November 2025 Science Summary

Aloha,

As we head into the season of sweets in the United States (from Halloween to New Year's Eve), I wanted to include a fascinating article (Gopaulchan et al. 2025) on how scientists recently learned a trick to get fancier-tasting chocolate by using the right mix of bacteria and fungi! It's a jam-packed wild read. I've also got two articles on 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).

FIGURING OUT WHAT MAKES CHOCOLATE TASTIER
Gopaulchan et al. 2025 advances the frontier of scientific understanding of flavor development in chocolate. It has a few components. First they measured changes in temperature and pH over a week in fermenting Colombian cacao beans to estimate microbial activity (they correlated with the color changes used to assess fermentation end point). Second they sequenced the genome every 24 hours to watch diversity decline for both bacteria (Fig 1e, Acetobacteraceae dominating over time) and fungi (Fig 1f, Saccharomycetaceae dominating over time). But crucially, they third compared how these shifts happened at three farms w/ similar genetics but different microbial mixes. Look at Fig 2e and 2f!!! The two new farms had diversity increase again eventually, and one farm had significant populations of families that were only present in trace amounts before! OK, stay with me. Fourth, they extracted cocoa liquor and compared their three farms to reference choocolates (Fig 3b). One farm tastes "West African" (roasty, dark wood, tobacco), and two taste more "Malagasy" (one emphasizing light / caramelly / tropical flavors, and the other more fruity and bitter). Fifth they figured out which familiies of microbes were likely most essential for flavor (Fig 4) and sixth put together different incoculant mixes (most had the full diversity of microbes minus a different single strain missing for each mix, plus a random mix). They then (seventh) did controlled cacao bean fermentation w/ each mix plus an uninoculated control (in the lab so it wouldn't have the wild strains), and tasted the results (eighth), finding that the beans inoculated with the full mix of strains had better flavors than those inoculated w/ fewer strains or none at all (Fig 5h). The authors argue that with synthetic starters and controlled fermentation, chocolate flavor could be improved in more industrial-scale chocolate.

PANTANAL:
Fernando et al. 2025 looks at variation in fish biodiversity across the Upper Paraguay River Basin (the Pantanal and its headwaters, see Fig 1). They found the Pantanal floodplain has higher fish species richness than the headwaters, BUT note that the headwaters have: more undescribed species (at least 60), clear threats to the hydrology, likely more endemic species, and headwater threats are likely to impact species in the floodplain as well. Mid-altitudes had high richness in a small area due to overlap in species from below and above. Considering all factors, the authors recommend more conservation focus on the headwaters.

Tomas et al. 2025 recommends eight principles for good conservation policy in the Pantanal: 1) manage the entire Upper Paraguay River Basin; 2&3) use a range of management options for the entire region (not only some habitats); 4) maintain environmental heterogeneity and functionality; 5) Maintain hydrological integrity and connectivity; 6) expand protected areas to represent all ecosystems; 7) incentivize conservation (e.g., via carbon or biodiversity credits, payment for ecosystem services, etc.); and 8) support Indigenous people and their way of living.


REFERENCES:
Fernando, A. M. E., Severo‐Neto, F., Ferreira, F. S., Mateus, L., Tondato‐Carvalho, K. K., Kashiwaqui, E. A. L., Gimenes Junior, H., Domingues, W. M., Pavanelli, C. S., Pinho, H. L. L., Penha, J., & Súarez, Y. R. (2025). Fish distribution across altitudinal gradients in the Upper Paraguay River Basin: Implications for conservation in the Pantanal region. Conservation Science and Practice, 7(7), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1111/csp2.13290

Gopaulchan, D., Moore, C., Ali, N., Sukha, D., Florez González, S. L., Herrera Rocha, F. E., Yang, N., Lim, M., Dew, T. P., González Barrios, A. F., Umaharan, P., Salt, D. E., & Castrillo, G. (2025). A defined microbial community reproduces attributes of fine flavour chocolate fermentation. Nature Microbiology, 10(9), 2130–2152. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41564-025-02077-6

Tomas, W. M., Andrade, M. H., Berlinck, C. N., Bolzan, F., Camilo, A. R., Catella, A. C., Chiaravalloti, R. M., da Cunha, C. N., Damasceno Junior, G. A., Fernando, A. M. E., Garcia, L. C., Girard, P., Ikeda‐Castrillon, S. K., da Silva, C. J., Laps, R., Mateus, L., Morato, R. G., Mourão, G., Nunes, A. V., … Urbanetz, C. (2025). Eight basic principles for the elaboration of public policies and development projects for the Pantanal. Conservation Science and Practice, 7(7), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1111/csp2.13207


Sincerely,
 
Jon
 
p.s. The paintings were both made partly by a dog; we put paint on a board, covered it with plastic wrap, and put a "pup cup" on top so as the dog ate the treat it smeared the paint and made art! Here's a pic of the painting on the right before the dog helped, and another of the dog (Jito) in action.

October 2025 Science Summary

Greetings,

I've got a mixed bag of four mostly unrelated science articles this month.

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).

CLIMATE CHANGE:
Chen et al. 2025 reviews the evidence (from 21 studies with at least 10 years of data) that climate change may cause 3 problems (see Fig 1): mountaintop species going extinct when conditions become too warm for them, species not able to move upslope as fast as conditions change, and bottomland diversity declining b/c no warm-tolerant species can replace areas abandoned by species moving upslope. Using a model they found that mountaintop extinctions are not happening more than expected w/o climate change, many species ARE moving upslope but rarely having range contract, and only limited homogenization of bottomland species. They note including moisture changes and nitrogen deposition could have changed the results, and more research is needed to figure out why these problems are occurring in limited cases.


FOREST CARBON:
Schnabel et al 2025 has experimental evidence that after 16 years, planted forests in Panama with a mix of 5 native species sequestered 57% more aboveground carbon than monocultures. Both treatments lost soil carbon relative to the pasture they started with (see section 4.3 for possible explanations) but still gained a net of 24.7 t C / ha (90.7 t CO2e/ha) due to the aboveground gains. See  https://news.mongabay.com/2025/04/diverse-forests-and-forest-rewilding-offer-resilience-against-climate-change/ for more.


DATA AND DEFORESTATION:
Roquette et al. 2025 is ostensibly about the technical details around land use mapping in Mato Grosso, Brazil. But it actually makes a much broader point: boring things like data sources and algorithms used can have an outsize backdoor policy impact. They argue that a shift in how land use was classified could sneakily allow a ton of deforestation. Basically by changing how "forest" is defined and reclassifying some forest as a type of savanna (confusingly, cerrado is an ecosystem but the Cerrado is a biome / region), this could allow deforestation since 80% of forest has to be set aside from development but only 35% of savanna does. In some cases the new map actually does the reverse (classifying what was savanna as forest) but that can be reversed upon request. The worst case scenario is that up to 4,1 million ha could be authorized for deforestation.


MINING AND TOXICITY:
Foerster et al. 2025 found that giant otters in the Pantanal are showing evidence of mercury contamination in the Pantanal – higher when they’re closer to gold mines (except for streams close to the mine over land but not connected by water). Their results aren’t conclusive but it seems likely that the values are high enough to be causing toxicity, and that otters aren’t able to flush out the mercury by molting their fur, nor by having selenium bind to the mercury. They measured mercury in fur rather than directly in the liver, but based on other research they think it’s likely levels are high enough in some animals to cause serious toxicity and perhaps even death. 


REFERENCES:
Chen, Y.-H., Lenoir, J., & Chen, I.-C. (2025). Limited evidence for range shift–driven extinction in mountain biota. Science, 388(6748), 741–747. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adq9512

Foerster, N., Soresini, G., Leuchtenberger, C., Bócoli, D. de A., Paiva, J. de B., Brait, C. H. H., & Mourão, G. (2025). Pervasive mercury contamination of a semi-aquatic apex predator across the Pantanal wetland. Environmental Conservation, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0376892925100155

Roquette, J. G., Vacchiano, M. C., Daher, F. R. G., & Finger, Z. (2025). Pseudo-legal deforestation due to changes in the classification of native vegetation in Mato Grosso, Brazil. Environmental Conservation, 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1017/S037689292510012X

Schnabel, F., Guillemot, J., Barry, K. E., Brunn, M., Cesarz, S., Eisenhauer, N., Gebauer, T., Guerrero‐Ramirez, N. R., Handa, I. T., Madsen, C., Mancilla, Lady, Monteza, J., Moore, T., Oelmann, Y., Scherer‐Lorenzen, M., Schwendenmann, L., Wagner, A., Wirth, C., & Potvin, C. (2025). Tree Diversity Increases Carbon Stocks and Fluxes Above—But Not Belowground in a Tropical Forest Experiment. Global Change Biology, 31(2). https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.70089


Sincerely,
 
Jon
 
p.s. These four foster puppies were getting some wiggles out in my yard before a "puppy party" which raises money for an animal rescue (Homeward Trails) and helps them find homes

September 2025 science summary

Hi there,

This month I've got three articles on water scarcity, and two on fire and human health in South America. But before I get to the science, here are a couple of very old blog posts and more pictures...

In case you want more pics like the one above, here's an album full of similar pics of snowy mountains and clouds I took on the flight from Punta Arenas (Chile) to Santiago. This was the most beautiful plane flight I've ever taken.

Also, way back in 2013 I wrote an article about how I came to appreciate house centipedes (along w/ nematodes) for their ecological role in pest control, and recently was tickled to see people are still reading and commenting on it 12 years later! Here it is if anyone is curious: https://blog.nature.org/2013/02/08/everyday-nature-how-i-came-to-love-house-centipedes

Finally, the Washington Post and New York Times recently did their own taste tests about real sugar / high fructose corn syrup (including Mexican vs. American Coke) BUT neither was double-blind and neither involved multiple samples of each to improve statistical confidence in the results. Here's one way to do a more rigorous test if you're interested: https://sciencejon.blogspot.com/2012/10/does-real-sugar-make-mexican-coke-taste.html

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). OK, with that, here are the science summaries (finally):

FIRE AND HUMAN HEALTH:
dos Santos et al. 2025 found that the smoke plumes from the 2020 Pantanal fire combined with heatwaves, lack of rain to wash smoke particles from the air, and COVID to drive an increase of 21% in premature non-COVID deaths in São Paulo state (see Fig 5) – not counting nonlethal hospitalizations. In other words, improved fire management in the Pantanal could benefit even city dwellers far away. Fig 2 shows the smoke plume trajectories, Fig 3 shows the resulting PM2.5 (small particulate matter air pollution) levels, and Fig 7 is a nice schematic of how the different hazards combine to drive excess mortality. The authors call for more widespread integrated fire management, and continued reductions in sugarcane burning.

Palmeiro-Silva et al. 2025 is an opinion piece arguing that with wildfires increasing across South America, we need to do more to consider human health impacts of fire prevention and management. Using the 2024 wildfires in the Pantanal and the Amazon as a case study, they note that in addition to impacts on the environment and obvious human health impacts like death and air pollution, economic and mental health impacts are also important. They call for better and faster communication to affected communities, co-development of fire plans with local residents, and coordination across multiple sectors to address wildfires via a comprehensive fire risk reduction strategy.


WATER SCARCITY:
Womble et al. 2025 covers several potential ways to address water scarcity (via mandatory cutbacks, several types of water markets focused just on water consumption, and strategically considering impact on fish habitat when selecting places to buy water from). Fig 3 shows the room for improvement from the perspective of fish, often with relatively little extra cost. But an interesting twist is that depending on how the market is structured, the cost and incentives to consider fish habitat varies a lot. The default least cost "authorized market" authorized by the 2019 legislation is not great for fish (the "strategic portfolio" would cost 55% more) but for other markets the extra cost is from <1% to 8% higher to improve fish habitat. Specifically: "strategically investing <1% more funding than a least-cost plan nearly doubles fish habitat improved to intermediate status in an authorized water market with aggressive water-use reductions" and "investing 8% more than a least-cost plan ... nearly triples restored intermediate habitat in an expanded water market with aggressive water-use reductions, more water-user participation and more protections for restored flows". Finally - just 10 transactions yield 1/4 of that potential tripled habitat benefit at 1% of the cost. My overall take-aways are that there could be a lot of secondary effects of market structure, and that a little bit of focused spending to improve fish habitat can have a huge impact!

Given the outsize impact of alfalfa in the SW states, Waring et al. 2025 has some potentially useful ideas about how IF you had a well-designed water market, alfalfa irrigation could be reduced to save water (compensating farmers for reduced yield). Essentially they would cut and sell alfalfa fewer times each year b/c it goes dormant under low water, which they estimate could reduce 16-50% of alfalfa’s water use. See Table 3 for why that’s a big range – it depends on how many fields participate, how many cuttings participating fields have under BAU, and assumptions of irrigation efficiency. Almost half the fields have a short season (3-4 cuttings), which is why in Table 3 you see that scenarios like 3 and 5 that reduce participation by short-season fields result in a lot of missed opportunity. Fig 2d shows the % of total water consumption in each state due to alfalfa from Jul-Oct (note consumption is the amount of water evaporated and transpired from both rain and irrigation, unlike withdrawal which is the volume of irrigation water applied). 

Coelho et al. 2025 shows the trend for overall streamflow and flooding in the Pantanal, and also shows how three upland basins (Jauru, Taquari, and Miranda) connect to their floodplains and the Upper Paraguay (UP) River. I find Fig 11 to be pretty compelling in showing the drying trend for the Pantanal, and Fig 3 shows how the three upland basins flow into their respective floodplains and then to the UP river channel.


REFERENCES:
Coelho, M. E. M. S., Chaves, H. M. L., & Fonseca, M. R. (2025). Trends, Patterns, and Persistence of Rainfall, Streamflow, and Flooded Area in the Upper Paraguay Basin (Brazil). Water, 17(10), 1549. https://doi.org/10.3390/w17101549

dos Santos, D. M., de Oliveira, A. M., Duarte, E. S. F., Rodrigues, J. A., Menezes, L. S., Albuquerque, R., Roque, F. de O., Peres, L. F., Hoelzemann, J. J., & Libonati, R. (2024). Compound dry-hot-fire events connecting Central and Southeastern South America: an unapparent and deadly ripple effect. Npj Natural Hazards, 1(1), 32. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44304-024-00031-w

Palmeiro-Silva, Y., Llerena-Cayo, C., Blanco-Villafuerte, L., Rojas-Rueda, D., Borchers Arriagada, N., Vela-Clavo, Z., de Camargo, T., Rusticucci, M., Valdes-Velasquez, A., & Hartinger, S. M. (2025). The 2024 South America ablaze: health impacts and policy imperatives for protecting population health in an era of wildfires. The Lancet Regional Health - Americas, 48, 101160. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lana.2025.101160

Waring, E., Dahlke, H. E., Abatzoglou, J. T., Medellín-Azuara, J., Yost, M. A., Bali, K. M., Naughton, C. C., Putnam, D. H., Sabie, R., Kishore, S., Santos, N. R., & Viers, J. H. (2025). Reimagining alfalfa as a flexible crop for water security in the Southwestern USA. Science of The Total Environment, 990(June), 179851. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2025.179851

Womble, P., Gorelick, S. M., Thompson, B. H., & Hernandez-Suarez, J. S. (2025). A strategic environmental water rights market for Colorado River reallocation. Nature Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-025-01585-x


Sincerely,
 
Jon
 
p.s. The pic above is one of the many beautiful snow covered mountains I saw in Chile between Punta Arenas and Santiago (in June so during winter). More pics are here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jaundicedferret/albums/72177720327724315/with/54674270850

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.