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.

November 2023 science summary

Hello again,

This month I review papers on inequitable restoration, the carbon impact of working from home, learning from failure, and connectivity. I also have some notes on using AI to help with your lit review. And a shameless plug for our foster dog (Kong) pictured above.

Kong is a an exuberant dog ready to bring some joy to someone’s life! He is a great partner for the dog park, hiking, playing ball in the yard, and lots and lots of cuddling. He has so much love to give, and likes every person and dog he meets.  He would enjoy a playful dog brother or sister, and gets along well with cats and kids. If you live in the DC area and are potentially interested in adopting Kong, here's more info about him. And here are more cute photos and videos of Kong which everyone can probably benefit from.

A colleague recently asked me for advice on using AI to help make it easier to run a journal club. She wanted help narrowing down which papers to read and recommend to the group. My favorite tool for this purpose is still elicit (elicit.org, which I reviewed in my March 2023 summary). Just upload a folder of manuscript PDFs, be sure to turn on the "detailed summary" field (the default summary leaves out enough to be misleading), and review the spreadsheet of summaries you get. It's a great way to pick which articles to start with and which to condemn to the "maybe eventually I'll read this but who am I kidding" folder unless something changes. 

Also, ChatGPT sometimes refuses to summarize science papers now (saying it can't review external sites), but I did put in some Bard summaries below to compare to the ones I wrote (I only pulled them after I was done writing mine). Bard rolled out a feature in September where you can sometimes check its sources (since it still is prone to getting facts wrong), but in recent testing there was no text available for me to easily check with their tool.

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).

INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE
Jon summary:
Grenz & Armstrong 2023 is an article criticizing "pop-up restoration," a term they coin for ecological restoration that 1) lacks long-term engagement and monitoring, 2) denies people use of lands (even Indigenous people who have been there for millennia), and 3) sets fixed ecological baselines or goals even for ecosystems which historically were highly managed and dynamic. They describe two use cases where  management outcomes preferred by Indigenous people were ignored, instead managing for outcomes preferred by non-Indigenous ranchers or residents. They call for restorative justice being the norm, and ethical engagement with communities in each specific place (rather than coopting and misusing Indigenous knowledge). They also call for more openness to evolving needs and conditions of both people and ecosystems, and acknowledging failures and wrongdoing.

Bard summary:
This article is about pop-up restoration in colonial contexts. It discusses the problems with pop-up restoration, which is restoration that is done without Indigenous input and does not consider Indigenous knowledge. The authors argue that pop-up restoration can actually do more harm than good. They propose that instead, restoration should be done in collaboration with Indigenous communities and should center Indigenous knowledge.

CARBON BENEFITS OF WORKING FROM HOME:
Jon summary:
Tao et al. 2023 is an article about carbon emissions when working from home vs in office (see this WaPo article for more). They claim in the abstract remote workers can have a 58% lower carbon footprint than staff fully in the office, BUT there are a bunch of issues with the paper that make me think this claim is invalid (although I'm almost certain there are carbon benefits). First - the 58% number in the abstract does not appear anywhere in the paper (even the SI), the results say 54%. It's a small difference but seems sloppy which can be a warning sign. Next, the methods (even in the SI) do not really explain their calculations in full. They do not define the components of "office energy use" let alone how they measure and calculate it, which is bewildering (they seem to have modeled how attendance & headcount related to office actual energy use but that's about all I could figure out). As a result I can't assess the amount of energy related to occupancy vs. not (I presume heating and cooling are not affected unless there's enough remote workers to shrink the office building). Finally, two assumptions seem especially problematic. First is that residential heating, cooling, and (de)humidifying is OFF when staff are not at home. That is pretty rare for people who live in places w/ hot summers and/or cold winters. Second, the benefits they cite only come from seat sharing, not just people working at home and leaving their seat empty. That's a valid scenario to look at, but it undercuts the framing about benefits from working from home X days per week (and note that many offices want staff to be in on the same days, rather than rotate, which limits seat sharing). So I'm not convinced on their office energy estimates, but the avoided carbon from having fewer commutes is hard to argue with. The authors argue that people working remotely have more NON-commute travel though, so savings are less than you'd think. So let's keep talking about benefits of remote and hybrid work, but NOT assume that will dramatically shrink our carbon footprint of work.

Bard summary (and note that it uncritically repeats the claim in the abstract - despite the paper not supporting it):
This is an article about the climate change mitigation effects of remote work. It discusses the environmental impacts of commuting, non-commute travel, office energy use, and residential energy use. Remote work can reduce up to 58% of the carbon footprint of work. The impacts of IT usage are negligible. The environmental benefits of remote work depend on proper configuration of lifestyle and workplace.

CONNECTIVITY:
Jon summary:
Hanson et al. 2023 compares 8 approaches to optimally expand protected areas (PAs) for birds in Washington state that all consider connectivity differently (all spending $7.6 billion). Some are oblique (maximizing total protected area and presuming it will decrease mean distance between habitat), some focused on connectivity WITHIN PAs (minimizing edge / perimeter, which likely REDUCES connectivity between PAs so looks very different), and several with different assumptions about what conditions facilitate the most species movement (like focusing on connecting areas w/ relatively homogeneous cores and corridors). See Table 2 for pros and cons of each approach, and Fig 2 for maps comparing the results (blue is unique to that approach, yellow was included by all, orange was shared by at least two). There was no obvious winner, but the 'environmental similarity' approach scored pretty well on most. Note that land cost is a big driver of the results.

For this one Bard said "I'm a text-based AI and can't assist with that." (or variants on this reply when I tried again). Seems to be an access issue since it still worked for the other articles here.

LEARNING FROM FAILURE:
Jon summary:
Dickson et al. 2023 piqued my curiosity by breaking down different causes of conservation failure and how to respond. I generally dislike taxonomy papers, and find them academic and hard to apply. But understanding how to respond to different kinds of failure seems helpful, especially for the most common causes (including lacking a sufficiently robust theory of change. see table 2 for more). Their taxonomy has 59 (!) root causes, grouped into 6 categories: 1) planning, design, or knowledge (e.g., inadequate theory of change); 2) team dynamics (e.g., disagreements on what priorities should be); 3) project governance (e.g., lack of a technical advisory group); 4) resources (e.g., staff overloaded or lack needed technical expertise); 5) stakeholder relationships (e.g., lack of buy-in from gov't); and 6) unexpected external events (e.g., natural disaster, war, disease, etc.). After reading all the ways to fail, my main take away is that failure will happen sometimes and we need to focus on how to learn and pivot. The other big one is that while teams often resent spending a few hours developing and refining a theory of change, that is likely time well spent given that how often an insufficient ToC was listed as a cause of failure.

Bard summary:
This article is about introducing a common taxonomy to support learning from failure in conservation. It discusses the need for a culture shift in conservation towards learning from failure. It also details the development of a taxonomy of root causes of failure in conservation. The taxonomy is organized into three tiers: overarching cause categories, midlevel cause categories, and specific root causes. The authors tested the taxonomy by asking conservation practitioners to use it to classify the causes of failure for conservation efforts they had been involved in. The authors then analyzed the frequency that particular root causes were encountered by projects within this test sample. The authors suggest that the taxonomy could be used to improve the identification, analysis, and subsequent learning from failed conservation efforts.


REFERENCES:
Dickson, I., Butchart, S. H. M., Catalano, A., Gibbons, D., Jones, J. P. G., Lee‐Brooks, K., Oldfield, T., Noble, D., Paterson, S., Roy, S., Semelin, J., Tinsley‐Marshall, P., Trevelyan, R., Wauchope, H., Wicander, S., & Sutherland, W. J. (2023). Introducing a common taxonomy to support learning from failure in conservation. Conservation Biology, 37(1), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13967

Grenz, J., & Armstrong, C. G. (2023). Pop-up restoration in colonial contexts: applying an indigenous food systems lens to ecological restoration. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 7(September), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2023.1244790

Hanson, J. O., Vincent, J., Schuster, R., Fahrig, L., Brennan, A., Martin, A. E., Hughes, J. S., Pither, R., & Bennett, J. R. (2022). A comparison of approaches for including connectivity in systematic conservation planning. Journal of Applied Ecology, 59(10), 2507–2519. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2664.14251

Tao, Y., Yang, L., Jaffe, S., Amini, F., Bergen, P., Hecht, B., & You, F. (2023). Climate mitigation potentials of teleworking are sensitive to changes in lifestyle and workplace rather than ICT usage. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(39), 2017. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2304099120

Sincerely,
 
Jon

p.s. In the photo above, Kong is sleeping with his head on my lap, while I am resting my head on him. He is such a sweet and cuddly dog.

November 2020 Science Article Summary

Happy post-Halloween!

This month I have five big global conservation papers, plus two on wildlife migrations. Also - my team is hiring! You can find out more and apply here: https://jobs-pct.icims.com/jobs/6374/job and let me know if you have any questions.

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

GLOBAL CONSERVATION:
Dinerstein et al. 2020 is the latest paper advocating for conserving half of the earth (not all via legal protection). I like that they break down the primary conservation focus of each new area: rare species, distinct species assemblages (beta diversity), intact large mammal populations ('rare phenomena'), intact habitats (driven mostly by the Last of the Wild data which tends to rate rural farms as relatively intact), and high carbon stocks (see Figure 1 for a global map). Interestingly the big mammal cluster is 42% the size of current protected areas but stores 91% as much carbon. There's also a useful connectivity analysis: they find 4.3% of global land area would be needed to connect current protected areas (w/ ~3.5km wide corridors), and if their 50% target was met we'd still need 2.7% more to provide connectivity. About a third of targeted lands are indigenous territories which may already be effectively conserved in some cases. As a reminder, the 50% global target was picked arbitrarily, so describing these as 'science-based targets' is a bit misleading. They used science to identify places that add up to 50%, but the 50% overall target is NOT science-based. Check out their results at https://www.globalsafetynet.app/viewer/

Maxwell et al. 2020 reviews how effective the last 10 years of new protected areas (PAs) have been in covering underprotected species and areas. The key finding is that PAs are not being added in the highest priority areas, and while some species are doing better than average in new protection, protection overall remains badly inadequate relative to the needs of species and ecosystems. On land PAs expanded by ~9% but only contributed to very small increases in representation (only increases in wilderness were significantly better than that 9%, while carbon and terrestrial key biodiversity areas expanded less than 9%, Fig 3b). At sea PAs more than doubled in area (+160%), with corals, cartilaginous fishes (like sharks), marine wilderness, and pelagic (open ocean) areas doing even better than that. But the expansion of marine PAs underperformed in increasing representation of marine reptiles & mammals, bony fishes, key biodiversity areas, and several others. The authors call for more transparency around decisions to add or expand (or shrink) PAs, improved recognition and management of Other Effective area-based Conservation Measures, better planning for climate change, more financing for protection and management, and more.

Strassburg et al. 2020 is a global prioritization of where to restore ecosystems on land. As with similar analyses they find we could achieve more at lower cost if we use analyses like theirs to drive the work. Fig 3 has the best comparison of cost and environmental benefits, while Fig 1 has maps of priority areas. However,  Maxwell et al. 2020 is a reminder that these decisions are NOT typically driven like papers like this, and Fig 1e raises immediate concerns about the likelihood of proposing to restore most of the Philippines and Indonesia, or 96% of converted habitat in the Caribbean. Scenario VI in Fig 3 shows how much lower the environmental benefits are (and that the cost is higher) if each country restores their highest priority 15% of lands relative to what's possible by concentrating restoration in relatively few countries (scenarios I-III). Despite the challenges, this paper does make a key point: given the relatively high cost of restoration relative to protecting intact habitat, it's important that we stretch those dollars by picking the right places to restore (including likelihood that restored lands won't get quickly reconverted).

The 5th Global Biodiversity Outlook report has mostly bad news - none of the 20 targets set in 2010 for 2020 have been met, although 6/20 have been partially achieved. Check out page 6 of the summary for policymakers for the results (green means met, yellow some progress, red no progress, and purple negative progress). Some of these are optimistic, e.g., it's very optimistic to assume that not only will 10% of the ocean be protected this year but that they will focus on areas of particular importance for biodiversity and ecosystem services. But you can read more about why they rated it this way on page 82 of the full report. It's worth at least looking at the high level scores for everything, and digging into the ones most relevant to your work.

van Rees et al. 2020 has 14 recommendations to improve freshwater outcomes in  the next version of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) as well as the EU's biodiversity strategy. In brief, they are: don't lump freshwater in w/ lands and ocean when planning, recognize their role in supporting human life, recognize the importance of connectivity and barriers (like dams), manage freshwater ecosystems at the watershed / catchment scale, use systems thinking to consider trade-offs like how hydropower or intensive ag impacts on freshwater systems compared to others, improve existing freshwater protected areas (via restoration, management, and enforcement), use 'flagship umbrella species' to get freshwater biodiversity more attention, do more research on invasive species and how they impact freshwater ecosystems, improve monitoring of freshwater ecosystems, improve freshwater data's accessibility, use novel methods to monitor biodiversity like environmental DNA (eDNA) or digital text analysis, use strategic spatial planning, use more global data (like Red-Listed species) in national and local decision-making, and seek to better integrate top-down decision making by experts (due to technical complexity) with bottom-up stakeholder-driven approaches.

WILDLIFE MIGRATION:
Greggor et al. 2020 argues that for conservation interventions to influence wildlife, it can help to think through the lens of animal cognition. It seems funny, but check out Fig 3 on “Why did (or didn’t) the chicken cross the road?” – they ask a really useful set of questions (like does the chicken see habitat on the other side and perceive it as better, does it see the road and see it as a danger, are danger cues masked, does it see the overpass and perceive it as safer, etc.). Fig 2 offers a decision tree to pick the right intervention, and the paper proceeds to offer several rules about how animal cognition and decision making tends to work to explain those recommendations. They note some limits, like omitting how animals deal w/ novelty, and how much is unknown about perception in many species.

Testud et al. 2020 evaluated crossings of amphibians (newts, frogs, toads, & salamanders) in tunnels under high-speed rail. Shorter tunnels led to more successful (complete) crossings for most species (but not toads), and broadcasting audio of frog mating calls led to a big increase in successful crossings (and crossing speed) for the one frog species who was included in the recordings. It would be interesting to follow up to see if more complex audio representing more species would work better, and even whether this approach might work for mammals as well.

REFERENCES:
Dinerstein, E., Joshi, A. R., Vynne, C., Lee, A. T. L., Pharand-Deschênes, F., França, M., … Olson, D. (2020). A “Global Safety Net” to reverse biodiversity loss and stabilize Earth’s climate. Science Advances, 6(36), eabb2824. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abb2824

Greggor, A. L., Berger-Tal, O., & Blumstein, D. T. (2020). The Rules of Attraction: The Necessary Role of Animal Cognition in Explaining Conservation Failures and Successes. Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, 51(1), annurev-ecolsys-011720-103212. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-ecolsys-011720-103212

Maxwell, S. L., Cazalis, V., Dudley, N., Hoffmann, M., Rodrigues, A. S. L., Stolton, S., … Watson, J. E. M. (2020). Area-based conservation in the twenty-first century. Nature, 586(7828), 217–227. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2773-z

Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity. (2020). Global Biodiversity Outlook 5. Montreal, 208 pages. Available at https://www.cbd.int/gbo5

Strassburg, B. B. N., Iribarrem, A., Beyer, H. L., Cordeiro, C. L., Crouzeilles, R., Jakovac, C. C., … Visconti, P. (2020). Global priority areas for ecosystem restoration. Nature, (August 2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2784-9

Testud, G., Fauconnier, C., Labarraque, D., Lengagne, T., Lepetitcorps, Q., Picard, D., & Miaud, C. (2020). Acoustic enrichment in wildlife passages under railways improves their use by amphibians. Global Ecology and Conservation, e01252. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gecco.2020.e01252

van Rees, C. B., Waylen, K. A., Schmidt‐Kloiber, A., Thackeray, S. J., Kalinkat, G., Martens, K., … Jähnig, S. C. (2020). Safeguarding freshwater life beyond 2020: Recommendations for the new global biodiversity framework from the European experience. Conservation Letters, (April), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1111/conl.12771



Sincerely,
 
Jon