Congratulations,
If you're reading this you made it to December! I've got four unrelated reviews this month; the first is a new paper about wildlife road crossings to promote climate adaptation (I'm a minor author).
Also - this is a great piece on how to get better at using AI: https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/getting-started-with-ai-good-enough The short version is: don't treat AI like a search engine! Give it more context and instructions and let it figure out precisely what you want through iteration. The author says it probably takes ~10 hrs of experimentation to get good enough at using AI for it to be working 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).
WILDLIFE CONNECTIVITY & CLIMATE ADAPTATION:
Littlefield et al. 2024 (I'm a minor author) examines how wildlife road crossings can be beneficial to help species adapt to climate change. We recommend that when siting crossings we should consider a) current wildlife movements, AND expected short-term and long-term shifts in species range and migrations due to b) climate change AND c) human land use change (expansion of housing, ag, etc.). We show how doing this was accomplished for elk in Colorado.
For this to work well, diversion fencing is important to channel wildlife to crossings, and avoiding future fragmentation is key. The paper is open access. There's a press release for the paper here: https://fish.freeshell.org/publications/Littlefield2024-PressRelease.pdf
HORIZON SCANNING / EMERGING ISSUES:
I realized I've only rarely reviewed Bill Sutherland's annual "horizon scan" article listing 15 emerging conservation issues that potentially deserve to be better-known.This year they used artificial intelligence to generate some of the ideas but none made the cut. Here's the final list so you can decide if any are worth looking up:
1. New sources of hydrogen for energy (mining or electrolysis instead of natural gas),
2. Decarbonized ammonia (making fertilizer w/ lower carbon emissions but could increase fertilizer wasted),
3. Feeding people and/or animals w/ cultivated bacteria,
4. Light-free artificial photosynthesis (yes, it's as weird as it sounds) for indoor ag,
5. Enhanced rock weathering at scale (putting rock dust on croplands to sequester carbon),
6. Potential global declines in earthworm populations (more data is needed to see if UK decline is representative),
7. Ecoacoustics to monitor soil ecology (testing how meaningful soil sounds are for estimating things like biodiversity and water flow),
8. Wildfire affecting El Niño and La Niña phase (aerosols leading to the La Niña phase),
9. Benchtop DNA printers (potential to eventually allow guerilla genetic engineering),
10. Better predicting chemical toxicity from early data,
11. a skyscraper city planned in Saudi Arabia that birds could crash into when migrating from Europe to Africa.,
12. Sea urchin die-offs (possibly from disease) leading to algal overgrowth on corals and other marine ecosystems,
13. Ocean-based carbon removal (from the air or dissolved in water to stable forms),
14. Warming "twilight zones" (200-1000m below sea surface) affecting global nutrient and carbon cycles, and
15. Melting Antarctic ice changing deep sea currents.
RIVERS:
Brinkerhoff et al. 2024 (summarized by Harvey & Kampf 2024) asks how much rivers in the continental US originate from ephemeral streams (which rely on rain to flow, as they are always disconnected from groundwater, see Fig 1). The answer is 55% by total streamflow and 59% by total stream length- which may seem surprisingly high at first (and they have a few reasons it's likely an underestimate)! But it makes sense; streams have to start SOMEwhere, and that's either rain or groundwater or a mix. If it's rain those source headwater streams would dry out faster than bigger downstream reaches. Smaller streams and the West are more reliant on ephemeral streams (where they are dry more often), and the Great Lakes region and Florida are the least dependent on ephemeral flow. The paper notes that since they found the majority of river water comes from ephemeral streams, excluding those streams from the Clean Water Act (due to the Sackett ruling) makes it much harder to regulate water quality overall.
FIRE:
Balch et al. 2024 found that over the last 20 years fires in the US have been spreading faster. In the Western US over 20 years the average peak daily growth rate (the average of the fastest each fire grew on a given day) increased 2.5 times (in California they increased by 4 times). The fastest 3% of fires nationally (spreading more than 1,620 ha in a day) destroyed between 78-89% of the buildings lost to fire (the paper lists each number in different section for the same stat). I’ve heard a lot more about severity and frequency and extent of fire, but thinking about speed is also important as faster fires are harder to respond do, and may make really smooth coordination increasingly important. Increases in drought conditions and potential increases in high winds could make this worse over time.
REFERENCES:
Balch, J. K., Iglesias, V., Mahood, A. L., Cook, M. C., Amaral, C., DeCastro, A., Leyk, S., McIntosh, T. L., Nagy, R. C., St. Denis, L., Tuff, T., Verleye, E., Williams, A. P., & Kolden, C. A. (2024). The fastest-growing and most destructive fires in the US (2001 to 2020). Science, 386(6720), 425–431. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adk5737
Brinkerhoff, C. B., Gleason, C. J., Kotchen, M. J., Kysar, D. A., & Raymond, P. A. (2024). Ephemeral stream water contributions to United States drainage networks. Science, 384(6703), 1476–1482. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adg9430
Harvey, J. W., & Kampf, S. K. (2024). The transitory origins of rivers. Science, 384(6703), 1402–1403. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adq1714
Littlefield, C. E., Suraci, J. P., Kintsch, J., Callahan, R., Cramer, P., Cross, M. S., Dickson, B. G., Duncan, L. A., Fisher, J. R., Freeman, P. T., Seidler, R., Wearn, A., Andrews, K. M., Brocki, M., Dodd, N., Gagnon, J., Johnson, A., Krosby, M., Skroch, M., & Sutherland, R. (2024). Evaluating and elevating the role of wildlife road crossings in climate adaptation. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1002/fee.2816
Sutherland, W. J., Bennett, C., Brotherton, P. N. M., Butchart, S. H. M., Butterworth, H. M., Clarke, S. J., Esmail, N., Fleishman, E., Gaston, K. J., Herbert-Read, J. E., Hughes, A. C., James, J., Kaartokallio, H., Le Roux, X., Lickorish, F. A., Newport, S., Palardy, J. E., Pearce-Higgins, J. W., Peck, L. S., … Thornton, A. (2024). A horizon scan of global biological conservation issues for 2024. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 39(1), 89–100. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2023.11.001
Sincerely,
Jon
p.s. The photo is of my neighbor Buddy's old house; the new owners are adding more levels to it but so far have just removed the roof and back and people who walk by are always surprised to see it.
