trees in cleared forests is a win-win.


REFERENCES:
Cho, S. J., Klemz, C., Barreto, S., Raepple, J., Bracale, H., Acosta, E. A., Rogéliz-Prada, C. A., & Ciasca, B. S. (2023). Collaborative Watershed Modeling as Stakeholder Engagement Tool for Science-Based Water Policy Assessment in São Paulo, Brazil. Water, 15(3), 401. https://doi.org/10.3390/w15030401

Lehner, B., Beames, P., Mulligan, M., Zarfl, C., De Felice, L., van Soesbergen, A., Thieme, M., Garcia de Leaniz, C., Anand, M., Belletti, B., Brauman, K. A., Januchowski-Hartley, S. R., Lyon, K., Mandle, L., Mazany-Wright, N., Messager, M. L., Pavelsky, T., Pekel, J.-F., Wang, J., … Higgins, J. (2024). The Global Dam Watch database of river barrier and reservoir information for large-scale applications. Scientific Data, 11(1), 1069. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-024-03752-9

Petry, I., Miranda, P. T., Paiva, R. C. D., Collischonn, W., Fan, F. M., Fagundes, H. O., Araujo, A. A., & Souza, S. (2025). Changes in Flood Magnitude and Frequency Projected for Vulnerable Regions and Major Wetlands of South America. Geophysical Research Letters, 52(5). https://doi.org/10.1029/2024GL112436

Pompeu, J. (2025). Cross-Boundary Drivers of Water Cover Reduction in the Pantanal Wetland and Implications for its Conservation. Wetlands, 45(3), 32. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13157-025-01916-w

Smith, J. R., Beaury, E. M., Cook-Patton, S. C., & Levine, J. M. (2025). Variable impacts of land-based climate mitigation on habitat area for vertebrate diversity. Science, 387(6732), 420–425. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adm9485


Sincerely,
 
Jon

p.s. This is a sea lion lazing about in Valdivia who happened to yawn as I was watching them.

April 2025 science summary

Hello,

This month I thought people might be interested in a short overview I pulled together about some of the fires in recent years and the impact they've had (instead of only detailed summaries of each paper). Let me know what you think! I do have normal summaries of four papers on fire (two mentioned in the overview) as well.

If you know someone who wants to sign up to receive these summaries, they can do so at http://bit.ly/sciencejon (no need to email me).

FIRE OVERVIEW:
Earlier this year in and around one of the largest cities in the US, almost 50,000 acres burned (https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/2025), destroying >16,000 buildings, displacing tens of thousands of people, and causing an estimated damage of >$250 billion dollars (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/california-wildfires-what-we-know-palisades-eaton-los-angeles-rcna188239).  This follows an exceptional fire season across North and South America in 2024 (https://earth.org/north-and-south-america-endured-exceptional-wildfire-season-in-2024/). 

Experts estimate that there has been a “ten‑fold increase in the frequency of fire regime change during the last 250 years,” (Sayedi et al. 2024) and wildland fuels have almost universally been getting dryer over the last 40 years (Ellis et al. 2022). While fire is normal in many ecosystems (and essential in some), we also have many recent examples of fires which devastated nature due to unusual severity, scale, speed, and return intervals. For example, in 2019-20, after severe drought in Australia a fire burned over 25 million acres (>100,000 km2) and “killed or displaced an estimated 3 billion mammals, birds, frogs, and reptiles” (Legge et al. 2023). The Pantanal has had increasingly common severe fires, e.g., in 2020 almost half of the ~10 million acres that burned hadn’t burned before in the last 20 years (Garcua et al. 2021), killing roughly 17 million vertebrates (Tomas et al. 2021). 

In some cases severe fire can also lead to high greenhouse gas emissions, especially for peatlands. For example, in 1997-8 Indonesian peat fires emitted a gigaton of carbon (~15% of global fossil fuel emissions, Turetsky et al. 2015). 

There is hope: our ability to remotely detect forest fires early is improving (Barmpoutis et al. 2020), and Indigenous fire brigades have shown promise as a low-cost way to dramatically reduce harmful wildfire (Ribeiro et al. 2023). 


SUMMARIES OF SPECIFIC FIRE PAPERS:
GLOBAL FIRE:
Ellis et al. 2022 is a global analysis of fire risk over the past 41 years, using estimated moisture trends in fuel (surface litter and dead plant debris) as the key metric. Fig 2a shows the % of days during the fire season where fuel moisture is expected to be below 10% (and thus at high fire risk), while 2b shows the total # of fire season days at high fire risk and Fig 4 shows the trend in high fire risk over time (36% of ecoregions are drying vs. only 4% getting wetter). They note that days w/ dry fuel isn't the only key driver of risk; consistent dry conditions limit fuel accumulation and thus the risk of severe fire. So surprisingly historically wet forests which accumulate lots of plant matter in wet years between fires may be the most at risk (as other research has shown).


FIRE IN SOUTH AMERICA:
Feron et al. 2024 analyzes how fire risk in South America has increased in the last 52 years (especially in the North Amazon). They estimate fire risk by combining the increasing number of warm days, dry days, and flammable days (combined in Fig 3). El Niño worsens risk in the Nothern Amazon, but lessens it in the Gran Chaco (where La Niña worsens the risk). The northeast part of the Gran Chaco has seen the most increase in fire risk (Fig 1a). The authors note that where humans set fires is also a key driver of wildfires spreading. In the Amazon severe fire has caused local warming (from black carbon) and decreasing rainfall.

Barros-Rosa et al. 2025 is a complex analysis of water and fire in the Pantanal and Planalto in Brazil. They looked at changes in land use and water and fire from 1985 to 2022. They found 1) open water in the Pantanal dropped from 20% to 5% (this analysis has a very high rate of error and variance so the precise numbers are likely wrong but the overall drying trend is valid), 2) forest and savanna were cleared for cattle (replacing them with exotic grass - doubling in the Planalto and tripling in the Pantanal), although 3) native grasslands also doubled in the Pantanal. They also find areas that have dried out are the most affected by wildfires. The authors also highlight existing policies allowing massive conversion of habitat to exotic grass, and allowing artificial drainage in wetlands outside the Pantanal.

Oliveira et al. 2025 argues that rigid "burn windows" when prescribed fire should be done works poorly in wetlands like the Pantanal (where the government limits prescribed fire to the beginning of the dry season (BDS), a ~5 month period as shown in Fig. 2). Burn windows remain important: prescribed fire requires considering both fuel loads and how wet or dry it is to ensure fire can burn but remains contained, as well as things like wind direction that could affect human health. But flooding combines w/ rainfall to determine actual fuel loads, limiting the utility of prescribed fire when rain is low but flooding remains. Considering river height as a proxy for flooding they find the end of the BDS is typically ideal for prescribed fire (although varying year to year, Fig. 6) even though rainfall is much lower than the beginning of BDS when flooding limits the use of prescribed fire (Fig. 4b and 4c). But they note that in the Northern Pantanal where rain and flood are more aligned than the Southern Pantanal the burn window is longer and more predictable (Fig. 5). The conclude that in wetlands like the Pantanal burn windows should be dynamic year to year and consider flooding as well as rainfall. One key point: prescribed burning is more important in high flood years, b/c while the window is shorter, flooding allows more vegetation to accumulate which raises the risk of fire once floods recede (we've often see severe fires in the Pantanal the year after a very wet year).


REFERENCES FOR PAPERS SUMMARIZED INDIVIDUALLY:
Ellis, T. M., Bowman, D. M. J. S., Jain, P., Flannigan, M. D., & Williamson, G. J. (2022). Global increase in wildfire risk due to climate‐driven declines in fuel moisture. Global Change Biology, 28(4), 1544–1559. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.16006

Feron, S., Cordero, R. R., Damiani, A., MacDonell, S., Pizarro, J., Goubanova, K., Valenzuela, R., Wang, C., Rester, L., & Beaulieu, A. (2024). South America is becoming warmer, drier, and more flammable. Communications Earth & Environment, 5(1), 501. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-024-01654-7

Barros-Rosa, L., Moura Peluso, L., Lemes, P., Johnson, M. S., Dalmagro, H. J., Nunes da Cunha, C., Zanella de Arruda, P. H., Mateus, L., & Penha, J. (2025). The ineffectiveness of current environmental and fire policies in the world’s largest wetland. Environmental Research Letters, 20(3), 034039. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/adb7f5

Oliveira, M. da R., Pereira, A. de M. M., Bao, F., Ferreira, B. H. dos S., Fernando, A. E., Roque, F. de O., Pott, A., Damasceno-Junior, G. A., & Neves, D. R. M. (2025). Designing Burn Windows for Integrated Fire Management in Wetlands: Why Should Flooding Not Be Overlooked? Wetlands, 45(4), 35. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13157-025-01919-7


REFERENCES FOR OTHER PAPERS IN OVERVIEW:
Barmpoutis, P., Papaioannou, P., Dimitropoulos, K., & Grammalidis, N. (2020). A Review on Early Forest Fire Detection Systems Using Optical Remote Sensing. Sensors, 20(22), 6442. https://doi.org/10.3390/s20226442

Garcia, L. C., Szabo, J. K., de Oliveira Roque, F., de Matos Martins Pereira, A., Nunes da Cunha, C., Damasceno-Júnior, G. A., Morato, R. G., Tomas, W. M., Libonati, R., & Ribeiro, D. B. (2021). Record-breaking wildfires in the world’s largest continuous tropical wetland: Integrative fire management is urgently needed for both biodiversity and humans. Journal of Environmental Management, 293(April), 112870. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2021.112870

Legge, S., Rumpff, L., Garnett, S. T., & Woinarski, J. C. Z. (2023). Loss of terrestrial biodiversity in Australia: Magnitude, causation, and response. Science, 381(6658), 622–631. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adg7870

Ribeiro, D. B., & Pereira, A. M. M. (2023). Solving the problem of wildfires in the Pantanal Wetlands. Perspectives in Ecology and Conservation, 21(4), 271–273. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pecon.2023.10.004

Sayedi, S. S., Abbott, B. W., Vannière, B., Leys, B., Colombaroli, D., Romera, G. G., Słowiński, M., Aleman, J. C., Blarquez, O., Feurdean, A., Brown, K., Aakala, T., Alenius, T., Allen, K., Andric, M., Bergeron, Y., Biagioni, S., Bradshaw, R., Bremond, L., … Daniau, A.-L. (2024). Assessing changes in global fire regimes. Fire Ecology, 20(1), 18. https://doi.org/10.1186/s42408-023-00237-9

Tomas, W. M., Berlinck, C. N., Chiaravalloti, R. M., Faggioni, G. P., Strüssmann, C., Libonati, R., Abrahão, C. R., do Valle Alvarenga, G., de Faria Bacellar, A. E., de Queiroz Batista, F. R., Bornato, T. S., Camilo, A. R., Castedo, J., Fernando, A. M. E., de Freitas, G. O., Garcia, C. M., Gonçalves, H. S., de Freitas Guilherme, M. B., Layme, V. M. G., … Morato, R. (2021). Distance sampling surveys reveal 17 million vertebrates directly killed by the 2020’s wildfires in the Pantanal, Brazil. Scientific Reports, 11(1), 23547. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-02844-5

Turetsky, M. R., Benscoter, B., Page, S., Rein, G., Van Der Werf, G. R., & Watts, A. (2015). Global vulnerability of peatlands to fire and carbon loss. Nature Geoscience, 8(1), 11–14. https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2325

Sincerely,
 
Jon
 
p.s. The picture is of the first drum circle I ever attended, which was at work during  a "learning week" event for my department!

p.p.s. Nothing in this post is an April Fool's joke or untrue in any way as far as I know :)

March 2025 science summary

Greetings,

Work has been pretty hectic so I've been reading less public science papers lately but have two good ones to share on "old and wise animals" and freshwater prioritization.

Like many others, I've also been struggling with the chaos and hurtful policy and people suffering from the recent political changes in the US.

I don't have answers, but have been finding that connection, community, being vulnerable, and supporting each other is helpful. As is finding joy wherever we can. In that spirit, here's a video of a song my chorus sang last December where I had a solo - I find it painful to watch all the mistakes but it was a joy to sing in the real world, and hope it may distract a few of you from everything going on in the world for a moment or two.

I've also found this document of things to say and not say to someone grieving can still be helpful in comforting people going through other tough situations. The main point is to resist the impulse to cheer them up and instead validate their feelings and be willing to just sit with the discomfort.

If you know someone who wants to sign up to receive these summaries, they can do so at http://bit.ly/sciencejon (no need to email me).


WILDLIFE:
Kopf et al 2024 really made me think. They summarize some of the important contributions of old (and often "wise"!) animals, and proposes "longevity conservation" as a strategy to retain them. Old animals are especially important for species who rely on cultural transmission (like migratory species) and those who reproduce more as they age and grow, and the article goes into detail with examples of both. The article also covers some of the impacts of losing large and old animals, like changing ecosystem structure and function, pack instability, and even infanticide. The ability of older animals to help their group adapt to drought or food shortages maybe increasingly important as climate changes (although the individual resilience of older animals is likely to lower to some stresses like disease). With trophy hunting and fishing selecting for larger (typically older) animals, they argue for the importance of better population modeling, setting age class targets for fisheries, restricting hunting of larger and older animals, and going beyond tracking biomass or abundance to watch for "longevity depletion."


FRESHWATER:
Sayer et al. 2025's headline is that 1/4 of freshwater animals are threatened with extinction. But that's similar to other estimates; to me the new thing here is guidance on how to prioritize sites to conserve with limited data. They found that 1) prioritizing with just threatened freshwater tetrapod data (animals with four legs like some amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals) does well for overall freshwater biodiversity (range-size rarity) but 2) prioritizing on abiotic factors alone (low flow / water stress, nitrogen as a proxy for water pollution) does worse than random! Also from Fig 2b permanent rivers are home to almost all of the threatened FW species, while species in other fresh wetlands fare much better.


REFERENCES:
Kopf, R. K., Banks, S., Brent, L. J. N., Humphries, P., Jolly, C. J., Lee, P. C., Luiz, O. J., Nimmo, D., & Winemiller, K. O. (2024). Loss of Earth’s old, wise, and large animals. Science, 2705, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.ado2705

Sayer, C. A., Fernando, E., Jimenez, R. R., Macfarlane, N. B. W., Rapacciuolo, G., Böhm, M., Brooks, T. M., Contreras-MacBeath, T., Cox, N. A., Harrison, I., Hoffmann, M., Jenkins, R., Smith, K. G., Vié, J.-C., Abbott, J. C., Allen, D. J., Allen, G. R., Barrios, V., Boudot, J.-P., … Darwall, W. R. T. (2025). One-quarter of freshwater fauna threatened with extinction. Nature, 3(December 2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08375-z


Sincerely,
 
Jon
 
p.s. This is a photo of a whitewater rafting trip in Chile w/ colleagues. It was beautiful and a great time albeit painful as my knee is still healing (hence the grimace)!

February 2025 science summary

 Good day,

I have a mixture of papers as usual this week, covering using AI to do lit review (on natural climate solutions), more on seaweed to reduce cattle emissions, one on fire management, and one bad study on return-to-office mandates.

Also, I have no idea how the cost and complexity of this new AI monitoring tool (SPARROW, https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2024/12/18/announcing-sparrow-a-breakthrough-ai-tool-to-measure-and-protect-earths-biodiversity-in-the-most-remote-places/) compares to simpler camera trap setups but I’m especially curious if the acoustic component might be able to detect amphibians or birds unlikely to be visible in a camera trap (thanks to Tara Schnaible for passing this on). If any of you are using camera traps and/or microphones for biomonitoring I'd love to hear your thoughts!

If you know someone who wants to sign up to receive these summaries, they can do so at http://bit.ly/sciencejon (no need to email me).


CLIMATE CHANGE AND AI METHODS:
Chang et al., 2024 uses specialized large language models to assess evidence for 11 co-impacts (positive or negative) of natural climate solutions (NCS). They extracted data from 257,266 studies (after screening 2.3 million)! Most (87%) focused on management, ~30% covered protection and/or restoration, but <2% mentioned cost or equity or Indigenous peoples or local communities. Fig 2 has a nice breakdown of NCS pathways, biome, co-impacts, etc., and Fig 4b maps countries by both evidence and mitigation potential. Paraguay and Republic of the Congo pop as highest carbon w/ lowest evidence (needing research), while the Americas and E/SE Asia have high evidence and high carbon (needing implementation). Fig 3 shows the volume of evidence for how 22 NCS pathways intersect with the 11 co-impacts (9 of which relate to human well-being). They argue that West and Central Africa deserves special research attention as evidence and human development index are relatively low while NCS potential and threatened species are high. One key caveat: evidence volume does not mean evidence quality. For example, there are many papers on sowing legumes in pasture to reduce enteric methane, but I'm not aware of any that are both accurate and precise enough for implementation (since putting them in the wrong places would lead to increased emissions). But this is still a great example of using AI to review a much larger body of evidence than would be possible manually.


CATTLE AND CLIMATE CHANGE:
Meo-Filho et al. 2024 is an important study (part of a special issue of papers around the sustainability of animal foods and plant alternatives, https://www.pnas.org/topic/561). There's been lots of research with hyperbolic claims about red algae reducing methane production in cattle (mostly in vitro, or tests in a petri dish). I believe this is the first paper to measure methane reductions not only 1) in vivo (a test of what happens in real animals) but 2) in the grazing phase of their life cycle. Most American cattle graze for very roughly 15 months before spending 3 months in a feedlot, and they emit more methane per day when grazing. Only 15% of total cattle production GHGs come from the feedlot phase, so even big reductions then can't touch cattle's high carbon footprint. But this paper found supplementing with the seaweed reduced GHGs relative to control animals by 38% over 90 days with no side effects! That is great news and this is work worth following up, BUT a few key caveats: 1) this was a study of only 24 animals, 2) the animals began at 15 months when they would typically go to a feedlot, to show how much this could really reduce the total carbon footprint of cattle (and if any side effects crop up eventually) it would need to be tested on calves from when they are weaned off of milk to when they go to slaughter, and 3) variations in cattle breed, the dominant type of grass they're eating, and climate could all affect the results. So it's very good news, but does not yet mean it's possible to produce a burger w/ 1/3 less carbon. Also, while the numbers are hotly contested, remember that the carbon footprint of beef is very roughly 10* that of pork or chicken (~50* the GHG of beans), so even if the reduction IS scalable, beef will still be a high carbon food.

Cowley et al. 2024 is a paper with very exiting results about reducing the carbon footprint of beef. They fed Australian Angus cows in a feedlot red seaweed (Asparagopsis) infused into vegetable oil, and added it to their diet at three concentrations of CHBr3 from the sewaweed, plus a control w/ no seaweed (5 cows for each of the four treatments). The medium and high doses reduced enteric methane (CH4) by 98% and 99%, with no significant reported side effects. Other studies have seen less impressive reductions in live cattle (e.g. George et al. 2024 found ~50% reduction), although in petri dishes 99% reductions have been achieved before. The discussion covers potential factors influencing the CH4 reduction, including dose, how much of the feedlot diet is grain vs grass, and cattle breed. Caveat - one high dose cow (20% of the sample) got acidosis and had to be removed, all groups had some health problems, and the medium and high doses did increase neutrophil and platelet count. Overall - at medium and high doses the methane was almost eliminated without affecting meat taste or safety, and without clear cattle health impacts. So the study is very promising, but needs to be replicated with larger groups and different contexts (including eventually a study using Asparagopsis during both the entire grazing phase and feedlot phase).


FIRE MANAGEMENT:
Lacey et al. 2024 highlights opportunities for prescribed fire and/or thinning (removing trees and/or brush) to proactively reduce risk for vulnerable communities and areas of high ecological value. Socially vulnerable communities are less likely to get this preventive fire management, but the authors find there are "win-win" opportunities for places high in: ecological value (specifically biodiversity, connectivity, and climate resilience), ecosystem services (carbon and drinking water), social vulnerability (see Table 1 for indicators), and the potential for wildfire mitigation to be effective (the last is based on fire hazard and vegetative cover). Fig 2c has their top priority areas, including big chunks in the Appalachians, Ozarks, and Rocky Mountains (esp. CO and ID), and Fig 4 shows in yellow where those overlap with the USFS top 10 firesheds. Fig 3 shows how much better their priority areas perform against several indicators than a focus solely in fire mitigation potential; as you'd expect optimizing for social vulnerability, ecosystem services, and ecological value results in sites that score a lot better on those indicators! That may seem obvious, but to reframe: in conservation we OFTEN don't include certain objectives in our planning but still expect to have great stories about all the co-benefits we got anyway. This paper is a great pitch for the value of inclusion; planning for what you care about up front will help you focus work on the places where you can have the most impact.


RETURN TO OFFICE MANDATES:
I already put this on LinkedIn but also wanted to flag here that I thought the recent Ding & Ma 2024 study from University of Pittsburgh (which has had a lot of media attention w/o scrutiny) was misleading. They found that 1) return to office mandates don't improve employee or company performance and 2) these mandates are used more to blame employees and "grab power" than to try and improve performance. This doesn't appear to be peer-reviewed research, which makes me more skeptical by default (it could still be right, but there's no screen for bad methods or misleading results). The paper's tone and methods make it look like they set out to prove some preconceived notions rather than exploring what's going on with an open mind, and the way they assert attribution and causation to some findings they report appear unsupported by the data. Their interpretations of their data are plausible, but even if you trust the data there are other valid interpretations which are also plausible. 

The reason I posted this despite it seeming like a "bad" study is to flag the role of bias in reading science. I believe that if I was required to go to the office more often, it would negatively impact my performance and happiness. I can point to personal experience backing that up (I'm more willing to work longer hours when I don't have a commute or when I'm getting hungry but don't have food nearby to keep working). But in situations like this where I have an opinion and feel inclined to "right on!" what I read, that's exactly when I need to slow down and read carefully since I know I have bias leading me to accept certain results and interpretations as convincing. Also - read a news article about science and wondering if it's misleading? I generally first look for the press release from the host institution (to read a summary that the authors would have had a chance to review to reduce accidental misunderstanding, although they are still unreliable whether on accident or on purpose to hype it: https://business.pitt.edu/return-to-office-mandates-dont-improve-employee-or-company-performance/ ), then read the actual paper.

Don't assume the press release, or even my summary is accurate! Always check before you share or act on a research summary.


REFERENCES:
Chang, C. H., Erbaugh, J. T., Fajardo, P., Lu, L., Molnár, I., Papp, D., Robinson, B. E., Austin, K. G., Castro, M., Cheng, S. H., Cook-Patton, S., Ellis, P. W., Garg, T., Hochard, J. P., Kroeger, T., McDonald, R. I., Poor, E. E., Smart, L. S., Tilman, A. R., … Masuda, Y. J. (2024). Global evidence of human well-being and biodiversity impacts of natural climate solutions. Nature Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-024-01454-z

Cowley, F. C., Kinley, R. D., Mackenzie, S. L., Fortes, M. R. S., Palmieri, C., Simanungkalit, G., Almeida, A. K., & Roque, B. M. (2024). Bioactive metabolites of Asparagopsis stabilized in canola oil completely suppress methane emissions in beef cattle fed a feedlot diet. Journal of Animal Science, 102(April). https://doi.org/10.1093/jas/skae109

Ding, Y., & Ma, M. (Shuai). (2024). Return-to-Office Mandates. In S&P Global Market Intelligence. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4675401

Lacey, L. M., Suraci, J. P., Littlefield, C. E., Busse, B. S., & Dickson, B. G. (2024). Informing proactive wildfire management that benefits vulnerable communities and ecological values. People and Nature, August, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10733

Meo-Filho, P., Ramirez-Agudelo, J. F., & Kebreab, E. (2024). Mitigating methane emissions in grazing beef cattle with a seaweed-based feed additive: Implications for climate-smart agriculture. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 121(50), 2–9. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2410863121


Sincerely,
 
Jon
 
p.s. the photo is of a salt marsh at The Wetlands Institute in Stone Harbor, NJ