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

November 2021 science summary

Hello,

This month I am summarizing a mixed bag of science articles on conservation planning, climate change, fire & human health, and wildlife monitoring.

I was interviewed by Wildhub about things I've learned as a conservation scientist (especially related to publishing papers), if you're interested it's available at: https://wildhub.community/posts/communicating-your-message-is-crucial-and-it-takes-lots-of-practice

Also the 2021 Annual Request for Proposals (RFP) from The Science for Nature and People Partnership (SNAPP) is now open. You can learn more and apply at https://awards.snappartnership.net/ (proposals due by December 10th), but they fund quick working groups to advance research w/ tangible benefits to people and nature.

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

CONSERVATION PLANNING:
Lees et al. 2021 is an interesting analysis of the impact of participatory and stakeholder-inclusive conservation planning on threatened species. They specifically look at the 35 planning workshops hosted by The Conservation Planning Specialist Group (CPSG) of the IUCN Species Survival Commission (IUCN SSC) which had data for at least 5 years before the workshop and 10 years after on the species in question (using the Red List Index). The abstract tells a rosier picture than does Table 1: 10 years after workshops 4% of spp improved, 22% declined, and 74% were stable (after 15 years it was 9%, 26%, and 66%). But 1) they show that the decline slowed down post-workshop relative to pre-workshop, and 2) relative to a modeled counterfactual (w/o the workshops) they predicted that 8 species extinctions were avoided (of the 35 spp. with 15 years of post-workshop data). Check out Fig 3 for the mean risk over time which makes their point well. While it's posisble the 15 year data is an anomaly, in the discussion on p6 they make a good case that the workshops were the secret sauce rather than some other factor. Since they take place in contexts where past conservation has been unsuccessful and the path forward was unclear due to conflicting views and uncertainty, the pre-workshop outlook was typically poor, and actively including stakeholders in planning was a good way to both find solutions and build support for them. Studying the impact of planning per se is very difficult, and I don't see this paper as definitive proof, but it is useful evidence making a case for broad and inclusive planning that involves a range of stakeholders.


CLIMATE CHANGE:
Dobrowski et al. analyzes how much of the world will experience enough climate change to effectively shift into a different ecoregion, and how that relates to protected areas (PAs). They move ecoregions' location to keep their historic climate similar, which is an interesting thought exercise but not a likely scenario (given variations in soil and topography and other factors that will not shift w/ climate). They found that with 2C warming, 54% of land will effectively change ecoregions, with 22% shifting biomes (see Fig 4 for how this affects % protected by biome). This means there are winners and losers, with the biggest losers the ~5% of land within PAs that don't have an analogous climate w/in 2000 km for species to migrate to (shown in black in Figs 2b & 3b; 56 ecoregions 'disappear'). They recommend a focus on unmodified areas expected to be climatically stable that are currently underprotected, as well as areas that improve climate connectivity (see Fig 6 for a case study in the NW US and Canada). They also have a tool where you choose a place, and it'll tell you what other place currently has the climate the first place is expected to have w 2C (or 4C) warming: https://plus2c.org/


FIRE & HEALTH:
Liu et al. 2017 combines modeled smoke exposure from wildfire with hospital admission data (due to respiratory illness) to estimate the health impacts of fire on different groups of elderly Medicare enrolees. Specifically, they looked at age, gender, race, urban/rural, region, poverty level, and education (see Table 2) in 561 counties in the Western US. They looked at baseline hospital admissions for respiratory illness for each group, and then how that changes on days when smoke levels are high. They found more smoke exposure in Blacks, California, urban, and more educated counties. Hospital admissions on smoke days increased the most for Blacks (22%) and women (10%). There are a few odd findings (like poor people having more smoke exposure, but decreased hospital admissions on smoke days), and they also used a bad practice of having a 'referent' population that was white, make, urban, and relatively wealthy and young.

Palaiologou et al. 2019 looked at how different aspects of the Social Vulnerability Index affect wildfire exposure in parts of three states (WA, CA, NM). They grouped social attributes oddly rather than using the default SVI themes (see Table 2: I'm unclear why 'minority' ends up in 'education'), but found fire exposure went up w/ poverty & disability, higher population & # of households, youth, inability to speak English, and lack of high school education (but with variation by state). They found that most fire exposure for the most vulnerable places originated on private land relatively near to both towns and "wildlands."


WILDLIFE MONITORING:
Lahoz-Monfort & Magrath 2021 is an overview of tech options for monitoring wildlife (excluding biotechnology like eDNA and genomics) and to a lesser degree collecting other environmental information. Since they cover a wide range of tech fairly shallowly, it's hard to summarize. It's worth a quick read for anyone looking to understand the range of ways scientists track and measure wildlife from afar. They cover types of sensors (chemical, thermal, optical including UV and IR but broken out from multispectral and hyperspectral and LiDAR, radar, active sonar, passive acoustic, vibration, and position / motion), specific devices (visible and thermal camera traps, microphones w/ loggers, sonar on boats or buoys, land-based radar like Doppler, smartphones, and a few others), networks of devices (wireless or independent but with data harvested and combined later), devices on land and water vehicles, traditional remote sensing (from planes, satellites, and drones), devices on animals (which can track: location via several tech options, physiological info like temperature and heart rate or even birth, imagery, audio, individual identity, interactions w/ other animals, and more), other ways to track the location of wildlife, using sensors to trigger traps (or deploy poison or open / close a gate, etc.), and computing (including online platforms, smartphones, AI, and cheap computing).


REFERENCES:
Dobrowski, S. Z., Littlefield, C. E., Lyons, D. S., Hollenberg, C., Carroll, C., Parks, S. A., Abatzoglou, J. T., Hegewisch, K., & Gage, J. (2021). Protected-area targets could be undermined by climate change-driven shifts in ecoregions and biomes. Communications Earth & Environment, 2(1), 198. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-021-00270-z

Lahoz-Monfort, J. J., & Magrath, M. J. L. (2021). A Comprehensive Overview of Technologies for Species and Habitat Monitoring and Conservation. BioScience, 71(10), 1038–1062. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biab073

Lees, C. M., Rutschmann, A., Santure, A. W., & Beggs, J. R. (2021). Science-based, stakeholder-inclusive and participatory conservation planning helps reverse the decline of threatened species. Biological Conservation, 260(December 2020), 109194. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2021.109194

Liu, J. C., Wilson, A., Mickley, L. J., Ebisu, K., Sulprizio, M. P., Wang, Y., Peng, R. D., Yue, X., Dominici, F., & Bell, M. L. (2017). Who Among the Elderly Is Most Vulnerable to Exposure to and Health Risks of Fine Particulate Matter From Wildfire Smoke? American Journal of Epidemiology, 186(6), 730–735. https://doi.org/10.1093/aje/kwx141

Palaiologou, P., Ager, A. A., Nielsen-Pincus, M., Evers, C. R., & Day, M. A. (2019). Social vulnerability to large wildfires in the western USA. Landscape and Urban Planning, 189(April), 99–116. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2019.04.006

Sincerely,
 
Jon
 
p.s. the photo above shows the inside of a sculpture called Meteor by Robert Rosselle (the last one he made before he died). The outside is less lovely (https://www.flickr.com/photos/jaundicedferret/51430890217/in/datetaken/) so it's a great surprise to peek in and see the planet and stars