December 2025 Science Summary

Greetings,

This month I am summarizing three science papers about climate change plus I wanted to share a cool idea I recently learned about.

Here's the cool idea: recent research in Colorado (by Julia Kintsch from ECO-resolutions among others) has found that simply adding lines of woody debris underneath underpasses (see the photo above) boosted underpass use by small mammals. Cover features composed of salvaged logs and branches with sufficient interstitial space through which small animals can move doubled the number of species documented using large bridges under an interstate to access habitats on either side. They detected 17 species using the cover features, including small mammals, amphibians, reptiles, and the federally threatened Preble’s meadow jumping mouse. This is a really cheap intervention worth trying out more broadly, please help spread the word!

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FORESTATION (REFORESTATION AND AFFORESTATION):
Wang et al. 2025 finds that earlier estimates of how much of the worth could be forested were much too high. One the one hand - this means we can't count on trees to do as much sequestering as some models hoped for. But as one of the authors (Susan Cook-Patton) points out (in this excellent post) the larger area wasn't feasible anyway, so this smaller estimate gives us more actionable priorities for planting. She also notes that while reducing fossil fuels (and protection of acutely threatened forests) is higher priority than forestation, we absolutely need all of the above. Note: reforestation is restoring trees where they used to be, afforestation is planting trees in what used to be grasslands or other ecosystems, forestation is both.

CLIMATE CHANGE - CARBON MARKETS AND ALBEDO:
Riley et al. 2025 have an update on an issue I've written about several times: that the albedo of trees (how much they reflect sunlight compared to bare soil) can reduce or even fully negate the climate benefit of trees in some cases. They looked at 172 tree planting projects in the voluntary carbon market to see how carbon credits issued compared to true climate impact once albedo was considered. On average 18% of the issued credits shouldn't have been, and 25% of the projects offered more than double the credits they should have once albedo was considered. 12% of the projects (a subset of that 25%) were even net harmful (representing 30% of total credits issued). In good news, 9% of projects actually had more benefit than estimated, and over half of projects had 0-25% of their issued carbon credits negated by albedo. This is important to get right, but a shortcut is to focus protection and forestation in more tropical places while avoiding areas with heavy snow cover and/or very light-colored soils (the pink places in Fig 2a are good to avoid).

DEFORESTATION AND CLIMATE CHANGE:
Franco et al. 2025 looks at how both deforestation and climate change have affected temperature and precipitation in the Amazon. Losing trees not only increases atmospheric carbon which drives global warming, for tropical forests in particular it also increases LOCAL warming and especially decreases water cycling. They found that deforestation caused 3/4 of the decline in dry season precipitation but only 17% of the increase in temperature. This is similar to other work which has found deforestation has delayed the onset of the rainy season in the Cerrado (Spera et al. 2016) and Pantanal (Lázaro et al. 2020).


REFERENCES:
Franco, M. A., Rizzo, L. V., Teixeira, M. J., Artaxo, P., Azevedo, T., Lelieveld, J., Nobre, C. A., Pöhlker, C., Pöschl, U., Shimbo, J., Xu, X., & Machado, L. A. T. (2025). How climate change and deforestation interact in the transformation of the Amazon rainforest. Nature Communications, 16(1), 7944. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-63156-0

Lázaro, W. L., & Oliveira-júnior, E. S. (2020). Thematic Section : Opinions about Aquatic Ecology in a Changing World Climate change reflected in one of the largest wetlands in the world : an overview of the Northern Pantanal water regime. Acta Limnologica Brasiliensia, 32, 8.

Riley, L. M., Cook-Patton, S. C., Albert, L. P., Still, C. J., Williams, C. A., & Bukoski, J. J. (2025). Accounting for albedo in carbon market protocols. Nature Communications, 16(1), 8810. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-64317-x

Spera, S. A., Galford, G. L., Coe, M. T., Macedo, M. N., & Mustard, J. F. (2016). Land-use change affects water recycling in Brazil’s last agricultural frontier. Global Change Biology, 22(10), 3405–3413. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.13298

Wang, Y., Zhu, Y., Cook-Patton, S. C., Sun, W., Zhang, W., Ciais, P., Li, T., Smith, P., Yuan, W., Zhu, X., Canadell, J. G., Deng, X., Xu, Y., Xu, H., Yue, C., & Qin, Z. (2025). Land availability and policy commitments limit global climate mitigation from forestation. Science, 389(6763), 931–934. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adj6841

Sincerely,
 
Jon

July 2021 science summary

 Hello,

This month I've got a few papers on protected areas and three important papers about the role of forests in climate change. The photo above is just a milkweed beetle from my garden whose eye is bisected by its antenna!

Since there's been a lot of interest lately in protected areas and 30x30, I pulled together summaries of some of my favorites here: http://sciencejon.blogspot.com/2021/06/some-papers-on-30-x-30-and-protected.html

If you know someone who wants to sign up to receive these summaries, they can do so at http://bit.ly/sciencejon

PROTECTED AREAS:
Barnes et al. 2018 highlights the downside of area targets: they may drive siting protected areas (PAs) in bad places and poor enforcement / management. They promote a shift to outcome-based protected area targets (meaning the targets are about biodiversity gains or avoided losses), emphasizing representation and connectivity, and building the evidence base for which factors affect how well PAs deliver conservation outcomes.

Devillers et al. 2015 argues that marine protected areas (MPAs) have largely been cited in remote areas with low threats that the MPAs are intended to address. They point out that politics drive MPAs to be established in places that minimize costs and conflicts with commercial interests, but that MPAs that avoid potential conflicts will by definition have low impact relative to business as usual. They offer two Australian case studies and in particular highlight how well the 2004 rezoning of the great barrier reef was done in terms of improving ecological representation, although still with room to improve. They suggest planners of MPAs and/or no-take zones ask four questions: 1. Are MPAs intended to protect biodiversity? 2. Do proposed MPAs give precedence to more threatened biodiversity features? 3. Do MPAs adequately represent all biodiversity features of interest? and 4. Do MPAs adequately represent variation within features (like bioregions) to focus on the most threatened sub-areas?

Waldron et al. 2020 looks at global financial implications of 30 x 30 (6 terrestrial and 5 marine scenarios), and for tropical forests & mangroves adds in avoided costs and non-monetary ecosystem service values. They estimate that expanding protected areas (PAs) to 30% could result in increased direct global revenues of $64-454 billion / yr (depending on the scenario chosen, and mostly driven by increased nature tourism, see Table 3) as well as more food and wood production. Broader economic benefits (largely from avoided storm damage) could be $170-534 billion / yr more. With a estimated cost of $103-$178 billion / yr (which includes funding to manage existing PAs), they find net economic benefits to 30x30 across all scenarios (spend some time with Table 3 to see the details, but $235 billion / yr is the lowest net financial benefit). It's hard to vet this kind of complex analysis with a ton of assumptions. My gut tells me this is a pretty optimistic assessment due to several key assumptions (like a social cost of carbon at $135-540 / t CO2e , assuming big tourism increases and scarcity of wood driving up forest product revenue, etc.). But they point out that it could be an underestimate since they didn't include broader benefits of other ecosystems like grasslands. Thoughts welcome! Note that other scientists criticized the Waldron paper, noting that not nearly enough has been done to estimate how 30x30 would affect people (nor to consult with them), among other issues. The critique (Agrawal et al. 2020) is here: https://openlettertowaldronetal.wordpress.com/

Wenzel et al. 2020 (NOAA’s 2020 Marine Protected Area report) has a good overview of marine (and great lakes) protection in the U.S. 26% of US waters are in an MPA, but only 3% in a no-take zone. Page 5 of the PDF has a breakdown by region showing that some places like Alaska are disproportionately unprotected. The report also indicates MPA coverage by habitat type (e.g. 83% of mangroves are protected), calls for OECMs to improve MPA connectivity, and notes the need for better management of MPAs.


CLIMATE CHANGE:
As a number of NGOs look to invest in reforestation and forest protection as part of the solution to climate change, Williams et al. 2021 has a very important caveat. They found that while forests cool the earth by sequestering and storing carbon, they can also warm the earth in some cases by absorbing more heat than bare ground or snow would. So some forest loss in the U.S. (lower 48 where they did their modeling) has led to net cooling, even though overall it has led to warming. The cooling mostly happened in the Western US where there’s a lot of snow cover and the arid conditions make for light-color, reflective soils (so losing trees results in less local heat absorption). This paper is more pessimistic than the others I’ve read about temperate forests (for example Li et al. 2015 used remote sensing to actually measure temperature changes and compare nearby pixels with forest vs. open land cover) and finds that 15 years of forest loss only caused warming equal to 17% of a U.S. annual fossil fuel emissions (because the most forest loss has happened in Western states with lots of snow cover, balancing out more moderate forest loss elsewhere). Other work on this topic has found that boreal forests are the most likely to cause net warming (as per Mykleby et al. 2017), but for tropical forest accounting for evapotranspiration and albedo actually enhances their net cooling effect.

Mykleby et al. 2017 estimates how planting trees would affect climate change (both globally and locally) in Canada and the Nothern U.S. They found that in Northern Canada and some Western U.S. states, planting trees would on net warm the earth because the carbon gained is more than outweighed by covering up highly reflective snow with more absorbent tree leaves (Figure 2c). The key point here is that the impact of adding or losing trees depends a lot on location (consistent w/ Williams et al. 2021 and Betts et al. 2000), so tables w/ averages across regions (like Table 1) are not super helpful. This concern with albedo causing local warming is most significant for boreal forests, followed by temperate forests in snowy regions, and does not apply to tropical forests.

Randerson et al. 2006 is another paper looking at how boreal forest loss affects climate change. They used a 1999 boreal forest fire in Alaska as a case study, measuring not only carbon dioxide and methane, but also albedo changes (from exposing snow and ice which reflect more light, and from black carbon deposition which absorb more light) and aerosols in the burned site compared to a control site. They found that for the first ~15 years, the emissions from the fire outweigh the lower albedo and result in net warming. But after 15 years, the fire has a net cooling effect as the GHGs and black carbon and aerosols dissipate, but higher albedo persists (Fig 3b, green line).

REFERENCES:

Barnes, M. D., Glew, L., Wyborn, C., & Craigie, I. D. (2018). Prevent perverse outcomes from global protected area policy. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2(5), 759–762. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-018-0501-y

Devillers, R., Pressey, R. L., Grech, A., Kittinger, J. N., Edgar, G. J., Ward, T., & Watson, R. (2015). Reinventing residual reserves in the sea: are we favouring ease of establishment over need for protection? Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems, 25(4), 480–504. https://doi.org/10.1002/aqc.2445

Betts, R. A. (2000). Offset of the potential carbon sink from boreal forestation by decreases in surface albedo. Nature, 408(6809), 187–190. https://doi.org/10.1038/35041545

Li, Y., Zhao, M., Motesharrei, S., Mu, Q., Kalnay, E., & Li, S. (2015). Local cooling and warming effects of forests based on satellite observations. Nature Communications, 6, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms7603

Mykleby, P. M., Snyder, P. K., & Twine, T. E. (2017). Quantifying the trade-off between carbon sequestration and albedo in midlatitude and high-latitude North American forests. Geophysical Research Letters, 44(5), 2493–2501. https://doi.org/10.1002/2016GL071459

Waldron, A., Adams, V., Allan, J., Arnell, A., Asner, G., Atkinson, S., Baccini, A., Baillie, J. E., Balmford, A., Austin Beau, J., Brander, L., Brondizio, E., Bruner, A., Burgess, N., Burkart, K., Butchart, S., Button, R., Carrasco, R., Cheung, W., … Zhang, Y. (2020). Protecting 30% of the planet for nature: costs, benefits and economic implications.

Wenzel, L., D’Iorio, M., Wahle, C., Cid, G., Canizzo, Z., & Darr, K. (2020). Marine protected areas 2020: Building effective conservation networks. https://nmsmarineprotectedareas.blob.core.windows.net/marineprotectedareas-prod/media/docs/2020-mpa-building-effective-conservation-networks.pdf

Williams, C. A., Gu, H., & Jiao, T. (2021). Climate impacts of U.S. forest loss span net warming to net cooling. Science Advances, 7(7), 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aax8859

Sincerely,
 
Jon