August 2026 Science Summary

Hi all,

As always - 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).

In addition to a handful of science papers below, check out this fascinating but scary article about a recently discovered contagious form of cancer in catfish (New York Times article: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/22/science/contagious-cancer... Nature article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10828-6).

AI TAKE ON A PAPER ABOUT WILDLIFE RESPONSE TO PEOPLE, PART 2
My July 2026 summary asked 3 AI tools (native Claude, Copilot using ChatGPT, and Elicit) for key points of a paper I summarized which were not obvious in the abstract. This month I got access to one more science AI tool (LeapSpace). Here's what it had to say:
"Three non-obvious points from the full paper are: (1) the species-level effects were often interactive, with human presence influencing wildlife more strongly in less modified habitats; (2) the authors could separate individual behavioral plasticity from species composition effects by comparing the same animals across 2019 and 2020; and (3) the paper’s applicability is narrower than the headline result suggests because it relies on GPS-tracked mammals and birds plus human-mobility data that are not broadly accessible and are often too coarse for fine-scale behavior"
JF note: the first point above is clearly stated in the abstract (boo), the third point is true but was stated more clearly by elicit (which broke it into two separate points), but the second point is a good one that all three other tools missed (although I included it in my own summary).
Another JF note: I just started experimenting with a Copilot agent to read a science paper and produce "warning labels" where it identifies a potential problem meriting human review, including a conflict between the abstract / results / discussion (or between text, tables, and figures), what appears to be inappropriate generalization of the findings, and many more. If anyone is keen to collaborate on this email me and we can exchange ideas on the instructions and see if we can come up with something good enough to be useful.


GOOD NEWS ON MANGROVES:
Zhang et al. 2026 brings a bit of welcome good news: from 2010-2023 mangroves expanded on net! This means mangrove conversion and thinning / degradation have recently have been more than offset by regeneration and expanion into the sea. They found that relative to 1984, by 2010 2% of global mangroves had been lost, but that 1984-2023 showed a net loss of just 850 km2 (although with substantial uncertainty). On the other hand, replacing old mangroves with new can still result in the loss of carbon and biodiversity, and regional or local losses. So the net gain since 2010 is good news, but also hides 6,275 km2 of gross losses to mangroves since 2010. Note that 1984-2010 is twice as much time as 2010-2013, so to get loss and gain rates be sure to convert everything to change per year.


CLIMATE ADAPTATION:
Nippert et al. 2026 argues that grassland managers should stop using binary thinking and trying to fight all woody encroachment (which is not feasible anymore). Instead they recommend a shift to thinking about how to manage grasslands for biodiversity and productivity within what is realistic, ideally before woody encroachment becomes established. For a variety of reasons, fully reversing the encroachment of shrubs can be really hard or even impossible (especially for clonal species that resprout well and/or recolonize quickly). But shifting the composition and extent of encroachment is more feasible. They suggest using the RAD (resist, accept, direct) framework, and recognizing that a resist strategy may be too expensive in some cases (see Fig 3 for alternative options to consider). A focus on biodiversity, structural complexity, and feasibility of different management options (often using a mix of fire, grazing, and cutting, including herbicide in some cases) can help managers identify the best management options for their context. Thanks to Chris Helzer (one of the co-authors) for sending this my way, it sounds like it's spurred a lot of tough but important conversations.

de Castro Borba et al. 2026 looked at the vulnerability of the beautiful ipê trees (see above) to climate change, and found that:
1. The Pantanal is currently more suitable for purple ipê than yellow (Fig 2)
2. Under the most likely climate scenario (SSP2-4.5), the Pantanal will be much less suitable for purple ipê even by 2041-2060 (Fig 3, upper left panel, ignore the bottom 3 which won’t happen). As that happens, they predict that as it dies back and become spread out farther, it will be less connected and those lose access to relatively tolerant genes.
3. Yellow ipê will be roughly equally suitable (Fig 4, upper left panel) – some places a little better and some a little worse.
They didn’t look at corridors and seem pretty negative on the potential for purple ipê to adapt in the Pantanal.


FIRE MANAGEMENT:
Nunes et al. 2026 interviewed ranchers and traditional communities (mostly riverside fishers) spread all over the Pantanal about fire management during the 2019-2020 megafires. The finding that stuck out to me was that cattle ranchers are much more likely to report having handled fire management themselves (or w/ the help of neighbors) since they generally have more access to equipment and people w/ fire experience, while communities are more prone to report having asked for help from the government for fire management. Their multivariate model (table 2) didn't find significant differences from any variables other than social group (ranchers or traditional community members). But they ALSO note that based on observations during 2019-2020 fires, ranchers could be underreporting their reliance on government (wanting to emphasize their autonomy, and/or seeing government as negative despite potential support). Either way - collaboration and integrated fire management is likely to yield the best outcomes.


REFERENCES:
Curd, E. E., Hart, S. F. M., Lubkowitz, J., Tracy, K. M., Milazzo, L., Bodnar, M., Jones, T., Henderson, M. J., Emerson, P., & Dragon, J. A. (2026). Brown bullhead catfish melanoma represents a novel transmissible cancer. Nature, June 2025. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10828-6

de Castro Borba, F., de Souza Bezerra, C., Souza Tomaz, J., Marques, M. J., Vieira Capucho, H. L., Freitas-de-Souza, S., Ferreyra-Ramos, S. L., Lopes, R., Salvino Gadelha de Meneses, C. H., & Gomes-Lopes, M. T. (2026). A modeling framework to assess climate vulnerability and future distributions of tropical tree species: a case study on Brazilian ipês. Bosque (Valdivia), 47, e4709. https://doi.org/10.4206/bosque.e4709

Nippert, J. B., Ahlering, M. A., Fuhlendorf, S. D., Helzer, C. J., McMillan, N. A., & Ratajczak, Z. (2026). Rethinking grassland management in the Great Plains during the era of woody plant encroachment. BioScience, 76(6), 554–562. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biag033

Nunes, A. V., Chiaravalloti-Neto, F., Soresini, G., Lorenz, C., Semedo, T. B. F., Chiaravalloti, R. M., Libonati, R., Toma, T. S. P., Damasceno-Junior, G. A., Lucena, R. F. P., Tomas, W. M., Anderson, L. O., Magalhães, H. F., da Rosa Oliveira, M., Pereira, A. de M. M., Berlinck, C. N., Fernandes, G. W., & Roque, F. O. (2026). Institutional dependence and social inequalities as drivers of collaborative wildfire response networks in the Pantanal wetland. Journal of Pyrogeography, 100015. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pyro.2026.100015

Zhang, Z., Murray, N. J., Song, X. P., Bunting, P., Worthington, T. A., Fatoyinbo, L., Mao, D., Jia, M., Arifanti, V. B., Aung, T., Htay, S. S., & Friess, D. A. (2026). Unexpected expansion and regrowth in Earth’s mangrove forests over the past four decades. Science, 392(6802), 1082–1087. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aec9773

Sincerely,

Jon

P.s. The picture above is of a purple ipê tree as described in the paper by de Castro Borba et al. 2026

May 2026 science summary

Hi,

I'm pretty behind on even screening new research - if you have a favorite paper from the past few months please feel free to pitch it to me along with why it's worth covering! This month I've got a paper on an interesting ecological engineering approach to wetland restoration, one on causes of fire in the Gran Chaco, and one on interest among ranchers in the Brazilian Pantanal in sustainable certification.

Subscribe instructions - 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).

WETLAND RESTORATION:
Petrakis et al. 2026 uses satellite imagery to document the degradation and subsequent restoration of a spring-fed wetland in an arid part of New Mexico. It dried out after water diversion and use for irrigation in the 1940s, and from 2008-2015 a series of changes were made to increase water retention (the so-called "Zeedyk" approach named after the last author on the paper). This included plugging diversion ditches / channels, widening channels, and adding many small rock dams all of which allow for slower flow and more water retention and infiltration. They actually doubled the area of the original wetland via restoration. On the one hand, these structures would impede connectivity for aquatic organisms, but on the other so does the absence of water. I can see a case being made for these kinds of structures in ephemeral headwaters in particular.


FIRE / CHACO:
Baumann et al. 2026 look at 40 years of fire history in the Gran Chaco (2/3 of which burned in that time) to find key drivers. 70% of all fires originated from clearing habitat for agriculture (91% in Bolivia), followed by burning existing cropland or pastures (28%, 7% in Bolivia). Fire was most common when initially clearing land, followed by regular burning of pastures, whereas regular use of fire was uncommon for croplands. Drought led to fires burning almost 5% more land than in non-drought years, which was significant but much less than I expected. One reason is that as a dry ecosystem, fuel loads are low, especially after longer droughts or other fires. The authors note that "other fires" (not from clearing land or burning ag lands) still were often set by humans, and some fires classified as "other" still originated from pasture fires before extending into forests.

PANTANAL / CATTLE SUSTAINABILITY:
Nogueira et al. 2026 interviewed ranchers in the Pantanal about beliefs and interest in adopting a sustainable certification scheme. Interviewees felt a lot of pride and identity as Pantaneiros, their unique ability to ranch effectively, and their sustainability. This is fairly universal in similar research I’ve seen of ranchers across the Americas. The biggest driver of them being willing to try for sustainable certification is direct support (likely both technical and financial – they report sustainable practices are both difficult and expensive, despite ALSO believing they’re already sustainable). The second biggest driver is how open they say they are to new ideas of managing their property, followed by being familiar with FPS (the certification scheme in question). Recognition of Pantaneiro culture had the smallest impact on intention to adopt of the four factors that helped to some degree. Belief that the government does not currently support sustainable cattle ranching was the biggest predictor of opposition to adopting sustainable certification.


REFERENCES:
Baumann, M., Maillard, O., Gasparri, I., Burton, J., Gavier Pizarro, G., & Kuemmerle, T. (2026). Fire dynamics in the South American Chaco and their link to agriculture and drought. Nature Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-026-01793-z

Nogueira, D. G., de Olivera Roque, F., Borges, J. A. R., Tomas, W. M., Mills, M., Jagadish, A., Nunes, A. V., Leimgruber, P., Legh‐Smith, C., Marchini, S., & Morais Chiaravalloti, R. (2026). What Drives Conservation Adoption? Social Science Insights from Cattle Ranchers in the Pantanal Wetland, Brazil. Conservation Letters, 19(2), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1111/con4.70033

Petrakis, R. E., Norman, L. M., McGraw, M., Carson, S., Sponholtz, C., Weber, C., & Zeedyk, W. D. (2026). Regreening, restoring, and reconnecting a southwestern wetland ecosystem – the Zeedyk wetland. Remote Sensing Applications: Society and Environment, 42(November 2025), 101964. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rsase.2026.101964


Sincerely,

Jon

P.s. The adorable chunky puppy in the photo is Thor - until very recently he was one of almost 100 puppies currently available for adoption via Homeward Trails in addition to many quality adult dogs (already potty trained and no surprises about their eventual personality). He has been snapped up but as I write this his similar brother Loki and sister Freyja are somehow still up for grabs! This pic was taken at a puppy party I volunteered at which both raises funds for the shelter and helps pups find homes.

April 2026 science summary

Hello there,

This month I've got two articles about moisture cycling and water security, and one on predicted climate change and wildfire intensity 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 unless the link breaks again).

GLOBAL WATER SECURITY:
Posada-Marín et al. 2024 is an interesting take on water security, arguing that since 40% of originates on land (upwind, potentially out of the hydrologic basin), accounting for that reveals more vulnerabilities (Fig 3) and risks to water security (Fig 5). Some of the results in Fig 5 don't look right to me, like the Paraná seems to have the same hazard for upstream vs. upwind approach, the vulnerability goes down from an upwind perspective (to middle), but Fig 5 says its risk is very high and unchanged. But despite that, the core idea is important: without accounting for where precipitation comes from, water security cannot be assured.


PANTANAL:
In a local example of what the paper above found, Bergier et al. 2018 shows that because much of the rain that falls in the Pantanal originates via trees transpiring moisture in the Amazon, continued Amazonian deforestation could lead to a 30% decrease in rain by 2100 (relative to 1961-1990, Table 2). Their estimate of reduced "precipitable water" of 25% was a hand-wave though: they arbitrarily picked a number that was more conservative than Boers et al. 2017 (which found losing 30-50% of the forest would decrease rain in the remaining forest by 40%). In better news, they found a 3C temperature increase would only drop rainfall by 1%.

Under the most likely SSP2-4.5 climate change scenario, Neto et al. 2026 predict that extreme heat days (where daily max temp >the 90th percentile) in the Pantanal will increase from an average of 36.5 days over the last 30 years to 85.8 from 2030-2060 (a 135% increase ). And days experiencing heatwaves (six or more consecutive days of extreme heat) will increase from the recent average of 8.8 to 50.7 under SSP2-4.5 (a rise from ~1 heatwave per year to ~5-6). This in turn is likely to drive increased wildfire intensity. Fig. 9 shows the spatial pattern of warming by season (a=summer, b=fall, c=winter, and d= spring when the biggest increase is seen).


REFERENCES:
Bergier, I., Assine, M. L., McGlue, M. M., Alho, C. J. R., Silva, A., Guerreiro, R. L., & Carvalho, J. C. (2018). Amazon rainforest modulation of water security in the Pantanal wetland. Science of The Total Environment, 619–620, 1116–1125. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2017.11.163

Neto, J. B. F., Shen, S., de Cássia Ramos, R., & Pereira, G. (2026). Towards a new climate regime: heatwaves proliferate and reshape seasonality in the world’s largest tropical wetland. Bulletin of Atmospheric Science and Technology, 7(1), 5. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42865-026-00122-8

Posada-Marín, J., Salazar, J., Rulli, M. C., Wang-Erlandsson, L., & Jaramillo, F. (2024). Upwind moisture supply increases risk to water security. Nature Water. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-024-00291-w


Sincerely,

Jon

P.s. If you look closely at the image above, you can see a big alligator chilling on the riverbank behind me. She was unconcerned by our kayaks though.

March 2026 science summary

Greetings,

Apologies for the double email last month! Hopefully the new platform will work right from here on. I've got one interesting global paper on how much freshwater we're pumping out to sea, and three on fire in the Pantanal and Brazil.

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

FRESHWATER:
Chandanpurkar et al. 2025 found that all continents except Antarctica have undergone drying (decreasing water stored on land) from 2002-2024 (although Figs 1 and 5 makes that hard to see in some cases, especially tropical Africa). They expect that trend to continue. Wet areas have gotten wetter but shrunk, while dry areas have expanded (and are drying faster than wet areas are getting wetter). Groundwater depletion caused 68% of the decrease, with the remainder a mix of ice and permafrost melt in Canada, and droughts in Central America and Europe. Another scary finding: water loss from continents is causing 44% of global sea level rise, more than either Greenland (37%) or Antarctica (19%). The lower-right map in Fig 3A shows how much dryer 2019-2024 in particular have been. There's a great news article and map about this here: https://www.propublica.org/article/water-aquifers-groundwate...


FIRE IN THE PANTANAL:
Concone et al 2026 found that two years after the 2020 megafires in the Pantanal, mammal diversity had been cut in half in the park they studied (see figs 2b and c), and abundance was reduced for at least 6 spp including capybara and giant armadillos (fig 4a). They found a combo of camera traps and eDNA was important to count all species (see fig 2a). 9 spp which typically favor drier and more open habitats were only found post-fire; the authors expect that to be temporary but since extreme fires have reoccurred they may have stuck around.

Whitney et al. 2026 looks at fire history in the Pantanal split by habitat type, using a mix of charcoal and diatom composition in lake sediment cores going back 3500 years, and satellite data from the last 20. In recent years, climate moisture index is the best predictor of fire, with maximum river depth during seasonal floods being an important variable. Fig 4 shows how the long-term fire trend differs for 5 habitat types. They note that the last 400 years had been getting more rain; while they don't discuss it, cattle ranching (along with fire to clear land) was introduced about 300 years ago and the wet period may have helped to contain the fires until the drying trend from the last 2 decades or so. Upland savannas are expected to see the biggest increase in fire as drying continues (based on historic data), with seasonally-dry tropical forest the least susceptible to increased fire.

Guedes et al.2026 looked at exposure of fish in temporary wetlands to fire across Brazil. They found over 1/4 of all temporary wetlands burned, including 34% of the wetlands in protected areas. In the Pantanal all protected temporary wetlands burned and 68% of the unprotected ones burned. They note that in the dry season that fewer connections between wetlands exist for fish to escape to, and that eggs buried in soil can be killed when fires burn surrounding areas.


REFERENCES:
Chandanpurkar, H. A., Famiglietti, J. S., Gopalan, K., Wiese, D. N., Wada, Y., Kakinuma, K., Reager, J. T., & Zhang, F. (2025). Unprecedented continental drying, shrinking freshwater availability, and increasing land contributions to sea level rise. Science Advances, 11(30), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adx0298

Concone, H. V. B., Magioli, M., Hilário, H. O., Semedo, T. B. F., Moreno, W. H. A., Saranholi, B. H., Ferreira, M. D. R., Batista, E. K. L., Botelho, M. T. de A., Lima, L. H. A., & Berlinck, C. N. (2026). Smoke on the water: Pervasive effects of megafires on the mammal fauna of the world’s largest wetland. Journal of Applied Ecology, 63(1), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2664.70268

Guedes, G. H. S., & Araújo, F. G. (2026). Water and fire: Wildfires threaten fish habitats across Brazilian biomes, and protected areas offer insufficient safeguards. Biological Conservation, 315(November 2025), 111692. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2025.111692

Whitney, B. S., Neves, D. M., Loughlin, N. J. D., D’Apolito, C., Carla, C. T., Hocking, E. P., Mayle, F. E., Power, M. J., Silva Aguinaldo, & Assine, M. L. (2026). Millennial-scale fire and climate dynamics in the world’s largest tropical wetland show emerging fire threat to flooded ecosystems. Global and Planetary Change, 259(April), 105318. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloplacha.2026.105318

Sincerely,

Jon

P.s. These are some baby bunnies rescued from a neighbor's window well

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.

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

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 :)

November 2024 science summary

Howdy,

I've got summaries of articles on carbon credits, wetlands and climate mitigation, and the Pantanal (drought, fire, and habitat loss).

But first - two quick notes on the use of artificial intelligence (AI):

1. When I mention AI tools I should say this every time: a) assume that any information you put into an AI may be shared in ways you don't want, so never put in sensitive / non-public information. b) that also means be wary of putting in copyrighted materials! Some publishers like Elsevier and New York Times have a blanket ban on using their publications in AI tools, and others allow some uses but not others!
2. I'm continuing to find Elicit a really helpful tool to find and summarize or extract info from science papers. If you have questions or want to chat about it let me know. If you register for a free account I can send you links to my custom notebooks to show how some cool features work.

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).

CARBON CREDITS
Trencher et al, 2024 is an analysis of the quality of credits on the voluntary carbon market. They focus on the 20 companies retiring the most credits between 2020-2023 (134 million metric tons CO2e), which is 20% of all global retirements on the three registries (see Fig 1 for company list). They found 87% of credits have a high risk of not providing real additional reductions (6% were low risk, most of the rest was medium), and 97% of credits focused on avoiding emissions rather than removal. Note that they classified all REDD+ (reducing deforestation and/or degradation) as high risk given that they have often 1) overestimated additionality, 2) not stopped deforestation, and/or 3) displaced deforestation elsewhere (aka 'leakage'). They also classify large-scale renewable energy as high-risk, since the price of credits is not typically the decisive factor in those projects (they are often built w/ or w/o credits) and they are often build in countries w strong government support for renewable energy. They also found that companies strongly prefer the cheapest credits (which creates demand for lower-quality offsets) often from older projects, although some companies have paid a lot more for REDD projects. The authors call for more regulation of the voluntary market, and for companies not using voluntary credits to support claims of offsetting emissions.

Blanchard et al. 2024 is a short opinion piece arguing that to fund nature conservation, we should pivot from an "offset" model (where companies buy credits to support assertions of lower net emissions and/or being carbon neutral) to a "contributions" model (where the financial contributions are recognized, but not taken as equivalent to reducing gross emissions). The authors say that 1) all entities should prioritize their own direct emissions reduction before seeking to pay others to do that, 2) we need to use the best science to pick what investments are most likely to lead to durable climate mitigation (considering reversibility, other GHGs, albedo, etc.), and 3) independent scientists should audit any quantitative claims made about the benefits of contributions to climate mitigation.


WETLANDS AND CLIMATE CHANGE MITIGATION
Arias-Ortiz et al. 2024 estimate how much methane different kinds of marshes in the U.S. emit each year. They found that warm freshwater marshes (>25.6C mean annual high temperature) produce the most methane by far (172 g CH4/m2/yr = 48.2 t CO2e / yr), followed by other freshwater marshes at low or medium elevation (producing ~1/3 that on average). Across all marshes the average is much lower (26 g CH4/m2/yr = 7.3 t CO2e / yr), and saltier marshes emit less methane. They report mangroves emit roughly twice as much methane flux as marshes, but seagrasses only emit 10% as much as marshes. Predicted methane was really close to measured methane (at least once they calibrated their estimates)


PANTANAL:
Marengo et al. 2021 is a review of the severe drought in the Pantanal in 2019 and 2020. The key direct cause was less warm humid air coming from Amazonia leading to much less rain across the Paraguay river basin, which in turn led to very low water levels in rivers and other wetlands, which reduced shipping goods by river (and economic losses) and enabled widespread fires. Previous studies looking at Pantanal rainfall trends have found only a small overall decrease but with a lot more variation each year. There are more days with no rain, the dry season has gotten drier, the Ládario river has been dropping ~3 cm / yr for 30 years, but the flooding in 2018 was unusually extensive. Part of the issue may be that the Pantanal has been relatively wet since roughly 1970, making a return to severe droughts that have not been seen for decades feel more unusual (see Fig 3). El Niño does not seem to be a driver of drought, nor do various climatic indices correlate well w/ drought years. But in 2019-2020 a strong South Atlantic Convergence Zone caused a shift in dominant winds to the Pantanal coming from drier and colder higher-latitude air.

Guerra et al. 2020 looked at the drivers of predicted habitat conversion in the Upper Paraguay River Basin (including the Pantanal, some of the Cerrado, and a bit of the Amazon) between 2008-2016 (broken into four 2-year periods). Key drivers in the Pantanal were unprotected status and existing land cover, with much weaker impact from elevation (higher means more loss), and in half the time periods there was also an influence of distance to roads (closer means more loss) and cattle (presence leading to more loss). Oddly there was LESS conversion near annual cropland which is very unusual except in dense fully converted ag landscapes. They only saw more habitat loss on land with good ag potential near rivers in the Pantanal from 2010-2012, which could be related to cropland moving closer to water due to the 2012 drought. Note that this model assumes deforestation expands from where it has already happened, rather than modeling other factors (economic, population modeling, commodity prices, planned roads, etc.) to look for what might change in the future.

Martins et al. 2024 recommend priority areas for fire prevention and/or restoration in the Upper Paraguay River Basin, based on the number of fire-sensitive species present (along w/ factors like fire frequency and intensity, dry biomass, and time since the last burn). The relatively few top priority areas for fire management are in red on Fig 2, and occur in a triangle roughly between Paiaguás, Aquidauana, and Bodoquena. There are many more areas flagged as a priority for restoration, but their top focus is 1,206 km2 of forest high in both resilience and sensitive species. But they also note ~6,000 km2 of potential restoration priorities that hadn't been burnt until recently (2019-2022, Fig 5). The supplement also maps the most important places for fire prevention (Supplementary Fig 15).


REFERENCES:

Arias-Ortiz, A., Wolfe, J., Bridgham, S. D., Knox, S., McNicol, G., Needelman, B. A., Shahan, J., Stuart-Haëntjens, E. J., Windham-Myers, L., Oikawa, P. Y., Baldocchi, D. D., Caplan, J. S., Capooci, M., Czapla, K. M., Derby, R. K., Diefenderfer, H. L., Forbrich, I., Groseclose, G., Keller, J. K., … Holmquist, J. R. (2024). Methane fluxes in tidal marshes of the conterminous United States. Global Change Biology, 30(9). https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.17462

Blanchard, L., Haya, B. K., Anderson, C., Badgley, G., Cullenward, D., Gao, P., Goulden, M. L., Holm, J. A., Novick, K. A., Trugman, A. T., Wang, J. A., Williams, C. A., Wu, C., Yang, L., & Anderegg, W. R. L. (2024). Funding forests’ climate potential without carbon offsets. One Earth, 7(7), 1147–1150. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2024.06.006

Guerra, A., Roque, F. de O., Garcia, L. C., Ochao-Quintero, J. M. O., Oliveira, P. T. S. de, Guariento, R. D., & Rosa, I. M. D. (2020). Drivers and projections of vegetation loss in the Pantanal and surrounding ecosystems. Land Use Policy, 91(April 2020). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2019.104388

Martins, P. I., Belém, L. B. C., Peluso, L. M., Szabo, J. K., Trindade, W. C. F., Pott, A., Junior, G. A. D., Jimenez, D., Marques, R., Peterson, A. T., Libonati, R., & Garcia, L. C. (2024). Fire-sensitive and threatened plants in the Upper Paraguay River Basin, Brazil: Identifying priority areas for Integrated Fire Management and ecological restoration. Ecological Engineering, 209(1), 107411. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoleng.2024.107411

Marengo, J. A., Cunha, A. P., Cuartas, L. A., Deusdará Leal, K. R., Broedel, E., Seluchi, M. E., Michelin, C. M., De Praga Baião, C. F., Chuchón Angulo, E., Almeida, E. K., Kazmierczak, M. L., Mateus, N. P. A., Silva, R. C., & Bender, F. (2021). Extreme Drought in the Brazilian Pantanal in 2019–2020: Characterization, Causes, and Impacts. Frontiers in Water, 3(February). https://doi.org/10.3389/frwa.2021.639204

Trencher, G., Nick, S., Carlson, J., & Johnson, M. (2024). Demand for low-quality offsets by major companies undermines climate integrity of the voluntary carbon market. Nature Communications, 15(1), 6863. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-51151-w

Sincerely,
 
Jon
 
p.s. these are jack o' lantern vegan quesadillas from our Halloween party

August Science Summary (fire in the Pantanal)

Hi,

This month I'm focusing on a single issue (fire in the Pantanal) but also advertising a new preprint I'm an author on. Fires in the Pantanal this June broke the record for that month (we have records of about 20 years) so it seemed timely!

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). Unsubscribe via the link at the end.

RAPID EVIDENCE ASSESSMENTS (REA):
I'm an author on a new preprint (not yet peer-reviewed) about rapidly assessing evidence in conservation (Schofield et al. 202X). It's the conclusions of a working group hosted by EPA which met over several online workshops to try and build consensus for a definition and approach since there are many competing ones out there. "Rapid" in this case is relative to systematic reviews - it doesn't mean doing the kind of informal scan of science literature that is pretty common at NGOs. We argue that it's important to balance speed w/ rigor to avoid either wasting effort on unnecessary detail or arriving at the wrong answer by rushing. The definition kind of hits the high points of the topics the paper covers: "REA is a structured review process that aims to maximize rigor and objectivity given assessment needs and resource constraints (e.g., time). REA aims to address requirements for timely and cost-efficient decision-making while maintaining confidence in conclusions. REA is typically more rigorous than less formalized practices such as traditional narrative literature reviews, but effort is reduced relative to comprehensive evidence assessment approaches such as systematic review. REA is transparent, well-documented, and the details of the specific methods used at each step are justified. Those who commission, conduct, and use REAs should be cognizant of the achievable levels of confidence in the conclusions that accompany the rapid application of different steps in the REA process." Let me know if you have questions, criticisms, ideas, etc. https://osf.io/u7z2g


FIRE IN THE PANTANAL:
Damasceno-Junior et al. 2023 covers flood and fire dynamics in the Pantanal and the need for integrated fire management (IFM), using the 2020 wildfires as a case study. The Pantanal burns the most in the dry season (Aug-Oct, Fig 5). From 2003-2019, ~5-15% of the biome burned each year (Fig 7); roughly half never burned and of the areas that did almost all burned no more than 4 times over 16 years (Fig 6In 2020 about 30% burned! It was a very dry year (the bottom ~5% over the last 120 years, and the worst in 47 years), but not the dryest on record (Fig 3). The drought allowed the fire to spread via soil as well as above ground. The authors believe that despite being the most severe fire on record, similar fires likely happened in past droughts. Note that cattle can both drive wildfire (by setting fires to clear vegetation) and reduce it (by reducing biomass available to burn). Key recommendations include: 1) better integration of information and decision makers (including between Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul; they worked together but not enough), 2) mobilization of additional people (federal natural resource staff, local police and firefighters, private fire brigades, NGOs, volunteers, etc.), 3) inclusion of Pantanal residents w/ traditional knowledge, 4) more research on the interaction of fire and floods in the Pantanal, 5) better fire forecasting and better communication about those risks (including to land managers who set fires).

Garcia et al. 2021 is an overview of fire in the Pantanal, and a call for an integrated fire management (IFM) program in the Pantanal. Water moves slowly through the Pantanal; it takes 3 months for rainfall in the watershed to reach the southern Pantanal via the Paraguay river. This means that near Corumbá typically there is flooding during the dry season (preventing fires in the floodplain), and water levels are lowest in December (after the rainy season has begun). But the 2020 wet season had 60% less rain than normal. That meant dead vegetation from 2019's flood combined w/ a lack of flooding provides fuel for wildfires. 43% of the area that burned in 2020 hadn't burned before since records began in 2003 (areas in gray in Fig 1). They noted that fire management in 2020 was hampered by COVID-19 (fewer firefighters were available, and had to socially distance from each other). Climate change is expected to bring more drought years, exacerbated by deforestation in the neighboring Amazon and Cerrado. The authors call for removing invasive African grasses (like Urochloa / Brachiaria) and note a 2021 IFM plan actually incentivizes planting cultivated grass. They also recommend more prescribed burns in the wet season, safe fire training for ranch workers, more funding for fire prevention, better warning systems, and increasing the participation of Indigenous people in fire brigades.

Pivello et al. 2021 is a good comprehensive overview of wildfire across Brazil. It's long and dense so hard to summarize! Natural fires are most common at the beginning of the wet season when lightning ignites accumulated dry vegetation. Fig 1 has an overview of fire by biome: the Amazon followed by Cerrado have the most fires; the Pantanal and Cerrado typically have the highest % burned (they are both fire-dependent, as is the Pampas, see Fig 2), and in 2020 the Pantanal had roughly triple the % burned and fire density as others. Pollen evidence (from a different study, Power et al. 2016) indicates fire activity in the Pantanal peaked about 12,000 years ago (people have only lived there for about 8,000 years, and grazed cattle for ~250). Introducing cattle has caused a shift from burning every 3-6 years (mostly in the beginning or sometimes end of the wet season) to burning every year or two during a relatively dry part of the wet season (see Fig 6). Conversely, fire suppresion in the Cerrado has also driven woody encroachment of savannas. In the Amazon and Atlantic Forest, natural fire is rare and very infrequent, making fire especially harmful as species are not adapted to it. The combination of deforestation and drought make it much easier for fire to spread (and Amazonian deforestation means more drought in the Pantanal). 1/3 of the forest in the Amazon from 2003-2019 were associated w/ deforestation. Indigenous people mostly used fires in small areas, but since European colonization it's used at larger scales to clear land permanently (or alternately supressed, see Fig 7 for a nice timeline of fire landmarks). Integrated fire management (IFM) is uncommon (except a few federal protected areas, mostly in the Cerrado). Only Minas Gerais and Roraima states have IFM laws. The authors recommend: 1) fire management policy should include climate mitigation and poverty reduction to reduce fire risk; 2) better fire monitoring and management systems; 3) filling knowledge gaps around drivers of fire, how fire impacts wetlands, human dimensions of fire, impacts of different fire regimes on grazing productivity and carbon; 4) better enforcement of illegal fire use (including more resources); 5) including local communities in developing fire management plans, and 6) national and state level fire policies with adequate resources for implementation (including data collection and sharing, and clear and simple rules about fire use).

Oliveira et al. 2021 looks at the impact of Indigenous fire brigades in the Kadiwéu Indigenous territory (where the Cerrado meets the Pantanal). They compared 2001-2008 (no Indigenous fire brigades) to years when they were active (2009-2018; the first 5 years they tried to suppress all fires and the last 5 they used integrated fire management). While a before/after study isn't a true control, the years w/ the fire brigades had 53% less area burned, the area that burned often (70% of the years in each period) declined by 84%, and areas with no fire increased by 86% (note the % reported in the text doesn't match the number of acres, I'm using the latter). Interestingly the number of days without rain affected the area burned w/o the brigades, but when the brigades were active climatic factors had much less influence. The authors note that the reduced fire frequency allowed forests to expand and grasslands to shrink; it wasn't clear which was their more natural historic state.

Arrua et al. 2023 asked how fire frequency and severity affected sun spiders in the Kadiwéu Indigenous Reserve. They considered fire every 1-2 years frequent, w/ every 3-4 years infrequent. Spider abundance was not significantly affected by fire frequency or timing, but the most spiders were seen 1 month after a fire (perhaps b/c of bugs that like young leaves eating the new shoots).

dos Santos Ferreira et al. 2023 found that patchy and variable fire regimes (but avoiding high fire frequency from July to December) leads to flowers and fruits being continuously available in the Kadiwéu Indigenous territory . They recommend a seasonal patch-burning mosaic without trying explicit to optimize flower and fruit production.


REFERENCES:
Arrua, B. A., Carvalho, L. S., Teles, T. S., Oliveira, M. da R., & Ribeiro, D. B. (2023). Fire Has a Positive Effect on the Abundance of Sun Spiders (Arachnida: Solifugae) in the Cerrado-Pantanal Ecotone. Fire, 6(2), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.3390/fire6020069

Damasceno-Junior, G. A., Roque, F. de O., Garcia, L. C., Ribeiro, D. B., Tomas, W. M., Scremin-Dias, E., Dias, F. A., Libonati, R., Rodrigues, J. A., Lemos, F., Santos, M., Pereira, A. de M. M., de Souza, E. B., Reis, L. K., da Rosa Oliveira, M., Souza, A. H. de A., Manrique-Pineda, D. A., Ferreira, B. H. dos S., Bortolotto, I. M., & Pott, A. (2021). Wetland Science. In B. A. K. Prusty, R. Chandra, & P. A. Azeez (Eds.), Wetland Science & Practice (Vol. 38, Issue 2). Springer India. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-3715-0

dos Santos Ferreira, B. H., da Rosa Oliveira, M., Mariano Fernandes, R. A., Fujizawa Nacagava, V. A., Arguelho, B. A., Ribeiro, D. B., Pott, A., Damasceno Junior, G. A., & Garcia, L. C. (2023). Flowering and fruiting show phenological complementarity in both trees and non-trees in mosaic-burnt floodable savanna. Journal of Environmental Management, 337(February), 117665. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2023.117665

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

Oliveira, M. R., Ferreira, B. H. S., Souza, E. B., Lopes, A. A., Bolzan, F. P., Roque, F. O., Pott, A., Pereira, A. M. M., Garcia, L. C., Damasceno, G. A., Costa, A., Rocha, M., Xavier, S., Ferraz, R. A., & Ribeiro, D. B. (2022). Indigenous brigades change the spatial patterns of wildfires, and the influence of climate on fire regimes. Journal of Applied Ecology, 59(5), 1279–1290. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2664.14139

Pivello, V. R., Vieira, I., Christianini, A. V., Ribeiro, D. B., da Silva Menezes, L., Berlinck, C. N., Melo, F. P. L., Marengo, J. A., Tornquist, C. G., Tomas, W. M., & Overbeck, G. E. (2021). Understanding Brazil’s catastrophic fires: Causes, consequences and policy needed to prevent future tragedies. Perspectives in Ecology and Conservation, 19(3), 233–255. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pecon.2021.06.005

Power, M. J., Whitney, B. S., Mayle, F. E., Neves, D. M., de Boer, E. J., & Maclean, K. S. (2016). Fire, climate and vegetation linkages in the bolivian chiquitano seasonally dry tropical forest. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 371(1696). https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0165


Sincerely,
 
Jon
 
p.s. The picture above is a sunset at Cape May National Wildlife Refuge

July 2024 science summary

Hello,

I've just got two science articles this month, but also wanted a plug a book I found really interesting: The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle. There's not a lot of brand new content - he draws heavily on concepts of psychological safety and vulnerability (see Amy Edmondson), learning from failure, how to give effective feedback, ways to generate candor and tough love, making space for feedback, etc.

The reason this one stuck w/ me is that he has pretty compelling real world examples of organizations and leaders that embody some of the recommendations. One of his suggestions was also new to me and really resonates: "resist the temptation to reflexively add value." I've thought before about 1) whether or not my review or input can make something better and how much, and 2) whether I'd add enough value for it to be worth my time. But he notes that 3) every time you weigh in on something, you're missing a chance to express trust in the author and build their confidence that they don't NEED your input for it to be good enough. I'm still grappling with how to put this into practice, but the book is a fast read and I recommend it.

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).


MAMMALS:
Greenspoon et. al 2023 is an attempt to estimate the biomass of all wild mammals on earth (combined), arriving at 60 Mt total: 20 Mt (million metric tons) on land (half from "even-hoofed" mammals, see FIg 2), and 40 Mt in oceans (23 Mt of which comes from baleen whales). But the kicker is that they estimate human biomass at 390 Mt, and livestock biomass at 630 Mt (420 Mt from cattle: which is more than all humans plus all wild land mammals). Fig 4 awkwardly tries to compare all mammal biomass on earth, showing how wild species have been squeezed. The wild mammal estimates mostly come from the IUCN red list which skews towards expert assessments of more threatened spp., and the numbers won't be "right" for several reasons (these estimates are hard, and the data are highly limiting). But it seems solid that humans and livestock substantially outweigh wild mammals.
There's a good critique of the paper (arguing that Greenspoon et al. underestimate biomass by a factor of 5.5) by Santini et al. here https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2308958121 and a reply from the Greenspoon authors pointing out why the methods used in the critique are also (differently) flawed: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2316314121


PANTANAL / CATTLE RANCHING:
Junk and da Cunha 2012 argue that when ranchers clear trees and shrubs from grazing lands, that should not be equated with deforestation. They note that from the perspective of ranchers, all trees and shrubs within pastures (whether native or not) are "invasive species." It's unusual to use that language to describe the regeneration of trees in what used to be forest (as of ~250 years ago before cattle were introduced) but makes sense from the perspective of someone trying to keep land suitable for cattle (and they note the land was managed for thousands of years to promote other wild game species, making parts of the Pantanal a cultural landscape). Table 1 lists their recommended methods to clear some of the more common woody species. They also discuss how starting in the 1980s, money from a gold rush was used to drive higher-density cattle ranching using African grass species.


REFERENCES:
Greenspoon, L., Krieger, E., Sender, R., Rosenberg, Y., Bar-On, Y. M., Moran, U., Antman, T., Meiri, S., Roll, U., Noor, E., & Milo, R. (2023). The global biomass of wild mammals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(10), 2017. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2204892120

REPLY AND COUNTER-REPLY TO GREENSPOON:

• Santini, L., Berzaghi, F., & Benítez-López, A. (2024). Total population reports are ill-suited for global biomass estimation of wild animals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 121(4), 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2308958121   
• Greenspoon, L., Rosenberg, Y., Meiri, S., Roll, U., Noor, E., & Milo, R. (2024). Reply to Santini et al.: Total population reports are necessary for global biomass estimation of wild mammals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 121(4), 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2316314121

    
Junk, W. J., & Nunes da Cunha, C. (2012). Pasture clearing from invasive woody plants in the Pantanal: a tool for sustainable management or environmental destruction? Wetlands Ecology and Management, 20(2), 111–122. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11273-011-9246-y



Sincerely,
 
Jon
 
p.s. This is a baby rabbit nibbling a weed in my garden. We had a nest of even tinier ones born more recently, but this guy was the cutest of them all.