December 2025 Science Summary

Greetings,

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

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

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).


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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

Sincerely,
 
Jon

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.

February 2020 science journal article summary

Greetings,

This month is a mix of topics; some papers came out recently that were too cool for me to wait to review with other similar ones, and I couldn't resist plugging the latest paper I worked on (Hamel et al. 2020). If you know someone who wants to sign up to receive these summaries, they can do so at http://bit.ly/sciencejon

Also, a 12-minute video came out recently about the 2017 March for Science, and I show up in it a few times. It's called "SciComm: Raising Our Voice for Science and Public Policy," it's directed & produced by Larry Kirkman (larry@american.edu) and Shannon Shikles at the Center for Environmental Filmmaking at American University, and you can watch it here: https://vimeo.com/383209723


CLIMATE CHANGE:
Sippel et al. 2020 bucks the pattern where climatologists emphasize how distinct climate and weather are. Past research has shown the impact of climate change on certain weather events, but this paper actually detects the impact of climate change on any given day since late March 2012! By summarizing weather data all over the world, they found that we’ve been clearly outside of natural variability for the past 8 years on a daily basis. On a monthly basis, climate change has been detectable from global weather data since 2001. You can read a newspaper article about the paper at https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/01/02/signal-human-caused-climate-change-has-emerged-every-day-weather-study-finds/  I love the description of this paper from meteorologist Maria LaRosa: “[it’s] like looking closely at an impressionist painting –  you can't say what the picture is until you step back and look at the whole”


ECOSYSTEM SERVICES:
Chaplin-Kramer et al. 2019 produced global maps summarizing ecosystem services (sort of) for coastal protection, water quality regulation, and crop pollination, now and in 2050 (under three different scenarios). One twist is that they go beyond the usual definition of ecosystem services (benefits provided by nature and received by people who need them) to also look at the 'benefit gap' where there are people with needs nature is not currently meeting (see Fig 2, bottom row, pink / lavender color). There's a lot to explore here, but one finding is that both SE Asia and Africa are expected to have increasing gaps for all three services. There's plenty of uncertainty, but this is a great set of data to think about trade-offs under different future paths. You can explore their results in a web map at http://viz.naturalcapitalproject.org/ipbes/

Johnson et al. 2019 analyzed where it makes economic sense to protect undeveloped land within 100-year floodplains across the U.S. They compared  expected flood damages (over the next 30-50 years) to land acquisition cost (to prevent development and avoid damages). They found benefits exceeded acquisition cost for about 1/3 of unprotected natural areas, and that the strongest benefits were within the 20-year floodplain but outside of the 5-year floodplain. Compared to the 5-year floodplain, these areas are more likely to get developed even though they flood less often, leading to more potential damages. Figure 3 has a map of the counties with the highest benefit:cost ratio, focused in Appalalachia, Arizona, and a mix of other places. Note that buying undeveloped lands avoids the controversy associated with asking or forcing people already living within floodplains to move.

Brancalion et al. 2019 looks at opportunities to restore lowland tropical rainforests around the world. They evaluate both the benefits (including biodiversity, climate mitigation & adaptation, and water security) and feasibility (land opportunity cost, ecological uncertainty, and chance of forest persistence). Figure 2 shows where there's the most opportunity, both by area (Brazil) and by combined benefit and feasibility (Madagascar, Tropical Andes). Where to focus depends on your goal - the places with the most total benefits are generally less feasible (higher land costs and competition, e.g. areas where habitat loss is recent and ongoing). But Figure 3 shows several examples of countries with restoration commitments who appear to have large areas with relatively high benefits and feasibility.


LANDSCAPE ECOLOGY:
Fahrig 2017 & Fahrig et al. 2019 are challenging but important reviews on the ecological impact of habitat fragmentation at the landscape scale (big areas). Their key findings are that with the amount of habitat loss being equal, fragmentation per se typically (70% of the time) didn't significantly impact biodiversity or ecological function at all. Even stranger, when it did have a significant impact, 3/4 of the time it was positive (even for threatened and rare species)! Section 5 in the 2017 paper summarizes the different explanations that authors of the primary studies provided, from fragmentation boosting functional connectivity (by reducing distance between patches) to edge effects and others. She concludes that in most cases we confound habitat loss with fragmentation, and that most of the time our intuition (that fragmentation per se is bad) is incorrect. She also notes that authors sometimes bury or caveat their findings of positive effects of fragmentation, which is one reason her findings continue to seem so wrong. My key take-aways are: 1) it's very hard (but very important) to examine our biases and deeply held beliefs when reading contrary science, 2) there is a good case made in the 2019 paper that small patches are under-protected, given their importance in many landscapes.

Jones et al. 2019 used GPS collars to track both migratory and resident pronghorn, and to model what features they avoided and which they ignored. They found that pronghorn were very reluctant to cross fences (consistent with under studies - they tend to crawl under rather than jump over), and avoided roads, but mostly ignored oil and gas well pads. There's a lot of other findings in their model, but the one I found most interesting was the concern that if ranches add more fencing to allow rotational grazing, it could have serious negative impacts on pronghorn and  mule deer unless wildlife-friendly fences are used.


RESEARCH IMPACT:
Hamel et al. looks at how scientific information was perceived and used in decision making for a water fund in Brazil. Through interviews, we determined that the hydrological modeling and monitoring data was NOT used in designing and implementing the water fund. But counter-intuitively, having done the analysis using complex models and high-resolution data was seen as important for the water fund to be seen as scientifically credible. So ironically, even though the credible models were not actually used, their existence helped build support for the overall water fund. Despite this, as long as monitoring data was used to calibrate and validate the model, a simpler model (InVEST, as opposed to SWAT) and coarser data resolution (30m, as opposed to 1m) would have met the information needs of the users. We should have had more frank discussions up front with the ultimate users of the information to produce a model seen as credible and actually used, while avoiding over-investment in model complexity that wasn't needed.

Samanta et al. 2019 is a paper about a program in Michigan to improve water quality issues from agriculture via a really well thought out collaboration (w/ scientists, practitioners, universities, farmers, and industry). Lack of public funding has pushed many farmers to rely on private crop advisors, who don't always share conservation opportunities (like cover crops, reduced tillage, and nutrient management) with farmers (especially as tied to programs involving lots of paperwork). They found it was critical to improve active communication & trust at all levels (especially about funding available).  Conservation was constrained by funding, and potentially by the shift of crop advisors to often be less comprehensive and represent a single company. The authors emphasize the need to integrate social science like this from the very beginning of projects.


REFERENCES:
Brancalion, P. H. S., Niamir, A., Broadbent, E., Crouzeilles, R., Barros, F. S. M., Almeyda Zambrano, A. M., … Chazdon, R. L. (2019). Global restoration opportunities in tropical rainforest landscapes. Science Advances, 5(7), eaav3223. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aav3223

Chaplin-Kramer, R., Sharp, R. P., Weil, C., Bennett, E. M., Pascual, U., Arkema, K. K., … Daily, G. C. (2019). Global modeling of nature’s contributions to people. Science, 366(6462), 255–258. https://doi.org/10.1126/SCIENCE.AAW3372

Fahrig, L. (2017). Ecological Responses to Habitat Fragmentation Per Se. Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, 48(1), annurev-ecolsys-110316-022612. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-ecolsys-110316-022612

Fahrig, L., Arroyo-Rodríguez, V., Bennett, J. R., Boucher-Lalonde, V., Cazetta, E., Currie, D. J., … Watling, J. I. (2019). Is habitat fragmentation bad for biodiversity? Biological Conservation, 230(October 2018), 179–186. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2018.12.026

Hamel, P., Bremer, L. L., Ponette-González, A. G., Acosta, E., Fisher, J. R. B., Steele, B., … Brauman, K. A. (2020). The value of hydrologic information for watershed management programs: The case of Camboriú, Brazil. Science of The Total Environment, 135871. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.135871

Johnson, K. A., Wing, O. E. J., Bates, P. D., Fargione, J., Kroeger, T., Larson, W. D., … Smith, A. M. (2019). A benefit–cost analysis of floodplain land acquisition for US flood damage reduction. Nature Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-019-0437-5

Jones, P. F., Jakes, A. F., Telander, A. C., Sawyer, H., Martin, B. H., & Hebblewhite, M. (2019). Fences reduce habitat for a partially migratory ungulate in the Northern Sagebrush Steppe. Ecosphere, 10(7). https://doi.org/10.1002/ecs2.2782

Samanta, A., Eanes, F. R., Wickerham, B., Fales, M., Bulla, B. R., & Prokopy, L. S. (2019). Communication, Partnerships, and the Role of Social Science: Conservation Delivery in a Brave New World. Society & Natural Resources, 0(0), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/08941920.2019.1695990

Sippel, S., Meinshausen, N., Fischer, E. M., Székely, E., & Knutti, R. (2020). Climate change now detectable from any single day of weather at global scale. Nature Climate Change, 10(1), 35–41. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0666-7

Sincerely,

Jon

p.s. If you'd like to keep track of what I write as well as what I read, I always link to both my informal blog posts and my formal publications (plus these summaries) at http://sciencejon.blogspot.com/

August 2019 science journal article summary

Photo from Mick Garratt

Greetings,

Hot weather and a vacation in the woods have me thinking about climate change and habitat conversion (with articles on deforestation, landscape conservation, biodiversity, and livestock sustainability).

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

LANDSCAPE CONSERVATION:
Runting et al. 2019 argues that debates about 'land sparing' vs 'land sharing' miss an important point - good forest management is likely more important. They run several scenarios with different degrees of land sharing vs sparing, and conventional vs. improved management (reduced-impact logging, longer plantation rotation, and strictly enforcing protected areas). They saw the best outcomes with improved management and a mix of sparing and sharing (but favoring sparing, see Figure 4). Check out Figure 2 for what an 'optimal' scenario looks like compared to extreme sharing or sparing (but ignore the idea that tiny islands of protected areas or holes in larger ones are ideal - this is almost certainly an artifact). There's a blog on this one at https://nature4climate.org/news/headline-stories/cant-see-the-wood-for-the-trees-making-the-most-of-our-forests-for-biodiversity-and-wood-production/

Kennedy et al. 2019 calculates how modified by human activities land around the world is. While only 5% of land area was 'unmodified', most of the world was 'moderately modified.' The authors argue that ecoregions with moderate modification may be good candidates for high priority conservation action, because they tend to have some relatively intact lands near to highly modified lands (which thus may pose a threat in the near future). In particular, the tropical and subtropical dry broadleaf forests biome (mostly in Mexico, India, Argentina, & SE Asia) was found to be the most threatened (high conversion relative to protection). While they didn't include all threats (e.g. logging, invasive species, climate change, and more) these data can be used to evaluate the suitability of lands for protection. You can explore the findings and maps at http://gdra-tnc.org/current/ and you can download the data from http://s3.amazonaws.com/DevByDesign-Web/Apps/gHM/index.html


CLIMATE CHANGE:
Bastin et al. 2019 estimate 900 million ha of land could be reforested globally (excluding cropland and urban areas), which could store 205 Gt of carbon (752 Gt CO2e). Alternatively, they predict we'll lose 223 million ha of forest by 2050 under business as usual. This paper has been broadly criticized for overstating the role of reforestation in climate mitigation (while reforestation is important, the authors' conclusion that it's the most important solution is a fringe opinion), especially since they call for a focus on boreal plantings which reduces albedo relative to bare snow and ice (thus reducing the climate mitigation contribution). Here's a blog covering the paper including the critique: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2019/07/10/reforestation-climate-change-plant-trees/#.XSdzAehJE2w

Diaz et al. 2018 looks at trade-offs between different forest management options for Douglas-fir in the NW US that could improve carbon storage. They compare managing the land to optimize net present value (NPV) to managing for sustained timber yield (with different levels of environmental management, e.g. longer rotations and some aspects of FSC certification). They find that environmental constraints boost carbon storage but hurt net present value. For example, one scenario had 26% more carbon, but 15% less timber and 21% lower NPV. They explore different policy options and challenges related to driving more carbon storage in timberlands.


DEFORESTATION:
Lambin et al. 2018 look at how effective company commitments to end deforestation are. The key finding is that public policy can significantly improve the likelihood of reducing deforestation relative to private action alone. For example, the Soy Moratorium combined sector-wide commitments with monitoring and public disincentives to clear forest in Brazil, with some success. They call for better company commitments (as called for by the Accountability Framework, https://accountability-framework.org/), and recommend public policies including: legal reform & enforcement, land tenure reform, working with people clearing the most forest, broadening scope (companies, commodities, & regions), incentivizing all actors in the supply chain to participate (e.g. fertilizer companies rarely engage in these commitments), improving traceability and transparency, and increasing demand for deforestation-free products.


LIVESTOCK SUSTAINABILITY:
Schader et al. 2015 looks at how shifting what we feed cattle could improve sustainability. The idea is to feed them less food humans could eat (like corn), and more grass and by-products we can't or don't eat (e.g. distiller's grains, bran, oilseed cake, etc.), which also limits the total amount of livestock which can be raised in this way. Figure 1 is a great overview of what this would mean, for example a big reduction in pigs and chicken and only modest increases in other livestock (that can eat grass). But note a cardinal data visualization sin: inconsistent scaling of bar charts (e.g. the soil erosion from water chart makes it look like their preferred scenario has only 42% the erosion of the reference scenario, but it actually has 88% the erosion) which means you have to look carefully. Still, it's an important concept to explore, and a useful contribution to the conversation.

What are the barriers to using livestock practices that reduce GHGs? Kipling et al. 2019 asked Welsh ranchers and other stakeholders in a series of interviews and workshops. They focused on the conceptual framework rather than the practices, splitting them into practical limitations (e.g. costs and infrastructure, see Figure 1), knowledge limitations (being unaware of options and how they work, see Figure 2), and cognitive limitations and interests (complexity and competing values, see Figures 3 & 4). There aren't any big surprises here, but it's a useful overview, especially the quotes from ranchers for each concept they present.


BIODIVERSITY:
Humphreys et al. 2019 looks at recent (since 1900) and historic plant extinction, and compares it to animal extinctions. The most interesting findings are that the IUCN Red List data on extinct plants are pretty poor (with 50 Red List species incorrectly listed as extinct, and 491 extinct species missing from the Red List), that 54% of plants reported extinct were later rediscovered (or reclassified to be the same as an extant species), that thousands of extant plant species are 'functionally extinct' (too few exist to form a viable population going forward), and that 55% of the 571 plant species that have gone extinct have done so since 1900. This is a short paper and worth reading.

REFERENCES:
Bastin, J.-F., Finegold, Y., Garcia, C., Mollicone, D., Rezende, M., Routh, D., … Crowther, T. W. (2019). The global tree restoration potential. Science, 365(6448), 76–79. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aax0848

Diaz, D. D., Loreno, S., Ettl, G. J., & Davies, B. (2018). Tradeoffs in timber, carbon, and cash flow under alternative management systems for Douglas-Fir in the Pacific Northwest. Forests, 9(8), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.3390/f9080447

Humphreys, A. M., Govaerts, R., Ficinski, S. Z., Nic Lughadha, E., & Vorontsova, M. S. (2019). Global dataset shows geography and life form predict modern plant extinction and rediscovery. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 3(July). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-019-0906-2

Kennedy, C. M., Oakleaf, J. R., Theobald, D. M., Baruch-Mordo, S., & Kiesecker, J. (2019). Managing the Middle: A Shift in Conservation Priorities based on the Global Human Modification Gradient. Global Change Biology, (June 2018), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.14549

Kipling, R. P., Taft, H. E., Chadwick, D. R., Styles, D., & Moorby, J. (2019). Challenges to implementing greenhouse gas mitigation measures in livestock agriculture: A conceptual framework for policymakers. Environmental Science and Policy, 92(November 2018), 107–115. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2018.11.013

Lambin, F., Gibbs, H. K., Heilmayr, R., Carlson, K. M., Fleck, L., Garret, R., … Walker, N. (2017). The role of supply-chain initiatives in reducing deforestation. Nature Climate Change, 8(February), 109–116. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-017-0061-1

Runting, R. K., Ruslandi, Griscom, B. W., Struebig, M. J., Satar, M., Meijaard, E., … Venter, O. (2019). Larger gains from improved management over sparing–sharing for tropical forests. Nature Sustainability, 2(1), 53–61. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0203-0

Schader, C., Muller, A., El-Hage Scialabba, N., Hecht, J., Isensee, A., Erb, K. H., … Niggli, U. (2015). Impacts of feeding less food-competing feedstuffs to livestock on global food system sustainability. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 12(113). https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2015.0891



Sincerely,

Jon

p.s. If you'd like to keep track of what I write as well as what I read, I always link to both my informal blog posts and my formal publications (plus these summaries) at http://sciencejon.blogspot.com/

Reforestation to reduce ozone without costing businesses extra money

A new paper (on which I'm an author) was just published in PNAS on our collaboration with Dow. In particular, we looked at reforestation as a tool for ozone abatement, with the key finding that in Houston reforestation was cost-competitive with building scrubbers (which has a high initial capital cost and cannot readily be adjusted to a precise need for removal) and NOx allowances. If carbon credits could be sold it would be cheaper.

There are plenty of caveats (the legal framework to actually do this is not in place yet, we assume land owners exist who want their lands reforested (as opposed to having to buy land), it only works in places with NOx-limited ozone and ozone non-attainment areas, etc. Also, the national map I made (above) is a coarse analysis showing where this could be replicated, but does not include factors like the current drought in California (the intent is to flag areas deserving a closer look if the policy piece goes through). For the paper, I did a more rigorous habitat assessment about where within the study area a specific type of bottomland hardwood forest could likely be planted successfully.

Nonetheless, it is exciting that in this case we found that a natural solution could be appealing to businesses, while also providing benefits to others (habitat, recreation, etc.). I was only peripherally involved (in the mapping out of where this could work), but I'm still pretty proud.

There is a blog post about why this paper is arguably significant here:

https://www.wvnews.com/statejournal/news/dow-chemical-nature-conservancy-scientists-explore-using-trees-to-clean-pollution/article_0494ec03-ad6e-5669-a530-2816f62e4561.html 

The TNC blogs with more info have expired, but the actual paper is here:

More information: Reforestation as a novel abatement and compliance measure for ground-level ozone, Timm Kroeger, PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1409785111

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-09-reforestation-urban-areas-ozone.html#jCp

Reforestation as a novel abatement and compliance measure for ground-level ozone, Timm Kroeger et al., PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1409785111