Scientists warn that rising sea surface temperatures and more frequent marine heat waves will have profound effects on ocean dwellers.
Billions of missing crabs in the waters off Alaska are a grim harbinger.
In October the Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced, for the second year in a row, that the Bering Sea snow crab population had plunged so low they had to close the fishery.
Snow crabs were once plentiful in the frigid waters, but researchers calculated that more than 10 billion had vanished from the eastern Bering Sea since 2018. They posited that the crabs had either moved or died. Research confirmed the latter.
The culprit, the study explained, was a marine heatwave in 2018 and 2019 that pushed water temperatures up — not high enough to kill the crabs outright, but enough to increase the amount of calories they needed to consume. Many crabs couldn’t find enough to eat and starved. Others were eaten by Pacific cod, who were able to extend their range into suddenly warmer waters.
We should take heed.
“The Bering Sea is on the frontlines of climate-driven ecosystem change, and the problems currently faced in the Bering Sea foreshadow the problems that will need to be confronted globally,” the researchers wrote.
As we’ve pumped more and more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the ocean has been working overtime, absorbing more than 90% of the excess heat since the 1970s. But the bill for that is coming due.
2023 was the warmest year and on record, and that extend to the ocean, too. There were five consecutive months with global sea surface temperatures hitting record monthly highs. August recorded the highest monthly sea surface temperature anomaly in 174 years of NOAA’s recordkeeping. In addition to rising average global sea surface temperatures, marine heat waves are also becoming more common.
Scientists attributed it to a combination of long-term climate warming and a growing El Niño in the Pacific Ocean, which causes warming-than-usual water temperatures.
“Over the long term, we’re seeing more heat and warmer sea surface temperatures pretty much everywhere,” says Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “That long-term trend is almost entirely attributable to human forcing — the fact that we’ve put such a huge amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere since the start of the industrial era.”
Changes Ahead
High water temperatures can throw ecosystems out of balance, as was the case with a persistent marine heatwave in the northern Pacific Ocean from 2013 to 2016 called “the Blob.” The warm waters fueled a bloom of toxic algae, which poisoned a host of marine life ranging from shellfish to sea lions. It also caused a shutdown to the crab fishery to protect human health.
“The Blob” marine heatwave from 2014-2016. Image: Joshua Stevens / NASA Earth Observatory with sea surface temperature data from Coral Reef Watch
When catching crabs was deemed safe again, fishers set their traps in the same area where humpback whales were feeding on anchovies. The turf war caused a record number of whale entanglements.
High water temperatures don’t just alter ecosystems; they can also cause direct mortality. Corals, for instance, have a symbiotic relationship to the algae that lives on them and gives them their color. But when water temperatures get too hot, the animals expel the algae, turning a whitish color. If this bleaching is prolonged, they succumb to disease and starvation.
Between 2014 and 2017 heat stress caused bleaching in 75% of tropical reefs around the world, resulting in mortality at nearly 30% of them. Even deep reefs, once thought protected, are now vulnerable. Researchers found coral bleaching in the Indian Ocean 300 feet below the surface.
This summer a marine heat wave scorched Florida’s waters, with one location recording triple digits in August. The ideal temperature range for most corals is between 73 and 84 degrees Fahrenheit. But temperatures well above that caused widespread bleaching and mortality on Florida reefs.
“This year’s bleaching event is proving to be more than many of even our hardiest corals can cope with,” the Coral Restoration Foundation reported in August. “Cheeca Rocks has experienced almost total bleaching and widespread mortality already. Sombrero, Newfound Harbor, Eastern Dry Rocks, and Looe Key have also succumbed to the heat.”
The loss of coral reefs threatens the homes and foods of 30% of marine fish and countless other species, while also leaving coastal communities more vulnerable to storm waters.
On the Move
For some marine species, survival will depend on being able to move if they’re unable to adapt to the rate of warming or prolonged ocean heat waves. Already we know that some haven’t been able to keep up.
A 2019 study in Nature found that local extirpations related to warming were twice as common in the ocean as on land. A likely contributor is that fish and other marine ectotherms — animals that don’t have internal mechanisms for regulating their body temperatures — live closer to the upper limit of tolerable temperatures. Nowhere is this truer than for fish that live in the tropics.
Water temperature is important for regulating basic functions for fish, such as metabolism, reproduction and growth. A study published in May in Global Change Biology looked at how 115 species of marine fish were responding to rising ocean temperatures. They found the majority of those populations were shifting their ranges toward the cooler water of the poles. This was especially true in the Northern Hemisphere, which has seen faster rates of warming.
School of tuna . Photo: United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization/ Danilo Cedrone (CC BY 2.0 DEED)
Where species adaptations allowed them to go deeper, they did that too. And it may be a last resort for Arctic fish that are limited in poleward expansion.
The ecological implications for these changes are vast.
“While relocation to cooler water may allow these species to persist in the short-term, it remains to be seen how food webs and ecosystems will be affected by these changes,” says Shaun Killen, a professor at the University of Glasgow and study co-author, of the research. “If the prey of these species don’t also move, or if these species become an invasive disturbance in their new location, there could be serious consequences down the road.”
Even more serious will be if climate warming remains unchecked and we continue along a high-emissions path. If that’s the case, we’re likely to see mass extinction on par with those in Earth’s history, found researchers of a 2022 study in Science. The highest risk of extinction is for species living at the poles, but the biggest drop in species diversity will happen in the tropics.
Concerted global action to tackle climate change could make a significant impact in curbing this impending loss.
“Reversing greenhouse gas emissions trends would diminish extinction risks by more than 70%, preserving marine biodiversity accumulated over the past ~50 million years of evolutionary history,” the researchers wrote.
The world’s largest land mammals are finding ways to navigate a landscape that’s becoming increasingly developed.
Species name:
African savanna elephant (Loxodonta africana)
Description:
African savanna elephants are one of the most iconic species on the planet with their enormous stature, big ears, long tusks, and of course unmistakable trunks. They’re the largest species of elephant and the largest extant land mammal.
IUCN Red List status:
Endangered.
Where they’re found:
The current range of African savanna elephants extends across parts of 23 African countries, including the Maasai Mara ecosystem in southwest Kenya. This large expanse of wilderness is interspersed with human settlements belonging to the Maasai people.
Nestled within the ecosystem is the world-renowned Maasai Mara National Reserve, and nearby across the border in Tanzania is the equally famous Serengeti National Reserve. Often viewed as one whole and very large ecosystem, both areas are a crucial haven for many species of wildlife, including elephants.
Major threats:
The most significant threats to the elephants include poaching, hunting, habitat loss and, increasingly, conflict with people. Around 70% of wildlife exists outside of protected areas in Kenya, and in the Mara ecosystem many species, including elephants, live outside the reserve and in between conservancies.
In recent years the Mara ecosystem has undergone many changes as land laws and land-use practices in Kenya have changed. Where there were previously “group ranches” — communally owned areas — in this region, there are now individual plots of land where landowners have erected fences. Many of the parcels exist within or border on the habitat of elephants.
Elephant faces a fence. Photo: Gini Cowell/Elephant Aware
Since the emergence of fences, incidents of human-elephant conflict have spiked and natural corridors that elephants once used have been blocked. Elephants often find themselves in the crosshairs of conflict when they try to follow traditional routes — or they raid agricultural crops, devastating human livelihoods.
These conflicts often result in terrible tragedy for both people and elephants.
Notable conservation programs or legal protections:
With the exception of four southern African countries, the Convention of International Trade in Endangered Species lists both species of African elephants on Appendix I, prohibiting all trade pertaining to the species. In Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe elephants are included in CITES Appendix II, which means the animals there are “not necessarily now threatened with extinction,” but could be without strict trade regulations.
My favorite experience:
There are so many amazing elephant experiences my team and I have had over the years. But one forever changed how I look at elephants, and it has invigorated my passion for their conservation.
In September 2017 we found a tuskless matriarch, Nalakite, our team knew well. She was very sick as a result of a spear injury.
The Mara Mobile Veterinary Unit was called in on two occasions and worked tirelessly with our team to save her. She had become separated from her herd due to her weak state, but her three calves remained by her side. Sadly, when Nalakite went into a mud wallow one day, she couldn’t get up again, and despite our collective teams working for more than 10 hours to free her, she eventually succumbed to her condition.
All of us observed quietly as the calves grieved for their mother, refusing to leave her side even when predators approached. The emotions this family of elephants were experiencing was obvious and heart wrenching.
What else do we need to understand or do to protect this species?
Global awareness, in tandem with conservation efforts at the local and government level, are crucial components in protecting African savanna elephants and ensuring their future in the wild.
This should include prioritizing the needs of the Maasai people who own the land, ensuring there are long-lasting mutual benefits, as well as securing wild habitat and linking protected areas through the establishment of designated land for corridors.
There are a number of organizations actively combating human-elephant conflict. Elephant Aware, a project in the Mara ecosystem where I work, uses a method referred to as “gentle persuasion,” which incorporates patience and collaboration with landowners to resolve incidents of human-elephant conflict.
This is especially crucial in situations where elephants get stuck in fences, which can turn dangerous very quickly without intervention. The Elephant Aware team, which includes Maasai rangers, must keep community members a safe distance away to allow the elephant(s) to get out of the fences peacefully. The rangers also monitor different herds of elephants every day to prevent conflict before it happens.
The fabled rainforest is starting to release its carbon as climate change, deforestation and other human threats drive it toward the limits of survival.
A version of this article was originally published by Nature. The Pulitzer Center supported travel for Daniel Grossman, photographer Dado Galdieri and videographer Patrick Vanier.
Luciana Gatti stares grimly out of the window of the small aircraft as it takes off from the city of Santarém, Brazil, in the heart of the eastern Amazon forest. Minutes into the flight, the plane passes over an 18-mile stretch of near-total ecological devastation. It’s a patchwork of farmland, filled with emerald-green corn stalks and newly clearcut plots where the rainforest once stood.
“This is awful. So sad,” says Gatti, a climate scientist at the National Institute for Space Research in São José dos Campos, Brazil.
Gatti is part of a broad group of scientists attempting to forecast the future of the Amazon rainforest. The land ecosystems of the world together absorb about 30% of the carbon dioxide released by burning fossil fuels; scientists think that most of this takes place in forests, and the Amazon is by far the world’s largest contiguous forest.
Since 2010 Gatti has collected air samples over the Amazon in planes such as this one, to monitor how much CO2 the forest absorbs. In 2021 she reported data from 590 flights that showed that the Amazon forest’s uptake — its carbon sink — is weak over most of its area. In the southeastern Amazon, the forest has become a source of CO2.
The finding generated headlines around the world and surprised many scientists, who expected the Amazon to be a much stronger carbon sink. For Carlos Nobre, a climate scientist at the University of São Paulo Institute of Advanced Studies in Brazil, the change was happening much too soon. In 2016, using climate models, he and his colleagues predicted that the combination of unchecked deforestation and global climate change would eventually push the Amazon forest past a “tipping point,” transforming the climate across a vast swath of the Amazon. Then the conditions that support a lush, closed-canopy forest would no longer exist. Gatti’s observations seem to show the early signs of what he forecast, Nobre says.
“What we were predicting to happen perhaps in two or three decades is already taking place,” says Nobre, who was one of a dozen co-authors of the paper with Gatti.
I’ve travelled to Santarém, where the Tapajós River joins the Amazon River, to join Gatti and other scientists trying to determine whether the forest is heading for an irreversible transformation toward a degraded form of savanna. Another big question is whether the forest can still be saved by slowing climate change, halting Amazon deforestation and restoring its damaged lands, something Nobre suggests is possible.
Rows of pepper plants grow at a former rainforest site. Photo: Dado Galdieri
The large-scale deforestation we saw from the air is the most visible threat to the Amazon. But the forest is suffering in other, less-obvious ways. Erika Berenguer, an ecologist at the University of Oxford and Lancaster University, UK, has found that even intact forest is no longer as healthy as it once was, because of forces such as climate change and the impacts of agriculture that spill beyond farm borders. In 2023 a large international team of researchers, including Berenguer, reported that such changes were having effects across 38% of the intact Amazon forest.
Gatti first visited Santarém in the late 1990s, when most of the farming in this part of the Amazon was practiced by smallholders for subsistence purposes. Now she’s astounded by the scale of destruction that has ravaged the jungle. While passing over one huge, newly razed parcel of Amazon forest, Gatti’s voice crackles over the plane’s intercom. “They are killing the forest to transform everything into soybeans.”
Breath of the Forest
The plane that collects air samples for Gatti is housed in a cavernous hangar at Santarém airport. On a rainy day in May, she visits the hangar to meet with Washington Salvador, one of her regular pilots. Gatti checks on the rugged plastic suitcases she has had shipped to Santarém and stored in her tiny office at the airport. Inside them, cradled in foam, are 12 sturdy glass flasks the size and shape of one-liter soft-drink bottles.
Gatti doesn’t need to accompany Salvador when he collects the samples. That’s fortunate, because she gets air sick flying in small planes. The pilots who work with her fly twice a month to specific sampling locations, one in each quadrant of the Amazon basin. Once they reach an altitude of 2,750 feet over a landmark, the pilot presses a button, opening valves and turning on a compressor that fills the first flask with air taken through a nozzle from outside. Then they dive in a steep, tight spiral centered around the landmark, collecting 11 more samples, each at a specified altitude. At the final level, the pilot practically buzzes the canopy, sometimes barely 60 feet above the ground.
Gatti will measure the amount of CO2 in the samples in her laboratory at the National Institute for Space Research. She calculates how much the forest soaks up (or releases) by comparing her measurements with those taken over the Atlantic Ocean, which is upstream of the trade winds that blow over the Amazon.
Scott Denning, an atmospheric scientist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins who has collaborated with Gatti, says that her research has been an “amazingly logistically difficult project. The beauty of Luciana’s work, and also the difficulty of her work, is that she’s done it over and over and over again, every two weeks for ten years.”
Lax Enforcement
Some of the forces transforming the Amazon biome are on display at Santarém’s port, where a trio of eight-story-high silos looms over the city’s fish market. Each silo can hold 20,000 tons of maize (corn) or soya beans, waiting to be shipped to other parts of Brazil and then around the globe. As of 2017 more than 13% of the Amazon’s old-growth forest had been cleared, largely for ranching and for growing crops. Almost two-thirds of the biome is in Brazil, which had lost more than 17% of such forest by that year, and its deforestation rates surged in 2019 during the administration of former president Jair Bolsonaro.
Rows of tractors waiting to be sold to agricultural operations. Photo: Dado Galdieri
Brazil’s Forest Code is supposed to protect the country’s woods. One key provision requires that in the Amazon, 80% of any plot, a portion known as the Legal Reserve, must be left intact. But many scientists and forest activists argue that lax enforcement makes it too easy to circumvent the law, and that fines for not complying aren’t effective deterrents because they are rarely paid.
Also, people often get title to public or Indigenous land that they illegally occupy and clear, through a process called land grabbing. Philip Fearnside, an ecologist at Brazil’s National Institute for Research in Amazonia in Manaus, says, “Brazil is basically the only country where you can still go into the forest and start clearing and expect to come out with a land title. It’s like the Wild West of North America in the eighteenth century.”
After a one-hour drive south from Santarém, we meet the Indigenous chief — the cacique — of the tiny village of Açaizal in the reservation known as Terra Munduruku do Planalto. He sits on a deck at a rough-hewn wooden table, positioned so he can watch for unwanted outsiders who might drive past.
Josenildo Munduruku — as is customary, his surname is the same as his tribe — says that decades ago, non-Indigenous homesteaders began establishing smallholdings on land that he and his ancestors had occupied for generations. He says that they built houses and opened up cattle pastures without ever asking permission or obtaining legal rights. Previous generations of his community didn’t object. “Our parents did not have this type of understanding — they were not concerned about it,” he says.
The land eventually ended up in the hands of commercial growers, who buy up adjacent plots then raze huge swaths of jungle. “They do not care about these trees from which we extract medicine. For them, these trees are meaningless, useless,” says Munduruku. He says that his community has tried unsuccessfully to get help from the government to stop the logging and to recover some of the land.
The high value of some tropical hardwoods is an ongoing threat to the forest. Off a highway just west of Açaizal, a timber-mill worker sends a massive log through an industrial saw, which slices off a plank as thick as an encyclopedia. Other workers shape the rough board into standard dimensions.
Ricardo Veronese, the timber mill’s owner, says that his family members, a small lumber dynasty, came to the state of Pará from Mato Grosso state 17 years ago. “We came to Pará because there was plenty of virgin forest left,” he says. The situation today in Mato Grosso is different: Since the mid-1980s, roughly 40% of its rainforest has been cut down.
Every year Veronese’s mill saws up about 2,000 giant trees, mostly for high-end flooring and porch decks in the United States and Europe. With obvious pride, he says that he takes only “sustainably harvested” wood. The huge trunks, stacked by the score in a yard, come from state-regulated logging operations that practice selective logging, he says, where only large trees are cut, leaving the remaining trees to grow and fill gaps in the canopy. And he says that his company follows the government’s rules for selective logging, which require firms to take steps to reduce their impact.
But many ecologists say that the selective logging permitted by the Forest Code is often not sustainable in the sense of preserving the jungle’s stock of carbon sequestered in trunks and retaining its hyper-diverse flora and fauna. That’s because the trees that grow back after a logging operation aren’t the same species as the ones that were removed. The original ones are generally slow-growing species with dense wood, whereas the replacements have less-dense wood. They absorb less carbon in the same space.
Erika Berenguer says that the rules for selective logging on the books are rarely obeyed in practice. She says, for instance, that few companies follow the requirements for limiting road construction or the number of trees that can be cut. “About 90% of selective logging in the Amazon is estimated as illegal, and therefore doesn’t follow any of these procedures.”
Carbon Counting
It takes patience and perseverance to monitor the Amazon for long periods. Berenguer and her team have been measuring 6,000 trees in the Tapajós National Forest every three months since 2015. From this, they estimate changes in the amount of biomass in the forest and how much carbon is stored there.
Censuses such as these, and atmospheric measurements such as Gatti’s, are two common techniques climate scientists use to study the uptake and release of carbon. Each has strengths and drawbacks.
The censuses directly measure the amount of carbon (in the form of wood) in a forest. If paired with measurements of debris on the ground and CO2 released from soil, they can also take account of decay. But censuses look only at a limited number of sites. Atmospheric measurements can assess the combined impact of changes in forests at regional and even continental scales. But it’s hard to decipher the cause of any changes they show.
In 2010 Berenguer began monitoring more than 20 plots in and around the Tapajós forest. Her goal was to compare the carbon uptake of primary forest with that of jungle degraded by selective logging — legal and otherwise. But in 2015 an unprecedented heat wave and drought hit the eastern Amazon.
Eight of Berenguer’s plots were burned, killing hundreds of trees that she’d measured at least twice. She recalls the day in 2015 that she visited a recently scorched plot. Her assistant, Gilson Oliveira, had run ahead. “And he just started screaming, ‘Oh tree number 71 is dead. Tree number 114 is burning,’” Her equipment was destroyed. Some favorite trees had died. “I just collapsed crying; just sat down in the ashes.”
Under normal conditions the Amazon forest is almost fireproof. It’s too wet to burn. But by the time this long dry season ended, fires had scorched 3,800 square miles of primary forest in the eastern Amazon, an area the size of Lebanon, killing an estimated 2.5 billion trees and producing as much CO2 as Brazil releases from burning fossil fuels in a year. Some of Berenguer’s research was, literally, reduced to ashes. Still, she saw the chance to study a problem that is expected to become increasingly common: the combined effect of multiple issues, such as severe drought, fires and human degradation caused by selective logging and clearcutting.
On a tour of where Berenguer’s team works in the Tapajós forest, her field director, Marcos Alves, takes us to a site that burned in 2015. Not long before the fire, illegal loggers removed the biggest, most economically valuable trees. The forest has grown back with plenty of vegetation, including some fast-growing species that are already as thick as telephone poles. But there are none of the giants that can be found elsewhere in the forest.
Alves and Oliveira take Gatti and me to a site two miles up the highway that has never been selectively logged or clear cut, and which escaped the 2015 fires. It’s dimmer here because the high canopy is so thick. And it’s noticeably cooler: Not only do the trees block sunlight, but they also transpire vast quantities of water, which chills the air.
Gatti marvels at the size of a Brazil-nut tree (Bertholletia excelsa) that forms part of the canopy. “It’s amazing! How much water this tree puts into the air.”
Gatti stands in front of a giant tree. Photo: Dado Galdieri
In 2021 Berenguer and a team of co-authors from Brazil and Europe published a study of carbon uptake and tree mortality in her plots during the first three years after the 2015–16 burning. They compared plots that had been selectively logged or had burned in the years before 2015–16, with ones that had not been logged or burnt. The study found that more trees died in degraded plots.
Although plots that weren’t degraded fared the best in her study, Berenguer says that there is no such thing as “pristine forest” anymore. Climate change has warmed the entire Amazon forest by 1°C in the past 60 years. The eastern Amazon has warmed even more.
Amazon rainfall has not changed appreciably, when averaged over the year. But the dry season, when rain is needed most, is becoming longer, especially in the northeastern Amazon, where dry-season rainfall decreased by 34% between 1979 and 2018. In the southeastern Amazon, the season now lasts about 4 weeks longer than it did 40 years ago, putting stress on trees, especially the big ones. Still, Berenguer says that, so far, the measurable effects of climate change on the forest are relatively subtle compared with those of direct human impacts such as logging.
Fading Forests
David Lapola, an Earth-system modeler at Brazil’s University of Campinas, says that deforestation alone can’t explain why the Amazon carbon sink has weakened — and has reversed in the southeast. He and more than 30 colleagues, including Gatti and Berenguer, published an analysis last year noting that carbon emissions resulting from degradation equal — or exceed — those from clearcutting deforestation.
What’s more, even intact forest with no obvious local human impacts is accumulating less carbon than it used to, as seen in some tree-census studies. A 2015 analysis of 321 plots of Amazon primary forest with no overt human impacts reported “a long-term decreasing trend of carbon accumulation.” A similar study published in 2020 reported the same things in the Congo Basin forest — the world’s second-largest tropical jungle.
That’s a change from previous decades, when censuses indicated that such primary forest in the Amazon was storing more carbon. There is no consensus explanation for these slowdowns, or why primary forest was accumulating carbon previously. But many researchers suspect that the carbon gains in earlier decades stem from the positive influence of extra CO2 in the atmosphere, which can stimulate the growth of plants. In some studies that expose large forest plots to elevated CO2, known as free-air carbon enrichment (FACE) experiments, researchers have measured gains in biomass. But in the handful of such experiments in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, only one has yet shown an effect that lasted more than a few years. The others either produced only short-term gains or have yet to show any increased growth at all.
All of the forest FACE experiments have so far been conducted in temperate regions, however. And many scientists suspect that tropical forests — and the Amazon, in particular — might follow different rules. The first tropical-forest FACE experiment is finally under construction, 30 miles north of Manaus. Its plumbing system for releasing carbon dioxide into test plots is expected to be started sometime next year. Nobre hopes that the experiment could help to predict whether continued increases in CO2 will benefit the Amazon.
For several decades Nobre and his students have used computer models to forecast how climate change and deforestation will affect the Amazon. The research grew, in part, from work in the 1970s showing that the Amazon forest itself helps to create the conditions that nourish it. Moisture blowing in from the Atlantic falls as rain in the eastern Amazon and is then transpired and blown farther west. It recycles several times before reaching the Andes. A smaller or seriously degraded forest would recycle less water, and eventually might not be able to support the lush, humid forest.
In their 2016 study, Nobre and several colleagues estimated the Amazon would reach a tipping point if the planet warms by more than 2.5°C above preindustrial temperatures and if 20–25% of the Amazon is deforested. The planet is on track to reach 2.5°C of warming by 2100, according to a report released by the United Nations in 2022.
Nobre now wonders whether his earlier study was too conservative. “What Luciana Gatti’s paper shows is that this whole area in the southern Amazon is becoming a carbon source.” He is convinced that, although the Amazon is not at the tipping point yet, it might be soon.
Susan Trumbore, director of the Max Planck Institute of Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany, is not a fan of using the term tipping point, a phrase with no precise definition, to discuss the Amazon. But she says that the forest’s future is in question. “We all think of a tipping point as it’s going to happen and it’s going to happen fast. I have a feeling that it’s going to be a gradual alteration of the ecosystem that we know is coming with climate change,” she says. Regardless of whether the change will be fast or slow, Trumbore agrees with the majority of scientists who study the Amazon that it is facing serious challenges that might have global ramifications.
Some of those challenges are directly linked to politics in the region. On Aug. 23 Gatti and her colleagues reported that assaults on the Amazon — including deforestation, burning and degradation — had increased dramatically in 2019 and 2020 as a result of declines in law enforcement. And that doubled the carbon emissions from the region.
The fate of the Amazon is on Gatti’s mind as she climbs a lattice tower in the Tapajós forest — one of the landmarks her pilots fly over as they collect air samples. The metal structure rattles and creaks as she ascends. On the deck, 15 stories above the ground, she gazes at the forest spreading in all directions out to the horizon. It looks unblemished. But she says that it is suffering.
“We are killing this ecosystem directly and indirectly,” she says, choking up. She wipes a tear from her eye. “This is what scares me terribly and why it’s affecting me so much when I come here. I’m observing the forest dying.”
Several months after visiting the Tapajós forest, I contact Erika Beringuer to ask about her research plots. Nearly the entire Amazon Basin is experiencing a deep drought combined with a series of intense heatwaves that began in August. Beringuer says that the area around Santarem has been enveloped in smoke from scores of wildfires. There are “hectares and hectares of burned forest,” including at least one of her plots, she says in a text. The smoke is too thick for her to assess the effect on her research so far.
“Something that I find particularly distressing is that feels like 2023 is a remake of 2015,” she says. “How many remakes will we have until there are some actions in place to avoid forest fires?”
These unique ecosystems face threats from invasive species, development and pollution.
The Place:
Nestled in valleys between the mountains of the Western Ghats of southern India are pockets of tropical evergreen forests. These forests are better known by the local name sholas. Sholas are separated by montane grasslands spread across the rolling slopes, forming habitat complexes that date back 20,000 years. These habitat mosaics are found on isolated mountain tops, distinguished from lower reaches by their cooler climate, like islands in a sea of clouds. Hence the name: Shola Sky Islands.
Why it matters:
The shola-grassland habitat complexes are home to many endemic species across all taxa, a number of which are also endangered. Nilgiri tahrs (Nilgiritragus hylocrius), for example, are an endangered ungulate found only in Shola Sky Islands above 14,000 feet. Nilgiri langurs (Semnopithecus johnii), a vulnerable primate, are also restricted to these hilly areas. In 2017 laughingthrushes in Shola Sky Islands were discovered to represent a previously undescribed genus, with four distinct species separated by wide gaps in the mountain ranges. Named Montecincla, this genus is a striking example of the isolation of these sky islands.
Doddabetta Peak is one of the places where you can get a good glimpse of an endangered Nilgiri laughingthrush. Photo: Nisha Bhakat
The aptly named resplendent shrub frog (Raorchestes resplendens) is known from only two sky islands within the 37-square-mile Eravikulam National Park. It is one of many species found in just a few Shola Sky Islands. New species continue to be discovered there, including a jumping spider, Pancorius sebastiani, just described in November.
The importance of Shola Sky Islands reaches beyond wildlife. They are home to many tribal groups including the Todas, Kattunayakans, Kotas and Kurumbas. Their lives and cultures are intricately entwined with the shola-grassland ecosystems, and many people continue to depend on them for sustenance.
Additionally, sholas have often been likened to sponges for their ability to retain water, and they feed numerous streams and ultimately major rivers like the Cauvery. This affects the lives and livelihoods of millions of people downstream.
The threat:
Over the past several centuries, human activities have chipped away at these unique ecosystems. Both grasslands and sholas have been razed for plantations that grow tea, coffee, cardamom and other crops. After 1856 under British colonial rule, nonnative tree species such as eucalyptus (Eucalyptus globulus) and Australian blackwood (Acacia melanoxylon) were introduced to increase timber and firewood production. That has come at the cost of native flora and birds like Nilgiri pipits (Anthus nilghiriensis).
The loss of grassland habitat to exotic tree invasion also puts human-nature relations at risk. Among the affected are the Todas, who use specific native grass species — plants that are getting harder to find — to build their traditional temples.
Many of these mountains are also popular hill stations that are seeing increasing tourism pressure, particularly in summer. The soaring footfall is burdening a waste-management system already stretched to its limits. Untreated waste leads to soil and water pollution, the spread of disease, and the increased risk of human-animal conflict. Open garbage dumps tend to be lucrative foraging grounds for gaurs and sloth bears, especially if the surrounding habitat is a resource-poor exotic tree plantation.
Natural forests and grasslands have been replaced by tea estates in the In vast regions of the Shola Sky Islands. Photo: Nisha Bhakat
Climate change, of course, poses an additional level of concern. Species endemic to the sky islands are at particular risk since their climatic niche is already small. As temperatures rise, the size of the sky islands can effectively shrink.
My place in this place:
As a researcher for the National Center for Biological Sciences, I’ve been studying endemic birds in the Nilgiris region of the Western Ghats for the past year. Even finding shola patches has become its own task, leading me to realize the extent of habitat loss and fragmentation. The hills are now dominated by plantations instead of grasslands and forests. And I’ve seen the effect of increasing development, more tourism, and inadequate waste management.
The sight of endangered Nilgiri laughingthrushes congregating at a garbage dump to feed on Maggi (Indian instant ramen) is something I won’t forget.
Who’s protecting it now:
There are several protected areas in the region looked after by the state forest departments. However, many of the sholas lie outside of these protected areas. Nongovernmental organizations such as the Keystone Foundation, Nature Conservation Foundation, Bombay Natural History Society, Shola Trust, Wildlife Conservation Society India, Centre for Wildlife Studies, Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, and many more have also stepped up to carry out research and conservation work in the landscape.
What this place needs:
To save what’s left of this unique ecosystem, strict regulations are needed to adequately manage waste and sewage-treatment facilities, early warning systems to reduce human-wildlife conflict, and collaboration with local leaders. More research on how to reduce the heavy impacts of tourism would help, as well as ecological restoration of degraded forests and plantations.
A female grey junglefowl, endemic to Central and South India, has fallen victim to a speeding vehicle near Ooty, upper Nilgiris where an intricate network of roads weaves through remnant forest patches and timber plantations. Heavy tourist pressure ensures busy traffic. Photo: Nisha Bhakat
Lessons from the fight:
It’s easier to prescribe mitigation measures than to put them into practice, as on-the-ground realities tend to be far more complex than they appear on paper. Currently, the same tea and coffee plantations that have negative impacts on the environment are crucial to the economic security of hundreds of thousands of people. Such is the case with tourism as well.
But there are measures that can help. Many scientists have called for ecological restoration of the timber plantations strewn across the hills. Even the Madras High Court directed the removal of exotic plants from the Western Ghats nearly a decade ago. While this seems a massive venture, work has already begun.
And the Keystone Foundation is working with Indigenous communities on ecosystem restoration in the region. Traditional ecological knowledge held by these communities, in partnership with modern scientific research backed by sufficient funding and governmental support, is critical for restoring these habitats.
Share your stories:Do you live in or near a threatened habitat or community, or have you worked to study or protect endangered wildlife? You’re invited to share your stories in our ongoing features, Protect This Place and Species Spotlight.
The popular app can help you identify species, but its global community of naturalists is contributing even more to biodiversity protection.
A lot has changed since 2008. That’s when Ken-ichi Ueda turned his master’s project at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Information into a website called iNaturalist, which allowed people to post pictures and help identify species.
Since then iNaturalist has grown as technology has evolved — first becoming a mobile app in 2011 and eventually adding more sophisticated machine-learning models to streamline the identification of plants and animals.
It’s also grown in numbers. When Scott Loarie — now codirecting with Ueda — joined in 2010, he was the 477th user. Today the platform has almost 3 million users across the world who have recorded 150 million observations of 430,000 species. That’s made iNaturalist the leading source for biodiversity data for the majority of species — data that’s been used in more than 4,000 scientific papers.
That growth has come amidst a changing world. Global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, and species extinctions are occurring at 1,000 times the natural rate. iNaturalist’s data on hundreds of thousands of species can help us better understand some of the ways global changes are affecting individual species — and spur action for better protections, says Loarie.
The Revelator spoke to him about the conservation potential of iNaturalist, the biodiversity questions artificial intelligence can help answer, and what he’s learned from his 27,000 observations posted to the platform.
How has iNaturalist evolved?
I met Ken-ichi in the fall of 2010, two years after he started iNaturalist. At that time I was a postdoc at Stanford, and my research was focused on trying to scale and find new ways to generate and deal with biodiversity data. I immediately quit academia and got involved.
We ran iNaturalist as an LLC for five years, and then in 2011 we launched the first mobile app. In 2014 the California Academy of Sciences invited us to join them as an initiative of the museum. We were at Cal Academy for three more years, and then National Geographic also got involved. We ran another six years as a joint initiative between Cal Academy and Nat Geo. At the end of that contract, everybody realized it was a good time for us to spin off as an independent nonprofit organization, [which we did in July].
Initially iNaturalist was a website, which was combining some photo-sharing things that you could do on sites like Flickr with taxonomic labeling. Increasingly it’s been something that people are experiencing using on their mobile devices. When we launched, the idea that everybody would have a camera and a GPS in their pocket wasn’t a reality. Now obviously that’s totally changed, and I think a huge amount of iNaturalist’s growth has been on the backs of that.
Scott Loarie. Photo: Courtesy
Secondly, when iNaturalist started it was all crowdsourcing. You would post a picture of a butterfly and then you’d have to wait for someone in the community to say, “Hey, this is a western swallowtail.” But then in 2017 we were approached by a bunch of machine-learning researchers who were interested in facial recognition computer-vision work. They said, “You have the biggest data set of labeled images of living things. We would love to do some more research on this.” We realized we were in a position to use our own data to train the artificial intelligence to help recognize species automatically.
The AI is really just a synthesis of the expertise that’s already in our own community.
What can the platform help people do?
Most people think of iNaturalist as a place that gets species identified. A typical use case is that you’re in your backyard, you see this butterfly that interests you and take out your phone and take a picture of it. The iNaturalist app will identify it and tell you this is a western swallowtail.
What excites me more about that is that you can share that observation with the global community on iNaturalist, which can give you some context. They can help with the identification. A lot of times artificial intelligence isn’t perfectly accurate. They can also tell you something interesting about it, “Hey, this is really weird. These aren’t normally found this time of year.” And it’s that interaction with the community where a lot of the learning happens.
iNaturalist has become this really important source of biodiversity data. At the moment it’s producing most of the biodiversity data for most species around the globe. It’s an important tool for generating the biodiversity data that we need to help come up with solid conservation strategies and outcomes. But we’ve also realized that just as important is that what we’re doing is also connecting people in nature and getting them excited about what’s in their backyards.
You personally have 27,000 observations recorded on the platform. What have you learned?
I think that the ecosystem that you’re in wherever you are is such an important lens. It’s so exciting for me when I go visit a place I’ve never been before to just think about what kind of things live there.
It’s funny you mentioned the number of observations because when I had kids and I had less time to go out and find new things and go to remote places, I’ve become a much larger identifier on iNaturalist. I have many more IDs than I have observations. And those are IDs I’ve made for other people.
It’s helped me vicariously live through what other people are seeing. All of a sudden, I can be in South Africa and see what kind of interesting creatures are showing up in the intertidal zone and how that differs from going around the corner to Mozambique. I think it just taps into this lifelong interest I’ve had in geography and biogeography.
How can iNaturalist help drive conservation?
Our main goal is to make sure that iNaturalist is a tool for conservation impact. The three ways that we’re doing that are by connecting people to nature, which changes their hearts and minds. That whole saying that “you conserve what you love, and you love what you understand,” I believe is true. I think that by getting people to get to know a butterfly in their backyard, they’re more likely to stand up for that butterfly in any sort of local conservation. Effective conservation often happens from the bottom up. It comes from local land-use policy and local government action and things like that.
Secondly, just by generating all this data and getting this data into the hands of the scientific community through publications, that’s where a lot of the policy and the advocacy happens at a different level. We know at least 4,000 scientific papers have been published using iNaturalist data.
An observation of a western swallowtail on iNaturalist. Photo: newpawpaw, iNaturalist (CC BY-NC 4.0 DEED)
The third way is that this community isn’t just monitoring biodiversity — they’re also taking steps to steward the land. We see a lot of local naturalist groups who use iNaturalist to do a “bioblitz,” which are these monitoring events where people come together and see how many species are in a certain area. But they’re also taking steps to improve the habitat. Maybe they’re removing invasive species or bringing back native plants to help pollinators.
Are you seeing users recording information about how climate change and extinction are affecting ecosystems?
Every day we’ll see a paper published or some article in the popular media about one of three big changes. The first is that native species are eroding away. The classic one is the pika at the top of a mountain that has nowhere to move. The range of the pika is getting smaller and smaller every year as the planet gets warmer.
The second is that climate refugee story, which is that all of a sudden we’re seeing species off the coast that have never been seen there before — it’s the march of climate refugees moving as the climate changes. The third isn’t just a climate change story, but we see invasive species show up and really have an impact.
I think the climate change story has turned conservation on its head in some really important ways. The conservation plan used to be that we had to protect these pieces of land. If we can get enough of these species and these pieces of protected land, our job is done.
But now we have to have enough capacity to monitor these species as they’re shifting with the climate and hopping from one piece of land to another to make sure we don’t lose any on the way.
We’ve been using machine-learning tools to synthesize iNaturalist data to try to get at some of biogeography questions, such as: Can we really detect if a species is showing up at a weird time of year or a weird area, or a species is actually eroding away, or a new invasive species is showing up, or climate refugees are moving?
I think that’s really exciting because it combines our mission, which is really to have conservation impact, with some of the things that we’ve shown we can do with computer vision, which is take this data and use it to train these really complicated machine-learning models to pull out some really interesting insight.
It’s a much more dynamic problem, and I think it demands a lot more real-time information, which iNaturalist is really good at collecting.
Ocean waters warmed by climate change could open the door for marine invasive species in one of the world’s most pristine ecosystems.
Hundreds of scientists journey to Antarctica each year to work in the continent’s 77 research stations, used by some 30 countries. Many are there to study how the unique ecology and endemic wildlife in this faraway land is changing with human pressures like climate change.
These scientists, along with the 50,000 tourists and dozens of fishing boats in the offshore waters, pose a threat themselves: accidentally providing passage to nonnative species. Antarctica and its waters have remained relatively isolated, thanks to its distance from other places, frigid temperatures and ocean currents.
But in recent decades an increase in human traffic and pressures from climate change are opening the door for invasive species — those nonnatives that can rapidly spread, outcompeting native plants and animals, or become unchecked predators.
So far 11 nonnative invertebrates, including mites and an earthworm, have established themselves on the warmer parts of the continent.
In the water it’s a slightly different story.
A 2019 study in Global Change Biology reported five nonnative species in the coastal waters, including a Chilean mussel and a crab. But so far none of these visitors has established populations. And scientists are urging vigilance to keep it that way.
“For now, Antarctica and the Southern Ocean remain the least invaded marine regions on the planet and represent humanity’s last chance to demonstrate that we can manage and mitigate the risks of invasive species at a continental scale,” Arlie McCarthy, a researcher with the British Antarctic Survey and lead author of the study, wrote in an op-ed for The Conversation. “If we do not, climate change will open the door to the world and our neglect will transform the iconic ecosystems we love.”
Staving Off Invaders
Natural forces are Antarctica’s best protection. The ocean current that churns off its shores, known as the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, pushes floating species away from the continent. That defense is buoyed by cold water that makes survival extremely difficult for nonnative species, who aren’t especially adapted to the environment.
Sea ice creates another barrier to movement, with less than one-seventh of the coastline ice-free in summer and none of it ice-free in winter.
“Individuals that manage to cross the Polar Front are confronted with ice in all its forms, freezing temperatures, physical disturbance from icebergs, and strong seasonal variation in light availability and water chemistry,” researchers explained in the Global Change Biology study. “These extreme conditions often sit at or are beyond the physiological limits of potentially invading marine species.”
This natural shield, however, is being weakened by climate-change-warmed waters.
“Changes in physical factors (decreasing ice cover, increasing water temperature) will, if unchecked, in time create an environment more hospitable to nonnative species and less hospitable to native species, reducing the resistance of Antarctic ecosystems (Antarctic biodiversity) to establishment of nonnative marine species,” wrote the researchers.
Most marine species are likely to arrive on the hulls of ships, known as biofouling, although researchers note that microplastics could be a future concern.
Ships arrive from ports all over the world — some even making the journey from Arctic to Antarctic, which could carry some cold-loving organisms with them. While tourist ships usually only dock at each port for a few hours, research and resupply vessels can linger for weeks, providing ample time for stowaways.
Visitors in Antarctica. Photo: Ian Duffy, CC BY-NC 2.0 DEED
More than 180 ships were involved in more than 500 voyages active in the area between 2017 and 2018 — a big jump from the 30 vessels and 75-100 voyages in 1960. Fishing boats and those carrying researchers or their supplies create other opportunities.
Although it’s difficult with ocean currents, new species could arrive in the Southern Ocean and Antarctica by rafting on aggregates of algae. Millions of these so-called kelp rafts are afloat in the Southern Ocean.
“We found nonnative kelps, with a wide range of ‘hitchhiking’ passenger organisms, on an Antarctic beach inside the flooded caldera of an active volcanic island,” wrote researchers in a 2020 study in Scientific Reports. “This is the first evidence of nonnative species reaching the Antarctic continent alive on kelp rafts.”
Of the four “passenger” species found alive on the nonnative kelp, the most concerning, they said, is Membranipora membranacea, a kind of bryozoan invertebrate that can form across seaweed, limiting its ability to reproduce and grow.
The warmer waters inside the caldera may have proved a tolerable temperature, while much of the surrounding coastal waters are too cold — at least for now.
Growing Risks
If nonnative marine species do begin to establish themselves in the Southern Ocean, their impact can ripple across the food web, a forthcoming study concluded.
“We found that these invasive species can actually cause really catastrophic declines in native species abundances,” says lead author Oakes Holland, a postdoctoral research fellow with Securing Antarctica’s Environmental Future, an initiative of the Australian Research Council. “Things like mytilid bivalves can reproduce quickly and just smother all the hard surfaces on the bottom of the ocean, which will push other species out.”
Northern Pacific seastars (Asterias amurensis), known to be voracious predators, are another concern. So too are crabs, a “niche of predator that has been absent from the region for millions of years,” she says.
Asterias amurensis. Photo by Dean Franklin, CC BY 2.0 DEED
While Holland’s work has identified species to be wary of, she cautions that what we don’t know is even more problematic. The icy waters of the Southern Ocean are difficult to study. “At the moment, it’s just such an enormous area and it’s so hard to even know where to start looking,” she says.
There’s not much known yet about what organisms are being carted along on ship hulls either. Current research on nonnative marine species comes from studying just seven ships, including a confiscated illegal fishing vessel.
“We’re very much in the infancy stage of understanding where the biggest risks are going to come from, specifically on ships, and then how best to manage them in a way that’s not going to be economically limiting,” she says.
Visiting scientists could be part of the problem — and solution.
When underwater drones and submersibles are deployed for research, the collected data could be mined using machine learning to search for nonnative species, she says. Researchers have also recommended using environmental DNA, the genetic material shed by organisms into the air or water, that can help detect a species’ presence in the environment even when it hasn’t been seen.
And although the coastal waters of the continent are vast, efforts to ramp up biosecurity should focus on the most highly visited locations that are likely to be “invasion hotspots” — like the Antarctic Peninsula and the South Shetland Islands, say researchers.
The threat of invasive species is only one of the mounting pressures facing Antarctic wildlife, including warming waters, melting sea ice, ocean acidification and pollution. But broad conservation actions, like increasing marine protected areas, could help on all fronts.
“I think when people are thinking of Antarctica, they’re not necessarily thinking of ugly little worms on the seafloor,” says Holland. “They’re thinking of penguins and seals and whales. So if we get marine protected areas for emperor penguins, for example, then everything that lives underneath that is going to benefit.”
In 2023 wild animals stretched boundaries, set records, and inspired conservation across the world.
It’s tradition to honor the past year’s human achievements. From peacemakers and scientists to athletes and artists, we celebrate those who inspire us. But what about the wildlife who surround us who make up the biodiversity that sustains us? Each year standout members of those populations also set records and push boundaries, many with lasting results.
Consider P-22, also known as the “Hollywood cat.” In 2012 this young mountain lion surprised biologists and captured hearts by establishing a decade-long residency in the Griffith Park area of Los Angeles. Stealthily threading through backyards and freeways, he demonstrated the value of landscape connectivity, even in urban areas. And though he died in 2022, he inspired a massive fundraising campaign that helped build the largest wildlife bridge in the United States, to be completed in 2025 over California’s 10-lane Highway 101. In this way he changed the world.
Other animal pioneers accomplished similarly remarkable feats in 2023. Ocelots, grizzlies and many more used their innate skills and courage to recover lost territory, expand their ranges, or simply survive against the odds. Some were helped by human actions like stream restoration, while others, like P-22, created opportunities to deepen scientific knowledge and inspire conservation.
Here are some of their stories.
Grizzlies Edge Toward the Plains
This year multiple media reports illustrated how young grizzly bears continue to disperse beyond present-day populations in Montana — even to the brink of the Great Plains. Last July, following years of rumors, biologists confirmed evidence of one or two grizzlies both north and south of Interstate 90 in south-central Montana. And in November, a trail cam 200 miles to the north captured a lone grizzly in the Missouri River Breaks region of north-central Montana. It’s the first confirmation of grizzlies in any of these near-plains areas since their extirpation more than a century ago.
Grizzly bears knocking at the door of the Great Plains is a big deal. For most of the 20th century, western Montana hosted three isolated fragments of the West’s original grizzly bear population. Separated by vast distances and dangerous roads, the precarious holdouts centered around the Yaak River and Yellowstone and Glacier national parks, where the bears became associated with remote mountains. But before their extirpation, grizzlies had roamed the West’s deserts, coasts, forests and the Great Plains grasslands, where no one knows how far east they wandered.
Decades of intentional conservation serve as the backstory here. First, the 1973 Endangered Species Act mandated restoring grizzly habitat in the pockets where they survived. The work slowly helped grizzlies rebound, and today they increasingly tease crossing between recovery areas, long a holy grail of recovery efforts.
Second, changing attitudes and conservation outside of the recovery areas have laid groundwork for resumed human-grizzly cohabitation. For instance, the loner in the Missouri Breaks was on ranchlands owned by American Prairie, which since 2016 has restored habitat and introduced bear-friendly livestock practices.
And grizzlies aren’t the only creatures coming home again.
California’s Trendsetters
California was another scene of wildlife accomplishments last year. It started in May, when skiers aboard a Mammoth Mountain Ski Area gondola spotted a wolverine loping across a ski run. Lope turned to sprint as a skier, who likely never saw the animal, launched off a nearby jump. After additional reports, wildlife officials confirmed it was the first known wolverine in the region in 101 years. It’s the latest report of wolverines reoccupying historical ranges in California, Oregon, Washington and Alberta, Canada. The news came just in time for wolverines to finally make it onto the endangered species list after years of effort by conservationists.
Next, August brought news that wolves have established a pack in the southern Sierras for the first time in over a century. Genetic testing of scat found one of the females is a direct descendant of OR7, a young male disperser who in 2011 famously became the first wild wolf to enter California since the early 1900s. Ecologists believe conditions created by the 2021 Windy Fire influenced the new pack’s habitat selection.
California condor 87. Photo: Michael Quinn/National Park Service
Then, in September, six California condors repeatedly ventured north from their Pinnacles National Park homeland to Mount Diablo in the San Francisco Bay area, becoming the first condors seen in that area in over a century. Biologists speculate the sorties may indicate new nesting territories. Condors, who strongly favor undeveloped spaces, survive today because of a captive-breeding program and a California ban on hunting with leaded ammunition. Two of the Bay Area individuals had previously been treated for lead poisoning, while another was trapped to remove an aluminum can from his beak — a reminder of humans’ role in preserving this species.
The Pink Wave
Lots of birds survive hurricanes. But the flamingos who got sucked into Hurricane Idalia last August, and who then slingshot over 1,000 miles from their native Yucatan to the upper Midwest, deserve a special nod. Following the storm, dozens of them turned up in wetlands around Pennsylvania, Ohio and Wisconsin. By fall they appeared ready to migrate back south.
And while surviving a hurricane that throws you across the continent is noteworthy, there’s a deeper story. In 2018 a lone flamingo turned up in north Florida — well north of its current range — following Hurricane Michael. He’s still there, delighting birders who have nicknamed him Pinky. And before Pinky, Hurricane Allison in 1995 and Hurricane Agnes in 1972 also appear to have temporarily swept flamingos into north Florida. Like Idalia, the storms passed Cuba and the Yucatan, where the birds are abundant. The question now is whether last year’s wayward waders will return to Mexico or, like Pinky, settle into Florida — perhaps offering Pinky a mate.
If they choose the sunshine state, where they are rarely seen north of Tampa Bay, they could reclaim habitat that has been missing flamingos since the plumage trade of the early 1900s wiped them out.
Lil’ Jefe of the Borderlands
The ocelot caught on a game cam in Arizona’s Huachuca Mountains on July 4 is as much of a trooper as P-22. But instead of urban obstacles, this feline overcame ranchlands, roads, mining activities, USDA poison traps, and an increasingly fortified border wall, which has brought additional roads and deforestation. Nicknamed Lil’ Jefe — a nod to the famous jaguar known from the same region — his presence shows the habitat potential of the Sky Islands region but highlights the threats to wildlife from the growing wall.
Fewer than 100 ocelots may remain in the United States, mostly in Texas. Their U.S. population is the northern reach of a range that stretches south to Argentina. Biologists believe Lil’ Jefe, who was spotted just five miles north of the border, has appeared on game cams over 150 times since 2012. He’s the only known ocelot in Arizona and one of only five — all males — seen in the state since 2009. He likely dispersed from northern Mexico, a place he can’t return to and that others can’t migrate from, due to the wall.
Game cameras in the Sky Islands have also picked up ringtails, mountain lions, black bears and others, an indication of the region’s enormous potential and need for protection.
Honorable Mentions: A Hellbender Dad, Recovered Darter, and Marathon Beluga
On a human-dominated landscape, sometimes simply reproducing is a bold achievement. So cheers to the endangered Ozark hellbender dad who in 2023 became the first captive-bred giant salamander known to reproduce in the wild. Raised at the Saint Louis Zoo, he was collected as an egg in 2013 and released near Missouri’s Current River in 2019.
Congratulations to the Okaloosa darter, a small, green-yellow fish who graduated in 2023 from the Endangered Species List. The darter was listed in 1973 and its recovery was aided by conservation work at Florida’s Eglin Air Force Base.
And welcome back to the extremely rare frosted elfin caterpillar, who turned up in abundance among wildflowers in the Montague Plains of western Massachusetts. The nonmigratory species suffers from decades of habitat loss, but officials credit the new population to habitat restoration that has also brought back whip-poor-wills, turkey, deer, and black bear.
And the beluga whale that swam over 500 miles up Alaska’s Yukon River gets recognition for showing that sometimes wildlife enjoy exploration as much as we do.
These mostly cheery tales do not reverse today’s sobering news on climate and biodiversity. But they do highlight both the resiliency of wildlife and the promise of conservation work.
For instance, the 1973 Endangered Species Act — which celebrated its 50th anniversary last month — provides critical protections for grizzlies, wolves, darters, and others. But the law wouldn’t amount to much if it weren’t for the hard conservation work conducted by dedicated humans, including pulling cans off condor beaks or restoring prairies and wetlands.
Technology helps, too. Hellbenders released into the wild, for instance, carry chips that biologists use to check on their wellbeing, while game cameras and genetic testing help document the advances of ocelots and others.
Even as wildlife around the world continues to face perilous and unprecedented declines, we can expect this blend of legal protections, human effort, and technology breed more encouraging stories in the year ahead.
Researchers in Florida are testing an artificial reef planted with live corals.
Coral reefs support vibrant marine ecosystems, stimulate tourism and fishing industries, and protect shorelines from tropical storms and erosion. But reefs around the globe have been hit hard by pollution, overfishing and climate change, which is causing increasingly frequent and severe coral bleaching. Scientists predict severe bleaching on 99% of the world’s reefs within this century unless we reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Saving coral reefs requires major systemic changes — dramatic cuts in energy consumption, switching to renewable energy, managing overfishing and pollution, and restoring target reefs.
Restoration efforts have now become a priority for many scientists. This series looks at some of those efforts.
This boxy wind-wave tank, part of the Alfred C. Glassell, Jr. SUSTAIN Laboratory, is 60 feet long, 7 feet tall, and 23 feet wide. A jet engine creates winds up to 170 mph and mechanical paddles make waves; putting the two together can simulate a Category 5 hurricane. The tank is clear on all sides, high enough to walk under, and strong enough for scientists to sit on top so they can monitor the action inside.
A multidisciplinary team at the university is using this tank to study how artificial reef structures stand up to wind and waves and how well live corals planted on those structures survive and grow. This work could lead to a unique combination of “grey” or human-built infrastructure, such as concrete seawalls, and “green” or natural systems like coral organisms — resulting in systems that provide both shoreline protection and coral reef habitat. A collaboration between the university and the city of Miami Beach, the project is called Engineering Coastal Resilience Through Hybrid Reef Restoration, or ECoREEF.
Florida is the only state in the continental United States with a shallow coral reef near its coast, extending some 350 miles from the Dry Tortugas at the tip of the Keys in the Gulf of Mexico to north of Palm Beach. Studies show that shallow coral reefs can buffer up to 97% of the energy from waves, reducing flooding and helping to prevent loss of life, property damage, and erosion from storms. But nearly 90% of corals on this reef have died due to climate change, hurricanes, disease and human development. Add in South Florida, with its low-lying typography and its location within the tropical storm belt, the result is a heavily populated coastline extremely vulnerable to the effects of climate change.
A simulated ocean tank helps researchers study how coral reefs affect waves. Photo: University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science
ECoREEF joins other projects, some decades-long, working to restore Florida coral reefs, which provide habitat for hundreds of marine species — including green sea turtles, parrotfish and stingrays — while supporting the state’s tourism industry and protecting its shorelines and structures from wave energy. The reef-restoration efforts include studying the idea of moving hardier corals into degraded areas, outplanting hand-raised coral fragments onto existing reefs, coaxing corals to reproduce sexually in laboratories, and boosting natural sexual reproduction of the organisms in the wild.
“The idea behind ECoREEf is installation of structures that can host corals but also provide wave energy dissipation,” says Landolf Rhode-Barbarigos, an associate professor in the College of Engineering.
After testing designs in the tank, in March the team deployed two types of structures in 14 feet of water about 750 feet off the shore at Miami Beach. One design is a hollow trapezoid structure with limestone boulders on its outer surface to mimic the texture of coral reefs and attract marine life. The other is a configuration of hollow, hexagonal units perforated to let water flow through, called Sustainable Estuarine and Marine Revetments, or Seahives. Both are made of concrete.
It’s less expensive to test and alter a model in the tank than an actual structure out in the ocean, says Brian Haus, chair of the Department of Ocean Sciences at the Rosenstiel School. Post-testing, models can be scaled up.
“The tank testing gives us a model that tells us this structure dissipates this much wave energy,” says Rhode-Barbarigos. “Then we use those findings combined with mathematical models to design structures that can withstand the actual waves.”
There’s increasing recognition that green infrastructure is an effective and cost-efficient alternative to gray infrastructure. But once green systems are lost or degraded, it can take a long time to restore them. The artificial infrastructure can help speed up that restoration.
The physical structures are well-developed at this point, but adding living coral makes the system much more complex — one reason for the multi-disciplinary nature of the project. “We’ve blurred the lines between ecology and engineering to think of not only optimizing the structures but what types of corals we use,” Rhode-Barbarigos says.
A coral fragment three months after outplanting. Photo: University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science
He points out that data from the project can show the value of the combination. “It makes a different type of argument for coral restoration. If we can combine coral restoration and shoreline protection, we have a stronger argument.”
So far, the work clearly supports the argument of combining the two for shoreline protection. One study showed that coral structures — the calcium-based skeletons these organisms create — can significantly enhance the wave-reducing capability of an artificial reef, depending on sea conditions and characteristics of the structure. A trapezoidal artificial coral reef model was found to reduce up to 98% of the wave energy, with coral contributing an estimated 56% of the total. Additional testing found that adding skeletons of staghorn corals (Acropora cervicornis) mitigated up to an additional 10% of wave height and 14% of wave energy on submerged artificial reef compared to those without corals.
After the structures were placed in the water, marine scientists from the Rosenstiel School added live corals, including great star, mustard hill, knobby brain and symmetrical brain corals. These species all are stony corals, which can create massive reefs over time.
“On July 19, we outplanted about 500 corals, fragments we took from parent colonies and grew out either here at UM or at our offshore nurseries,” says Emily Esplandiu, a research associate in the school’s Coral Reef Restoration Lab. While many offshore coral nurseries hang staghorn coral fragments from PVC trees using monofilament, this lab uses an adhesive to affix corals to a plug that’s screwed into flat trays. The trays are easier to transport from the nursery to the testbed structure, she adds. Engineers are now incorporating the plug screws into the design of the artificial reef structures, making it easier to attach corals.
The team planned to outplant another 500 corals until extremely high temperatures hit Florida waters in late summer. The scientists instead found themselves bringing corals from their offshore nurseries into land-based facilities. “At temperatures of about 30.5 degrees Celsius (87 degrees Fahrenheit), we can’t outplant or move corals offshore,” Esplandiu says. The plan is to finish the planting by the end of this year, once temperatures fall below that threshold for at least a week.
Meanwhile, the scientists monitored the corals already on the structures, documenting about 80% survivorship. However, as temperatures continued to rise, on Aug. 17 the monitoring teams observed some paling (a precursor to bleaching), and on Sept. 8, they saw bleaching.
But there was some good news: The scientists observed differences in the amount of bleaching among species and genotypes within species. They plan to take a closer look to identify those least affected and use those hardier genotypes for future fragmenting and outplanting. For example, the original outplanting included four or more genotypes of star coral, Esplandiu says, and one genotype all bleached while another all remained healthy.
Haus notes that the ultimate goal is to create larger infrastructure to provide more protection. “Beach renourishment and dune reconstruction are no longer enough with sea-level rise,” he says. This effort could put corals in new areas as well as those that historically had reefs — good news for coastal residents and marine life.
Coral monitoring. Photo: University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science
“People are realizing it’s a crisis, all of it — coral loss, climate change, sea level rise,” says Haus. “The goal is to develop solutions that are ecosystem friendly and indeed help the ecosystem. Of course, it won’t be enough if we don’t change. We need to stop the source of the problem because emissions are just going to get worse.”
For the Coral Reef Restoration Lab, the next step is to grow out thousands more coral fragments for planting on additional structures. Working with engineers to design structures that work better for the corals has been exciting, Esplandiu says. “We learned that corals do best with high water flow, because that flow brings nutrients. We know putting a coral on the top versus the side of a structure is different. We can work together to find literally the specific spot on a structure that is best to put corals.”
“Up until now, the only outplanting we had done was on the natural reef, which is mostly degraded in Florida,” Esplandiu says. “We see a lot of restoration sites crashing after three to five years because they’re facing the same stressors the corals were to begin with. The reef framework is the most important part of the reef, and we’ve lost so many corals that they’re no longer able to create that framework.”
Coral restoration efforts are something of a finger in the dike, scientists acknowledge, and ultimately won’t succeed without continued efforts to change the things that are causing coral loss in the first place, such as greenhouse gas emissions, overfishing and pollution.
But the test structures offer a way to replace some of the natural reefs that have been lost, and they provide an alternative to putting corals back onto degraded reefs. The team has already documented a large fish community around the test structures.
The combination of artificial reefs and stress-tolerant corals could contribute to restoring both the coastal protection and marine habitat provided by healthy natural reefs. In other words, work in the university’s indoor ocean is helping to heal the real ocean just outside its windows.
By providing both mitigation and adaption, dam removal can lower greenhouse gas emissions and restore carbon sinks.
As the climate crisis escalates, a huge amount of attention and money is being focused on climate solutions. These can be divided into two categories: solutions that pursue “mitigation,” which lowers greenhouse gas emissions, and those that pursue methods to adapt to climate impacts to increase human and ecological resiliency.
Dams, of course, create enormous environmental harms, many of which have already been described in scientific literature. Equally well documented is the fact that removing dams can restore seriously damaged ecosystems. But missing from almost every climate-solution story and study is how dam removal can be key for both mitigation and adaptation.
Here are 10 reasons why dam removal fights climate change:
1. Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Dam removal reduces greenhouse gas emissions, especially methane. An increasing amount of scientific evidence, including from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, indicates that dam/reservoir systems can be a significant methane emitter. In some cases, hydropower dam projects can emit as much total greenhouse gases as a coal-fired powerplant.
2. Natural Flows
Dam removal allows rivers to meander through their historic valleys, plains and forests. In so doing, rivers transport surrounding organic material, such as decomposed plants and soil, to sea. Once there, much of the material sinks to the bottom of the ocean, where it’s transformed and locked into rock formations. These river plumes, which can extend for miles into the ocean, are carbon sinks.
3. Carbon Sinks
Dam removal allows landscapes that have been flooded to regrow their native vegetation: also carbon sinks. In the United States alone, the largest 150 reservoirs submerge over seven million acres of land. In the Canadian province of Quebec, over 6 million acres of previously forested land is covered by reservoirs. Globally, there are likely over 100 million acres of land flooded by reservoirs.
Alewives returned by the millions after the Edwards and Ft. Halifax dams were removed in Maine. (Photo by John Burrows/ASF)
4. Biodiversity
One of most detrimental ecological impacts of climate change is the diminishment of biodiversity. The construction of dams and reservoirs exacerbate this loss of biodiversity by flooding riverine ecosystems that are biodiversity hotspots. Dam removal restores native biodiversity, a key climate adaptation strategy.
5. Forests
Healthy forests — especially old-growth forests — are key carbon sinks in many ecosystems of the world including the Pacific Northwest. Dam removal that restores the migration of anadromous fish, such as wild salmon, are key fertilizers for healthy forests as the fish swim upstream and die, replenishing the soil and ecosystem.
6. Sediment Transport
Climate change is causing rising sea levels that batter coasts and deplete beaches in California and across the planet. Dams block natural sediment from flowing to the sea; dam removal will allow sediment to reach estuaries and coasts where it can help provide the material to rebuild beaches. Sediment in river deltas can also help protect against salt-water encroachment, worsened by rising seas, in places like the Mississippi River Delta.
7. Fish Populations
In parts of the United States and elsewhere, dams have decimated fish populations that are a principle food source for local and Native peoples. Dam removal allows fish to naturally spawn, reproduce, and migrate along vast stretches of rivers. As climate change intensifies, freshwater river fish are increasingly important as a human food source.
Falling levels visible in Lake Mead on the Colorado River. (Photo by Harshil Shah, CC BY-ND 2.0)
8. Water Supply
Reservoirs, large and small, allow vast amounts of water to evaporate off their surfaces, and this problem gets worse as temperatures rise. As just one example, in the drought- and overuse-plagued Colorado River in the southwest, it’s estimated that 10% of the entire flow of the river evaporates every year. Removing dams and storing water in underground aquifers makes water supplies more resilient in a warming world.
9. Climate Resilience
Climate change is intensifying extreme weather including rainfall, floods and melting glaciers. Most dams, large and small, were constructed to withstand a range of weather events that may no longer be the norm. Further, dams need an increasing amount of maintenance and repairs to withstand extreme floods. Recent massive floods in Libya and India that have caused large-scale dam collapses suggest that dam removal can increase the health and safety of downstream human settlements in the path of climate change.
10. Cooling Effect
As climate change causes the planet to warm, heat waves — especially in urban areas — cause heat stress and deaths. Not only do healthy flowing rivers provide a cooling effect to surrounding urban heat islands, but people increasingly use local rivers to stay cool on hot days. Dam removal ensures that rivers flow and stay cooler, cleaner, and healthier in a climate-changed world.
With more than 91,000 dams in the United States, it’s important to evaluate them all for removal as potential climate solutions. In many cases both mitigation and adaptation can be achieved in one single dam removal event. Few other climate solution projects of this breadth and magnitude exist.
While most other climate solutions involve building some type of structure or facility as a technical solution, dam removal involves tearing a structure down and letting natural ecological processes be restored. Such “nature-based solutions” that decrease the number of dams blocking rivers must be considered in the vast mix responses to the escalating climate crisis.
The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.
For families who can’t pay high upfront costs for solar energy, cooperatives offer a solution.
Rooftop solar has long been the preserve of the affluent. Solar adopters skew white and wealthy compared to the broader public, according to a report from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
The number of households installing solar across the country could be much higher, but millions of low-income homeowners don’t have enough capital to pay the upfront costs. While the price tag varies depending on location, incentives, and the type of solar panels, a typical 7-kilowatt rooftop solar system can cost between $17,400 and $24,000.
It can take many years to break even on that hefty investment, but since panels typically last for at least two decades and their costs are falling rapidly, homeowners can save thousands of dollars on their energy bills — if they can find that initial capital.
For those who can’t, there are some emerging alternatives. A growing movement of solar cooperatives is helping low-income households access those financial benefits, while decarbonizing the power sector.
Solar co-ops are groups of property owners who band together to build small solar projects for their communities. “It’s like putting panels on your own roof, except you put them somewhere else with a bunch of other people,” Dan Orzech, general manager at the Oregon Clean Power Cooperative, tells The Revelator.
Once installed, the electricity produced by the panels is injected into the grid and utilities pay for that power using a system called “net metering” that allows co-op members to slash their energy bills. Solar co-ops members own the solar arrays and can therefore take full advantage of federal and state incentives.
Building a solar co-op can be a daunting process that is often facilitated by organizations like Orzech’s and others including Co-op Power and the People’s Solar Energy Fund, to name a few.
One of the largest solar co-op organizers is Solar United Neighbors, which has helped 8,400 people across the United States install over 70 megawatts of solar capacity since 2007.
Solar doesn’t just come in handy during storms! We’ve seen how power can go out during extreme heatwaves, which is why a reliable resource like solar is especially important in hotter parts of the country! https://t.co/OMFhZODshK
— Solar United Neighbors (@SolarNeighbors) August 3, 2023
The nonprofit is seeing increased interest in solar co-ops because people want to lower their energy bills and “they’re concerned about the climate and the legacy they’re going to leave to their children and grandchildren,” says communications director Ben Delman.
But that’s not all. “Some people are also worried about the micro impacts of climate change, like what happens when a hurricane hits and the power goes out,” he says. “We’re seeing a lot of interest in Florida, because you can pair solar with batteries and keep the lights going when there is a blackout.”
Different Approaches
Solar co-op organizers follow different models, but they typically get a few dozen families together and help them negotiate a contract with solar installers that often offer bulk discounts. They also advise them on federal tax credits, as well as state and county-level solar incentives, and help them secure loans, grants, and other forms of funding from local governments and investors.
They also try to ensure that low- and middle-income families can gain access to solar energy. To that end, Cooperative Energy Futures in Minnesota doesn’t require credit checks or income verification “because that’s a barrier preventing a lot of low-income households to participate,” says Timothy DenHerder-Thomas, the organization’s general manager.
Their approach seems to be working: Between 38% and 50% of the approximately 700 people who subscribe to their solar projects are economically disadvantaged.
“Paying $25 or $30 less in your energy bill every month may not sound like much, but it’s money that you can use for groceries or medications,” he says. “It helps people who are struggling to make ends meet.”
The benefits spill over to nonmembers, too. For example, Cooperative Energy Futures tries to hire minority-owned companies to install solar panels. “There are also subcontractors and workforce development partners who are providing employment for Black and Brown workers,” DenHerder-Thomas adds.
Oregon Clean Power Cooperative follows a different approach based on community-based stock offerings that typically allow people who “want to see their money do something positive for the community” to invest around $7,000, Orzech says. The organization combines these investments with grants, tax credits, and donations to finance community solar and co-ops. Community solar projects are small solar farms owned by a third party and tend to offer fewer economic benefits but be ideal for renters.
The cooperative is now working on a solar project consisting of a 75 kW solar and battery system that will cut the power costs of low-income groups in the city of Talent, which was partially destroyed by the 2020 Almeda wildfire.
“This will allow them to lower their power bills by between 50% and 75%, but they will also be having some, albeit small, positive impact on the planet as a whole,” says Orzech. “I think it really gives people a new sense of power.”
The organization has also helped churches, libraries, schools, and at least one farm finance and develop solar projects. Its Oregon Shakespeare Festival Community Solar project was selected as a Sunny Awards winner by the U.S. Department of Energy for its efforts to increase access to clean energy among disadvantaged communities.
Ultimately solar co-ops could potentially help lower electricity prices for everyone because they tend to be in urban areas and don’t require expensive transmission infrastructure to distribute their power, says Crystal Huang, the cofounder of Oakland-based People Power Solar Cooperative.
The organization argues that the current system, under which utilities produce power and distribute it to households hundreds of miles away for a fee, is “inefficient, overpriced and unreliable” and has a huge environmental impact.
Instead, the People Power Solar Cooperative envisions using solar co-ops to create a not-for-profit decentralized energy system.
“Our relationship with energy doesn’t have to be just as consumers,” says Huang. “We can be part of cooperatives that own the energy and completely redesign what the energy system looks like.”
Boosting Efforts
Stakeholders say demand for solar co-ops is increasing rapidly, in large part thanks to efforts by the Biden administration to boost community solar generation from 3 gigawatts in 2020 to 20 gigawatts in 2025 and provide clean energy to five million families. This goal is part of the Justice40 Initiative, which seeks to ensure that disadvantaged communities receive 40% of the overall benefits of climate and clean energy investments.
Rooftop solar in California. Photo: Thomas Hart, (CC BY-NC 2.0)
In addition, the Inflation Reduction Act passed last year provides community solar projects with a 30% tax credit and bonus benefits for projects based in low-income communities or Tribal lands.
“The Inflation Reduction Act is a game changer for solar in the United States,” says Orzech. “Before we had to find tax equity investors and sign Power Purchase Agreements. The same model that large solar investors were using but downsized to a community level. It was a lot of work, but this legislation makes it simpler to leverage tax benefits for community solar.”
Growing Threats
States like New York, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Illinois are also helping solar co-ops, thanks to net-metering rules that pay a fair price for surplus power generated by solar projects that gets put back into the grid, stakeholders say.
“You basically get a one-to-one credit. The value of one electron is equal to what utilities compensate producers for,” says Delman. “But some utilities are essentially monopolies. They don’t like competition from rooftop solar.”
That’s what’s happening in California, where investor-owned utilities recently lowered the price they pay for the solar power that residential solar projects inject into the grid by around 75% and introduced a monthly charge for rooftop solar owners. The discounted rate will only apply to future projects.
The changes effectively slash the incentives that drive solar growth and will likely put solar power out of reach for low-income people in the Golden State, Huang says.
“Utilities are stopping community solar, or local solar as a whole, because it threatens their very lucrative business model. It threatens their existence,” she says.
California isn’t alone. Scores of other states are reviewing their net-metering policies or adding charges and fees that effectively undermine the economic benefits of residential solar, and by extension solar co-ops.
The Carolinas, Indiana, Michigan, Arizona, Utah, and Louisiana have implemented these types of policies, while Arkansas, Idaho, Virginia, and Washington state are considering similar measures, says Autumn Proudlove, associate director for policy and markets at the North Carolina Clean Energy Technology Center.
“I think ultimately residential solar isn’t going to stop growing, especially with these incentives from the federal government, but these state policies are eroding the value to customers in the compensation that they receive,” she says. “It makes solar less accessible for low-income communities because it’s not as valuable under these new structures unless you add battery storage to your system.”
Luckily the costs of battery storage are also decreasing, thanks in part to tax benefits in the Inflation Reduction Act, while states such as Illinois, New Hampshire, and Maryland offer additional incentives.
As a result, residents and co-ops are both more likely to install batteries to use all the power produced by their panels, instead of injecting it into the grid at a discount.
“That’s my prediction,” says Orzech. “But let’s see what happens.”
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