Wetlands can help remove nutrient pollution causing low-oxygen “dead zones.” But how much benefit we reap depends a lot on placement, a new study finds.
Summer in the Gulf of Mexico is a time to celebrate the region’s bounty, including its prized shrimp, which are the star of local festivals. But shrimpers this summer found themselves contending with another, competing event — the annual measuring of the Gulf’s “dead zone.”
This one doesn’t draw tourists, but instead scientists who calculate how large an area has become low enough in oxygen that it can kill fish and other marine life like shrimp.
This hypoxia stems from activities on land. When it rains, excess nutrients — mostly nitrogen and phosphorus from Midwest farm and livestock operations — wash into the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers. Those nutrients make their way to the Gulf, fueling an overgrowth of algae which deprive the waters of oxygen, driving away or killing marine life.
Over the past five years the average size of the Gulf of Mexico’s dead zone has stretched to more than 5,400 square miles. But these hypoxic areas are also found in other parts of the United States and across the world. And climate change, experts predict, will cause them to get bigger and persist for longer.
Map of the measured Gulf of Mexico hypoxia zone, July-August 2020. Image: LUMCON/NOAA
So what’s to be done?
Efforts to curb excess nutrients in waterways have so far included reducing the use of fertilizers or animal waste applied to agricultural fields and planting cover crops to limit runoff.
Protecting wetlands can also help. They slow the flow of water running off fields, and the roots of the plants absorb nutrient pollutants.
But do these types of efforts work? In a recent study published in Nature, researchers from the University of Waterloo and the University of Illinois Chicago found that efforts to restore wetlands in the United States “are often carried out in an ad hoc manner,” meaning they lack comprehensive strategy.
Most notably, they found that the areas where wetland restoration has been undertaken don’t necessarily coincide with nitrogen hotspots.
That means we’re not making the best use of these natural water purifiers.
If we were to target restoration efforts in these heavily farmed areas, however, we could greatly maximize the water quality benefits of wetlands. The researchers calculated that a 10% increase in wetlands in the United States focused in heavily farmed areas could remove up to 40 times more nitrogen.
That could go a long way in helping to achieve water quality goals. It would be especially helpful for areas that have high amounts of nitrogen, which they advise should get preferential placement. So, while they recommend a 10% increase across the country, some areas would see more wetlands restored. Under one their models, the Mississippi Basin, where nitrogen runoff is high, would actually see a 22% increase in wetlands, which in turn would provide about a “54% decrease in nitrogen loading to the Gulf of Mexico,” the researchers found.
They estimate this nationwide 10% bump in targeted restoration would cost $3.3 billion annually, twice as much as restoration of non-agricultural lands, but the costs “are in line with current expenditures to achieve water quality goals,” they wrote.
It could also go a long way to helping coastal economies. A report from the Union of Concerned Scientists found that nitrogen loading from upstream agriculture has caused between $552 million and $2.4 billion annually in damages to Gulf of Mexico fisheries and the marine habitat.
There are other benefits, too. Wetlands provide ecosystem services such as flood prevention, carbon sequestration and critical habitat. And, after environmental rollbacks by the Trump administration, water quality is likely to be an even bigger concern.
As the researchers concluded, “These results provide critical context to discussions of wetland restoration and water quality that are especially important today when a new Clean Water Act rule is reducing protections offered to existing wetlands.”
But what about International Tiger Day? Or World Otter Day? Or…
Okay, there are a lot of these “species awareness days” each year. They cover everything from birds to marine mammals and from big cats to tiny fungi. Some are established by international bodies like the United Nations. Others are declared by species’ home nations, while many are created by conservation nonprofits. In fact, just about anyone can declare a “holiday” and put it on the calendar. That’s how Earth Day got its start, after all. (We found enough environmental holidays to fill an entire calendar.)
These awareness days have obviously become a popular way to honor endangered species and fundraise for their conservation, but one big question looms over the concept: Do they work?
The answer, according to a paper published recently in the journal Biological Conservation, is yes — at least, to a certain degree.
Kandukuru Nagarjun (CC BY 2.0)
The researchers examined 16 awareness days honoring pangolins, rhinos, wombats, polar bears and other species or taxonomic groups. Overall, they did fairly well. Google searches for these species increased an average of 3.07% on those dates (no small feat in the world of search-engine optimization), while average Wikipedia views for the critters in question rose by a remarkable 34%.
And that sometimes generates cash for conservation efforts. A dozen nonprofits that organize awareness days spoke to the researchers about their effectiveness, and six of them reported an increase in donations on those dates. The two events that opened the most wallets were Bat Appreciation Day and World Rhino Day.
This answered several long-brewing questions for the research team.
“The question whether species awareness days — or any similar awareness-raising interventions — work had been a question at the back of my mind for about five or six years before the study,” says lead author Marcus Chua, a biologist and Ph.D. candidate at George Mason University who says he often participates when he sees these events pop up on social media. “I wondered whether all these efforts amount to anything and felt that someone should really investigate this. Things got more organized after my co-author, Audrey Tan, wished me ‘Happy Whale Day’ in February 2019 and we made plans to embark on this study.”
Gray whale and calf. Steven Swartz/NOAA
Tan, a journalist with Singapore’s The Straits Times, sees the research — and the days themselves — as an embodiment of “the nexus of biological conservation and communication” that will help with her own wildlife coverage in the future. “For example, it will help me decide on which ‘days’ to use as a news peg for relevant stories or in determining the medium of the content — story? online interactive? photo essay? — and so on.”
In addition to generating media coverage, the research identifies several ways sponsoring groups can make their days more effective. For one thing, they found, days devoted to the typical “charismatic” species didn’t do noticeably better than others, perhaps due to “fatigue from information overload … since these species are often featured regularly in other conservation campaigns or by the media.” For example, Google searches for whales and elephants decreased on their respective awareness days.
On the other hand, a species’ novelty may make people more interested in learning more. This obviously occurred during the early years of World Pangolin Day, when fewer people were aware of the species’ threats from poaching and the illegal wildlife trade.
The researchers also found that specific calls for action — like “go to this website” or “share your knowledge” — resulted in greater engagement on Twitter. “This could certainly be incorporated in their campaigns,” says Chua, who adds that this “could help organizers focus resources or experiment to improve their awareness day effectiveness.”
Of course, the most important question is whether these days translate species awareness to conservation action. The researchers found that holding actual events on awareness days resulted in the greatest influx of donations. (That’s probably the only metric that matters, since most people don’t have the opportunity to physically assist in efforts to conserve far-flung or hard-to-find rare species.)
An endangered lesser long-nosed bat visits a hummingbird feeder. (Photo by Nancy Bailey, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
One thing that didn’t work: declaring an awareness day without checking to see what else is already on the calendar. Of the 16 days they studied, three were held on the same date in 2020, which the paper suggests may have diluted their effectiveness across the board.
The researchers acknowledge a few limitations of their study, which focused on a relatively small number of awareness days, all of which were promoted in English. They didn’t examine geographic patterns to see if species did better or worse in certain parts of the world or how paid advertisements may have affected fundraising outcomes.
Still, Chua says he was pleasantly surprised by the results, as he didn’t expect the days to do as well as they did.
“I was probably a little cynical, but happy to be proven wrong.”
If we are to successfully restore the natural world, we’ll need to focus on some of the smallest creatures in the ecosystem, says the author of the new book, Rebugging the Planet.
What is rewilding? Basically, it’s the attempt to recreate the natural ecological systems that once covered our landscapes — woods, rivers, wetlands — and trusting nature to look after itself, perhaps with some help at the start to fix the most broken pieces.
Many rewilding projects are large in scale, to allow nature to really do its stuff without interference and pollution from us. It is about vast estates and landscapes, large herbivores or carnivores and huge decisions made by distant landowners or institutions. These are invaluable. But is not always about completely removing people — after all, humans are part of the natural world.
Instead, we need to find new ways to live while reconnecting with the ecosystems we live in, creating a richer world in which people and nature can thrive together. We can live alongside more bees, worms and flies, and I believe there is a benefit to taking the debate on rewilding down to the tiny scale of some of the smallest creatures on the planet.
Invertebrates are core to any rewilding project: ideal foot soldiers for the cause at every level as they travel, adapt and multiply so brilliantly. And, aside from farmed honeybees, silk moths and biological control agents, almost all the invertebrates we encounter, wherever we encounter them, are wild. They may be there because we created the environment for them, but they are not domesticated or tame — or even that interested in us.
How Does Rewilding Help Bugs?
Rebugging is looking at the ways, small and large, to nurture complex communities of these tiny, vital players in almost all the natural and not-so-natural places on earth. It means conserving them where they are managing to hang on, and restoring them where they are needed as part of a rewilding movement. And it means putting bugs back into our everyday lives, our homes and where we play and work.
But what does “good” look like for the bugs? We need to better know what the “perfect” habitats and conditions would be for bugs to thrive: the baselines against which recent losses occurred. We can’t tell what the true losses are as we don’t know what was there before people arrived, or even a hundred years ago. But how exciting to discover more new insect habitats through rebugging, as we let nature make its way.
Even rewilding a relatively small area can create something akin to the original habitats of the invertebrates, and we will discover so many intriguing aspects in the process. Rewilding projects are already throwing up some challenges to our previous knowledge about their favored habitats as species take to a habitat in a rewilded area that we had no idea they liked.
Bringing Back Lost Species
Which animals belong where is a fascinating issue in rewilding. It can involve reintroducing a species to re-establish it or to boost numbers of a native animal or plant at risk of going extinct. Or it can be about recreating an ecosystem that has got out of balance, such as a flood plain that needs the plants and animals back to slow water flow.
Would we want to bring invertebrate species back into countries and regions that have lost them? The removal of keystone species — a species that is fundamental to the existence of a particular ecosystem — can be catastrophic for a wild ecosystem, but reintroduction can work in unforeseen ways.
The reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park in the western U.S. created unexpected and positive results for the park ecology. When wolves were removed from the park 70 years ago, elk overgrazing became a problem and only resolved when the wolves were reintroduced, and so elks were naturally managed better. But there was a further impact: beaver populations grew now that their willow trees were not overgrazed by the elk. This created new fish and water invertebrate habitats, which then influenced other species feeding on the bugs and fish. Everything is connected, and while many focus on the furry vertebrate species, we need to recognize and nurture the bugs, too, as vital parts of the arrangement.
Beavers are also being reintroduced into U.K. river systems, leading to new habitats, more diversity, and even floodwater management and boosting green tourism. Sometimes iconic species can be hugely important for building public support for conservation, but also can help fund projects through carefully managed tourism.
But what about invertebrates? Rebugging could allow species lost to an area to be introduced successfully and this is indeed happening.
Given their size and ability to produce numerous offspring quickly, invertebrates have the wonderful ability to recolonize far more quickly when they spot the opportunity than larger species. Just take the aphid, which can produce five to 10 offspring every day. The African driver queen ant can produce an estimated three to four million eggs a month. And they do not need so much careful handling as, say, a wolf.
However, it makes sense also to focus on protecting the native bug species that are still in their habitats, but are just hanging on in pockets of scrub, hedgerows or small woodlands, and even urban parks, where once their habitats would have been far more widespread. And they can help rewild the small spaces as well as the big ones.
The School of Rebugging
Critical to keeping places wild and protected will be helping people to have a stronger relationship with nature. Making public access safe and easy in rewilded space will help create a movement for rebugging. Great wilderness parks such as the 63 federally designated U.S. national parks present a whole other level of invertebrate opportunity. As these areas are managed by government bodies largely for wildlife, rather than farming or other purposes, they can be described as wild — and over 80% of the areas involved are managed as wilderness.
They maintain some of the best habitats, perfect for invertebrates to thrive. This is an extraordinary asset, but one which compares dramatically with other land management in the U.S.: the empty prairies and often car-filled cities, where insects and other invertebrates are subject to massive pressures from industrial farming, pollution and development.
Take the sub-arctic Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska where there is an abundance of invertebrates such as bees and flower flies. People visit this park to see the grizzly bears but the other fur-covered animals should also gain attention. Alongside the flies, the bumblebees are critical for pollination and they have recently found a new species of bumblebee in this park — always an exciting moment.
These are keystone species and the Denali park’s grizzly bears, caribou and wolves would not survive without the bugs because they all need the wildflowers and shrubs for their food or the food of their prey. The grizzlies in particular need the bees to pollinate the blueberries, one of the bear’s main foods. As we know, honeybees are under threat globally, so it is vital that we protect the other pollinators like bumblebees so they can pollinate both wild plants and farmed crops.
Wildlife parks do have threats such as the pressure of visitors, especially at peak holiday periods. Other dangers respect no boundaries — for instance, climate change, illegal hunting and invasive species. But these places provide a fantastic way to conserve bugs in their natural world and to show what they can do.
Rebugging Actions
The joy of rebugging is that you can do it almost anywhere. Give people the chance to act and to encourage some bees, or even hummingbird hawkmoths, in a green patch of land, and you can start to change hearts and minds. From a Costa Rican municipality giving bees citizenship to an amazing three thousand food-growing spaces making space for nature in London, it is possible — and it is happening.
The “rebugging” title of this book was inspired by another, recent book Rebirding: Rewilding Britain and its Birds by Benedict Macdonald, who argues that to have more birds around, larger mammals must be allowed to do their work and re-engineer the landscapes. Letting nature heal itself and letting it get messy is key to a revival in birds and other species. If we can use the lens of birds and beavers to understand rewilding, we should also use bugs.
Hummingbirds are a vital force in one writer’s everyday life. Contemplating their loss is almost too much to bear.
What happens to us as the wild world unravels? Vanishing, an occasional essay series, explores some of the human stakes of the wildlife extinction crisis.
There is a frozen sea inside me. Inside all of us. Franz Kafka wrote in a letter in 1904 that a book should shatter our ice-choked inland seas — and as a lover of books and the ways they engineer empathies, I wouldn’t disagree. But it’s loving hummingbirds and contemplating their leaving that has broken me apart recently.
A 2019 study of bird declines in North America told a heartbreaking story about hummingbirds: There are 18 million fewer of them now than there were in 1970.
Just imagining the absence of hummingbirds sent me to bed for the day, sick with grief.
Enter the icepick beak of the hummingbird. Some species have beaks that have evolved expressly for waging tiny wars, gladiators among the gladioluses. For picking, pinching, poking, lancing and dancing — all to defend precious food sources and duel for mates. And, apparently, to puncture my heart.
Pick, pick. Yours is not a tolerable extinction. (As if any of them ever are.) Pierce, pierce. Trochilidae is the name on your family crest, my dear hummingbirds, my familiars. I could not bear for your bough to be chopped off our family tree.
On Facebook I post, but cannot afford to read, an article about mourning rites for glaciers. I have no idea what similar rites for hummingbirds would look like. Or maybe I do.
Maybe it starts when you interrupt that grim parade of would-be extinctions filing past and say to the Juan Fernández firecrown, No, not you.
Unacceptable, glittering starfrontlet.
I won’t live without you in the world, turquoise-throated puffleg.
Maybe it begins when your blanched interior is once again dyed with feeling, sensation returning to fingertips. With these hands I clean and refill my two glass hummingbird feeders like a devotion, to keep mold and bacteria at bay. Poorly maintained feeders can be fatal for my familiars, so even on days when I can maintain no other ritual, I make sure the sugar water is fresh and twinkling in the sun.
Years ago, when living alone and unwell in the rural Southwest, I was told by my landlord, “I knew you were sick when I saw the empty feeders.” You don’t have to know me well — my landlord certainly didn’t — to know that when I’m not feeding hummingbirds, I, too, am lacking nectar. In fact, I identify with these curio-creatures because they, like me, need constant sweetness to survive. They teach me that it is not weakness to require the scandal of red, the saturated and sugared things.
Every spring my wife hangs baskets of mandevilla (we affectionately call them “Mandy”) amid the other hummingbird-seducing flowers, and it is a joy to watch my feathered cousins hover and drink. This is what I call our “pollinator playspace,” a temporary and tenuous refuge for two Black women, hummingbirds, butterflies, and bees — all of us under threat.
In 1904 one warm-blooded mammal wrote to another: “We need books [and hummingbirds] that affect us like a disaster.” A disaster: If, one spring, hummingbirds didn’t return to me. It would be as if all the libraries in the world were shuttered, never to flutter open again.
A new surveillance system tracks trends in wildlife illness and death and could help keep people healthy.
An owl hit by a car, a bobcat caught in a trap, a sickened seal on a beach — wildlife rehabilitators are usually the first to provide medical care for injured or ill wild creatures. But their critical emergency services can also reveal bigger threats to wildlife — and potentially people.
That’s the findings of a new study about an early-detection surveillance system being piloted in California that’s designed to analyze near real-time information from hundreds of wildlife rehabilitators and trigger alerts when unusual patterns of illness or death are detected.
“There are so many disciplines that have come together to develop something unique,” says Pranav Pandit, a veterinary epidemiologist at One Health Institute at U.C. Davis. “We’re using machine learning, computer science, epidemiology and wildlife health.”
But the confluence of these multiple expertise wouldn’t have been possible without work that began years ago by Devin Dombrowski and Rachel Avilla, cofounders of the Wild Neighbors Database Project, who developed the Wildlife Rehabilitation Medical Database in 2012.
“They were working in the rescue centers and realized that there’s a need for digitizing all this data that the rescue centers have been collecting over the years,” says Pandit.
With their database now being used by more than 950 rehabilitation organizations in 48 U.S. states and 19 countries, it provided the groundwork for the new alert system, which has been up and running in California for a year.
Dr. James LaCour, LDWF State Wildlife Veterinarian, LSU Veterinary School student (right) and Dr. Erica Miller, Tristate Bird Rescue examines a brown pelican. Photo: (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Early results are encouraging, says Pandit.
During the pilot project, the system found several anomalies that signaled emerging health threats and triggered investigations by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. One of those was domoic acid, first detected in several species of birds in Southern California. The marine biotoxin can also affect shellfish — and sicken or even kill people who eat it.
“It’s bad for wildlife, as well as humans,” he says. “So when wildlife start showing the symptoms, having a very robust surveillance system is also good for public health.”
Making those connections between wildlife health and human health are a crucial part of the surveillance system. One of the things researchers look for are “sentinel species,” which can provide early warnings for diseases that also affect people.
For example, crows and other members of the corvid family can signal the presence of West Nile virus.
“They can show early signals of that outbreak even before the outbreak has happened in humans,” says Pandit.
There’s also the danger of infections jumping from animals to humans. As we all know too well with SARS-CoV-2 — and Ebola and others before that — infectious disease in wildlife can be serious threats to human health, too.
One antidote to that is better protections for wildlife. Another, of course, is not being afraid of animals that can be carriers of the diseases, says Pandit.
“If we really want to stay healthy, we need to maintain the ecosystem balance really well and we should nurture biodiversity in birds, bats and other mammals,” he says.
Furthering the reach of the WMME Alert System is also in the works. Pandit says they’re talking with other interested state and regional wildlife organizations, as well as some international ones that would like to see the system expanded.
“We are also constantly trying to find additional resources so that we can fund our servers, develop new models, make sure the data is secure and continually validate the model [when we go into a new region],” he says.
The other important component is continuing to recruit more rehabilitation centers to make sure the system provides the best representation of the population health of that region.
An expanded surveillance system, along with protecting biodiversity Pandit says, would be good for wildlife and people.
“We know that healthy ecosystems and healthy wildlife means healthy human beings.”
To stay or to leave in search of safer ground makes me wonder how we determine risk in a world that’s so rapidly changing.
Talent. King Mountain. Hugo. The town names — each the site of new wildfire ignitions following a lightning storm the day before — are all new to me. After I read each incident report, I head to Google maps to ask the same question that’s been on my mind for weeks: How close?
This is my first wildfire season — also known as summer — in my new home state of Oregon. I’m learning the geography by way of (potential) catastrophe.
After nearly two decades in San Francisco, my wife and I moved to central Oregon in May. We had been plotting our escape to a more rural location for years. While climate change wasn’t our reason for leaving the Bay Area, it was a consideration in where to go next.
We first looked at towns along the east and west flanks of California’s Sierra Nevada. But our searches mostly ended in frustration … and a bit of fear. We’d hear from locals about getting dropped from their fire insurance or the skyrocketing costs of keeping their policies. And then there were the actual wildfires — like the ones that reduced large swathes of Paradise, and now Greenville, to ash.
When we eventually settled on central Oregon as our next home, we were under no illusion that it would be free from wildfires: I’m an environmental journalist who covers fires and climate change as part of my beat. Wildfire risk, we knew, would come with our new territory.
And it has. As I write this, ash from multiple fires burning in the region dusts my patio furniture. Cascade peaks, usually visible on the horizon, have been smudged by smoke. The air quality has once again reached unhealthy levels.
Still, there are numerous reasons we’re glad to be here, even if we do have occasional pangs of doubt and wonder why we didn’t move out of the West entirely — out of the path of increasingly longer fire seasons.
Around the country, other families find themselves in similar situations, or may soon. As this summer so cruelly illuminates, climate change will present a barrage of challenges — including droughts, floods and hurricanes — no matter where you live.
Louisiana National Guard members in high-water vehicles work with St. John the Baptist Parish officials to rescue citizens stranded in their homes in the wake of Hurricane Ida. Photo: Louisiana National Guard, (CC BY 2.0)
Understanding the risks of different places isn’t easy. As we contemplated our move, I dug through state climate assessments and read scientific reports. But it was hard to match general findings with specific places, even for someone like me who gets paid to do that kind of stuff. Most people don’t have hours to read journal articles and try to decipher scientific lingo.
That got me thinking: Whether moving or staying put, how do we assess risk in a climate change world?
Where To?
Last summer the San Francisco Bay Area had a day when the sun never seemed to rise. The sky remained a darkened, calamitous gray-orange from morning till night as the August Complex fire burned, eventually scorching a record-breaking 1 million acres. I received more than a few texts from friends asking if it was time to move somewhere less “apocalyptic.” Was there a safer place to live in the coming years and decades as the planet continues to heat up?
It’s a question on a lot of people’s minds. The real estate website Redfin reports that the increasing frequency and intensity of natural disasters and extreme heat are factors in plans for about half of people considering moves in the next year.
Where to go may be a popular question, but it’s also a hard one to answer for a number of reasons, says Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA who gets asked that question multiple times a day.
“I don’t know what people’s motivations are, what their priorities are and what their lives are like,” he says. “It’s so personalized and individualized.”
The scientific factors, he says, are equally complex. For example, the difference between living somewhere with an extreme fire risk and a place with very little could be just a few miles in places like Los Angeles, he says.
And this summer has already shown that climate change is going to bring surprises.
“Most folks would have thought that Seattle or Portland would have been great places to escape extreme heat waves,” he says. “Well, clearly, that’s not always going to be the case. Seeing Death Valley-like temperatures in British Columbia in June, I think, really gave people pause. Climate projections suggest that all of these things and more are possible in the future, but I think it’s a particularly visceral recent example of how things are changing pretty fast.”
Climate change is likely to throw us other curveballs, too.
While most people are concerned with drought and fire in California, Swain says he’s more worried about how the state will handle the extreme flood risks that will also come with a warming climate.
“A lot of the risks, the physical hazards that are relevant in a changing climate, are not going to be obvious, and they’re not often going to be the ones that people are really hyper-focused on in a particular region,” he says. “What comes out of the woodwork in 10 or 20 years won’t necessarily be the same problems in the same places that we’re facing right now.”
Understanding the Science
So given what we know — and don’t — how do we go about figuring out where might be safe?
Historically, there haven’t been a lot of great resources to tap. Most climate models aren’t accessible to the general public. Or their raw data is taken out of context by others when trying to convey more localized impacts, which can be misleading, says Swain.
“I think a good example of this is California, where most of the state, according to climate models, is expected to see neither more nor less mean precipitation in the future with a few degrees of mean warming,” he explains. “And if you look at all of these downscaled products, it’ll say ‘great news, your water availability isn’t going to change,’ which of course is completely wrong for a variety of reasons.”
One reason is that rising temperatures will ensure that even if total precipitation doesn’t change, there will still be less available water supply because there’ll be more evaporation and thirstier soil, diminishing runoff.
But even a small change in annual average precipitation doesn’t catch the variability that California’s likely to experience with more extreme storm events and more droughts.
“So you get more really wet periods, but also more really dry periods,” says Swain. “In practical terms, it’s a really dramatic change. And so you might get a very inaccurate picture of what the future holds if you look at the wrong variables in the wrong context, even if the information is technically correct.”
Emerging Tools
So how do we find the right information in the right context? There are some new efforts attempting just that.
Redfin, for example, recently partnered with ClimateCheck to add a feature to their listings that provides the future climate risk of a particular property. It assesses the change in the risk of heat, fire, drought and storms over the next 30 years.
(EXCLUSIVE)
There are signs that more Americans may be starting to weigh climate -related risks when purchasing a home.@Redfin will announce tomorrow that it is adding local climate risk data to its site, the company told @USATODAY exclusively.https://t.co/gDy68FUUh1
— Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy (@SwapnaVenugopal) August 2, 2021
Getting down to the address level makes sense because risk itself can be hyper-local. Whether your house survives a disaster may depend not on what state or town you live in, but on what side of the street.
But can these tools really be precise at such a fine scale?
Swain, who has done some consulting for ClimateCheck, says it’s possible to take regional climate data and combine that with very high-resolution spatial data at the parcel level. But he cautions, “I think it’s more important to get it right than to be first to put something out there.” After having seen it implemented poorly in the past, he says he now sees people today “who are trying to do a more thorough job of vetting and contextualizing everything.”
Do Everything
Having better resources to find places that may have less risk is great … for the people who can afford to move there. Or move anywhere.
I’m among those lucky enough to get to pick a place on the map and point the moving truck in that direction. But that’s not going to be a reality for a lot of other folks, as we saw last month before Hurricane Ida, when many people didn’t even have enough cash on hand to temporarily flee the impending disaster, let alone permanently uproot their lives.
“It’s a pretty extreme privilege in a global and even a national context to be able to choose where you want to live on the basis of your perceived comfort or safety from a climate perspective,” says Swain. “That’s not a choice the vast majority of people on Earth even get to make, even if there is good information to use for making that decision.”
And while some places may seem like the proverbial higher ground, climate change is not a problem we can move away from — even for those with more resources. If it’s not directly threatening our homes, it may endanger our food supply, water, jobs, health, neighbors, or the wildlife and wild places we hold dear.
That means making every place safer is a better bet — especially considering that the ground we’re starting from isn’t level. Many communities of color and low-income communities already face greater climate risks and climate-related health threats.
As far as I can tell, our best bet is to do everything — big and small. First and foremost, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and speed up the energy transition — equitably. At the same time, we’ll need to protect and restore critical habitats, green urban areas and increase resilience wherever we are — including curbing new developments in areas we know will flood and burn.
When I started this article, I wanted to ask what resources people could use to pick new places to live. I also wanted to ask: Who has access to them? But maybe, instead of focusing on where we should go, it would be better to ask, “What more can we do to stay in the homes and communities we already love?”
A new paper finds that we’re failing these “small-bodied mammals” — and that comes with a cost to ecosystems around the world.
Rodents often get a bad rap.
Sure, some of them carry diseases or have become invasive pests — I’m lookin’ at you, Rattus rattus — but they’re also evolutionary marvels who have adapted to live in almost every region on Earth. They’re found in marshes, deserts, jungles and everything in between.
Along the way, these small-bodied mammals have become essential to their native ecosystems. They serve as prey for larger animals, while their own eating habits help to disperse seeds and spores, pollinate plants, cycle soil nutrients, and shape vegetation patterns.
Despite the ecological benefits they bring, smaller mammals don’t get much attention from the media or scientific journals. They also typically lack the same conservation attention received by more charismatic species such as wolves and tigers, even though they, too, face habitat loss, pesticides, invasive species such as cats and foxes, and human exploitation for their fur and meat.
A new paper may help to change that. The research examines the known species from the order Rodentia and another group of small mammals known as Eulipotyphla — hedgehogs, moles and the like — to determine their conservation risk and opportunities to save them.
The big conclusion: There’s a lot we don’t know.
“There is still a general lack of knowledge about the status, distribution and ecology of many small mammals,” the researchers write.
And that knowledge gap leaves a lot of the planet’s wildlife potentially at risk. Scientists have identified at least 2,231 Rodentia species, while Eulipotyphla adds another 454 to the list. Collectively they represent 48.3% of all known mammal species, and we don’t know how well a good chunk of them are doing. According to the paper, 452 rodent and eulipotyphlan species —16.7% of existing species — are currently classified as “data deficient” by IUCN, the international organization that assesses species’ conservation risks. As we’ve seen before, so-called “data-deficient” species have not been fully assessed by scientists but may, unknown to us, be threatened with extinction — or even already gone.
It’s easy to understand why that happens with Rodentia and Eulipotyphla. These animals hide easily, many live nocturnally, and they decay quickly when they die. That, combined with other human biases and a resulting lack of scientific funding, makes them hard or less attractive to study.
The new paper sets the groundwork to change that. The authors have identified 21 priority conservation regions — 18 for rodents and another three for eulipotyphlans — that would account for more than half of the data-deficient species. Locations include Cameroon, the Albertine Rift, Sri Lanka, Southwestern Ghats in India, Mexico, Sumatra and Java.
The researchers also identified five eulipotyphlans and 44 rodent species whose ranges exist completely outside any national protected areas. This includes the endangered Idaho ground squirrel (Urocitellus brunneus) of the United States, the possibly extinct emperor rat (Uromys imperator) of Guadalcanal, and the endangered Rumpi mouse shrew (Myosorex rumpii) of Cameroon.
So now that they’ve identified the knowledge and conservation gaps, what next? The paper recommends targeting the data-deficient species for field research and conservation assessment; continued evaluation of the effectiveness of protected areas (many of which are only protected on paper and need more on-the-ground help); and strengthening research networks to build better data for all species.
Perhaps most importantly, the authors call for researchers to address and prioritize Rodentia and Eulipotyphla separately from other mammals, so they don’t continue to get lost in the shuffle.
All this builds on recommendations and strategies established by the IUCN Small Mammal Specialist Group in 2017, which included promoting zoo-based conservation efforts and finding individuals and small organizations to serve as “champions” for these species.
Let’s start to change that. I recently asked people to identify their favorite rodents on Twitter, and the responses are as wide and varied as this group of species. Join the conversation here, and then see what you can do to champion any species of mice, hedgehogs, shrews, moles, voles, squirrels, chipmunks or porcupines in your own communities and conservation efforts.
Photo: Preble’s Meadow jumping mouse (Rob Schorr/Colorado Natural Heritage Program), Tipton kangaroo rat (USFWS), hedgehog (Kalle Gustafsson CC BY 2.0), Amargosa vole (BLM California)
The month’s best and worst environmental news also includes advice on reversing the “insect apocalypse” and more.
Life in these modern times: masks indoors for Covid, masks outside for wildfire smoke. Welcome to Links From the Brink.
Best News (and Worst) of the Month: The media is finally paying attention to climate change and, for the most part, covering it accurately.
This is an important shift, as journalism’s longstanding policy of presenting both sides of a story allowed too many climate deniers and industry hacks to get their disinformation out there and, in the process, confused the public about the nature and threats of global warming. This false balance undoubtedly served to delay concrete action for decades.
But the scientific evidence of climate change is now incontrovertible, while deniers’ arguments are anything but, and the media has taken notice. A new study examined more than 2,600 news articles published between 2005 and 2019 and found that 90% of them “accurately represented climate change,” and that this accuracy improved over time.
Of course, there’s an exception to this trend. Conservative media, the study found, publishes fewer articles about climate change, and only 71% of those articles reflected the scientific consensus.
The Newsmax home page the day of the IPCC report release.
We found this dichotomy in action on Aug. 9 following the release of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The major media I checked that day — including the Times, The Washington Post, CNN and the Associated Press — all carried this bleak news as their lead story. That wasn’t the case for right-wing news sites like Fox News and Newsmax, which both covered the IPCC report, but only by republishing a short AP article and posting it way, way, way below the top of the page. Readers could only find it if they scrolled past headlines designed to drum up fears about Antifa, immigrants at the border, the “left-wing media,” the Green New Deal, sports’ stars “anti-American” attitudes, vaccination mandates and violent crime.
That’s by design, not by indifference. Fox News and other broadcast outlets still gave airtime to “discredited contrarians and climate deniers to discuss, or tried to downplay the stark findings,” according to Media Matters for America, a nonprofit that monitors conservative misinformation, which also found that these right-wing outlets aired far fewer segments about the new IPCC report than they have in the past.
That lack of coverage itself is disinformation. By being quiet or devoting their scaled-back efforts to discrediting the IPCC report, they told readers and viewers that climate change is nothing to worry about or a left-wing hoax.
So, all things considered, we’ve made progress. But right-wing disinformation still plays a major in American public life, and that’s going to keep causing trouble — and delaying both understanding of climate change and action against it — for years to come.
Buzzworthy Science: A team of scientists this month provided a list of “eight simple actions that individuals can take to save insects” amidst the ongoing declines. Some of the recommendations are for individual action, like replacing lawns with native plants, but several aim to improve the conservation outlook for insects overall. They’re all backed up with the latest evidence and clear examples of how these actions have helped in cases around the world.
A Wild Fantasy: One of our favorite articles of the month came from The Guardian, which profiled Irish baron and death-metal enthusiast Randal Plunkett’s efforts to rewild his 1,600-acre ancestral estate, which his family has owned since 1402. Locals called him an “idiot” for getting rid of the estate’s traditional lawns, cattle and sheep, but now the property has grown so wild and hosts so much biodiversity that biologists frequently journey there to study its success. The official Dunsany Nature Reserve account on Instagram showcases the many species that live on the estate, including deer, foxes, hedgehogs, birds, butterflies and a wide variety of plants.
What the article doesn’t mention is how Plunkett’s ancestry fits into all of this. You see, he’s the 21st Baron of Dunsany. The 18th baron, Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett (1878-1957), wrote hundreds of books, stories and plays under the name “Lord Dunsany,” through which he arguably created modern-day fantasy and horror fiction, much of which resonates with his descendant’s work today. “The need for human reunification with the natural world was the overriding theme that permeated all his works,” according to the website Irish Identity.
Here’s one of my favorite Lord Dunsany lines: “Ivy dreams sullenly and alone of overthrowing the cities.” Now his modern-day lineage has made that quote come alive.
More Rewilding: Irish aristocrats don’t have a monopoly on rewilding. Here are some related stories from the past few weeks:
Santa’s Gonna Be Pissed: Wildfire smoke reached the North Pole for the first time this month, thanks to the record-setting fires in Siberia. Meanwhile, new research finds the Russian Arctic is losing billions of tons of ice a year due to climate change, and so much ice is melting in Greenland (and down south in Antarctica) that the freakin’ Earth’s crust is starting to warp.
Speaking of Greenland, did you hear that it rained at the Greenland ice sheet’s highest point this month — for the first time in recorded history? And yes, that’s just going to make the ice there melt even faster.
As if the specter of resulting sea-level rise weren’t bad enough, all this melting creates other threats to people and wildlife, including landslides and the release of toxic pollution.
And this is only going to accelerate, as the Arctic’s oldest ice is now being pushed by excessive wind patterns into warming waters, where it too is melting. Eventually, scientists warn, the loss of sunlight-reflecting ice will cause more of the sun’s heat to be absorbed by the ocean, further speeding up the effects of global warming.
So yeah, Santa’s probably not in the best mood this year. Plan those holiday wish lists carefully.
Speaking of which, what do we put in naughty kids’ stockings now that coal needs to stay in the ground? Because I can think of a few fossil-fuel executives who don’t deserve any treats this (or any) year.
A Life in Beauty: Whenever we need to illustrate an article about the value of public lands, we’ve always turned to one man: Bob Wick. As a photographer for the Bureau of Land Management, Wick’s images have done more than just capture the beauty of wild spaces in the United States, they flat out inspired us.
Wick retired this month, but his photos will live on, as you can see in the video below.
What’s Next? August ended with some small but significant progress on the Democrats’ big infrastructure bill, which includes numerous climate-related provisions, and we expect that to dominate the discussion throughout September.
Our eyes will also be on California, were the upcoming gubernatorial recall election could have negative environmental consequences not just for the state but the whole world.
September will also bring World Cleanup Day on the 18th, World Gorilla Day on the 24th and World Environmental Health Day on the 26th.
(Wait, shouldn’t every day be environmental health day?)
What are you watching or waiting for in the months ahead? Good news or bad, drop us a line anytime.
That does it for this edition of Links From the Brink. For more environmental news throughout the month, including bigger stories you won’t find anywhere else, subscribe to the Revelator newsletter or follow us on Facebook or Twitter.
This endangered mammal, known as the “gardener of the forest,” is related to rhinos and horses but has an elephant-like nose.
Baird’s tapirs are known as the “gardeners of the forest” because they eat a diversity of plants, fruits and seeds. They disperse the latter in their dung, helping forests regenerate.
Species name:
Baird’s tapir (Tapirus bairdii)
Description:
Tapirs are the largest neotropical mammals, with females reaching up to 600 pounds. They’re from the taxonomic order Perissodactyla, or odd-toed ungulates, meaning that they’re related to horses and rhinos. Unlike their cousins they have a short trunk called a proboscis, which they can use to grab foliage, seeds and other food. The largest seeds in tropical forests tend to be associated with slow-growing trees with dense wood, precisely the species of trees that sequester the most carbon. Large mammals like tapirs are the only animals capable of dispersing these seeds, and the reproduction of these trees depends to a significant extent on tapirs. This means that tapirs are not only important due to their roles as “gardeners,” but are also some of our strongest allies in our fight against global climate change.
Where found:
From Mexico to Colombia, primarily in the remaining intact forests of the region.
IUCN Red List status:
Baird’s tapirs are classified as endangered. Experts estimate that the current population could contain as few as 4,500 mature adults.
Major threats:
Central America has lost massive tracts of forest during the past decade, much of it due to major roads that now bisect the range of Baird’s tapirs. The loss of habitat, combined with significant hunting throughout their range, has devastated the species and left the remaining tapirs in isolated subpopulations. It’s unclear if all these subpopulations are genetically viable, as the slow reproductive rate of tapirs makes it difficult for any population to rebound quickly.
Conservationists fear that they may lose even more habitat to climate change. Much of the species’ northern stronghold of the trinational Maya Forest has limited water during the dry season. Climate change may reduce the amount of available water in these areas even further and thus make the large, protected habitat unsuitable for tapirs.
Notable conservation programs:
The Baird’s Tapir Survival Alliance is an effort to build precisely the substantial, coordinated, long-term regional effort needed to save this species. BTSA members hail from Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama.
One of my favorite personal experiences was while we were collaring tapirs in Indio Maiz Biological Reserve in Nicaragua. We were with a film crew that wanted to film tapirs, and we spent all day trying to track a tapir with a collar in order to film him, but somehow he kept evading us. At the end of the day, in frustration, I went in a canoe up the river by myself without any cameras, just to be 100% sure that the collar was working properly. I walked maybe 50 yards into the forest; there he was, standing in front of me, eating plants with the collar on. It was like getting home after a long absence and seeing my dog again.
I also had a recent sighting in Belize. We spent all day exploring a property we protect there. My colleague Jeremy Radachowsky and I set out alone to look around at some clearings we’d seen on a map and ended up finding a beautiful creek, filled with Morelet’s crocodiles and other wildlife. While we were watching the crocodiles, I saw a tapir head swim across the creek, some 50 yards away. We snuck up the edge of the creek to try to find it and ended up coming out behind a natural blind only about 5 yards from the animal. From that cover we got to watch him swimming around for at least 20 minutes. It was great to watch him like that, knowing we’d helped to protect his forest.
Marbled murrelets could benefit from a unique research project that’s uncovering information to help better protect this endangered species.
One thing sets marbled murrelets apart from other seabirds: They forage at sea but nest inland in mature forests. That makes them a “bird of two worlds,” says Oregon State University animal ecologist Jim Rivers.
But this unique characteristic also increases their vulnerability. Climate change threatens murrelets’ food sources in the ocean, while on land, logging, wildfires and habitat fragmentation have diminished their nesting forests.
Although the birds received Endangered Species Act protection as a threatened species in 1992, their decline continued as logging chipped away at their forest habitats along the Pacific Coast of North America. Last year the results of a study by OSU researchers with the Oregon Marbled Murrelet Project analyzing 20 years of data revealed climate change and reduced prey populations as the additional factor in the murrelets’ decline.
The Revelator spoke with Rivers, principal investigator of the project, about the challenges of tracking murrelets and how their research is guiding conservation.
Jim Rivers. Photo: Oregon State University
Why was this project started?
There’s a lot of uncertainty about the steps that are needed to recover murrelet populations. That has led managers to not really be sure in some cases as to what they can and can’t do in a given area.
So what our project aims to do is uncover some of the breeding requirements for murrelets. In particular we want to know about where birds are nesting and how successful they are in their nesting. And then if their nest failed to produce any offspring, we want to know the limiting factors and whether or not those might be factors that can be managed.
There isn’t much known about murrelet nesting success in Oregon. There’ve been other large studies in British Columbia, California, Washington and Alaska, but nothing in Oregon. Prior to the start of our work, there were only 29 nests that were active when they were located.
Murrelets use older forests — late succession and old-growth forests — for nesting. They also use the ocean for all of their foraging. They’re a unique species in that sense, but from a research perspective, that means our project requires a lot of people on the ground, in the air and on the water.
We didn’t want to start in the forest and potentially bias where we’re searching for nests. So what that required us to do is to go out and capture birds on the ocean and then tag them and then follow them inland. We do that so that we have a hopefully unbiased sample of birds that could go into federal sites or private lands or state lands.
What’s the process like for capturing these birds in the ocean and then tracking them all the way back to a nest site in the forest?
We go out on the water with an 84-foot boat from the beginning of May to the first week of June when the weather conditions are OK. When we get out on the water, we have a Zodiac [inflatable boat] that’s offloaded just after nightfall. A group gets into that capture boat and goes out into the nearshore environment. They look for birds with a spotlight and a salmon net. It sounds funny, but that’s as simple as we need.
When a bird is caught, they bring it back to the main boat where we have a crew attach a radio tag that allows us to track its movements over the course of about three months. Then we take a measurement of the body, as well as blood and feather samples, which tell us about the health of the bird. Then it’s released back to the water.
The tracking part starts the next morning with our ground crew, who look for the birds along the water. What we want to find is a bird that’s on the water one day, then missing the next day. And then it’s on the water the third day and it’s missing the fourth.
That’s suggestive of a bird in the process of incubating an egg. Males and females share in that responsibility, and they take 24-hour shifts. When we find that, that’s when we send the plane up to look for that individual bird.
The plane flies around and looks for the signal. Once we find the location where the bird is likely sitting on a nest, the ground crew goes inland and starts looking for that individual bird in a given tree, which isn’t easy. These birds are nesting 200 feet above the ground — not even in a nest, but in just a scrape in the moss on a horizontal limb. So you can’t see the bird from the ground.
Once we narrow it down, we have a tree climber set up a video camera in an adjacent tree so we can zoom in and get a good idea of what’s going on at the nest site without bothering the birds.
Then we just run that camera for as long as the nest is active. Once the nest ends, we go out and take down the cameras and we take measurements of the nest tree itself. We do that whole process for as many nests we can find.
What have you learned?
We’ve learned that the ocean conditions appear to have a really big influence on whether these birds are nesting or not. The first year of the project that we went full-scale on our tagging effort was 2017 and we tagged 61 birds. And we waited and waited and waited. None of those birds ended up breeding.
Oregon State University researchers monitor marbled murrelet movements as part of a multi-year study. Photo: Kim Nelson, Oregon State University, (CC BY-SA 2.0)
And that was a huge surprise to us. We really kind of scratched our heads. But one of the things that stood out during 2017 was that the coastal marine conditions in central Oregon were really poor for a bird like a murrelet that relies on forge fish to feed its offspring.
In 2018 and 2019, we went back with the same methodology. And we did have birds that were going in and breeding. We had about a dozen nests that we found, which is still not a very high propensity to breed and pretty uncommon relative to the number of birds that we tagged.
This year it’s been a very different story. The ocean has been quite a bit different in terms of the upwelling and the productivity and the forage fish availability. And what we’re finding is that we have the smallest number of tagged birds this year — just under 50 birds, but a third of those birds have bred.
We have 17 nests at last count for this season — much more than we had in all previous three seasons. We didn’t work last year because of COVID.
So we’re learning that you need to have good ocean conditions if murrelets are going to breed. And they have to have good nest sites in the forest. If you don’t have those, you’re not going to have healthy populations.
Have any of your findings so far been able to inform policy or conservation work?
Right now, the way that the regulations are written, at least for state lands in Oregon, is that if you go out to a site that might be murrelet habitat and you conduct a series of surveys and you don’t get any birds in the first year, and you go back the second year and you get the same result — no birds after a set number of surveys — that area can be harvested because it’s considered to be unoccupied habitat.
What our results showed was that you may have a couple of bad years of ocean conditions, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s an unoccupied habitat forever. It just means that birds are not using it because the ocean is not allowing them to, in a sense, because they don’t have the breeding resources.
Although our project really started as one that’s focused on nest ecology and breeding in the forest, we really can’t remove it from the ocean conditions too, because they’re tied together.
So we’ve done a little bit more work toward that marine side of things lately. And I think that’s where people are starting to really appreciate murrelets as a bird of two worlds.
What else are you hoping to learn?
The nice thing about this project is that we’ve had the latitude to ask questions that are related to our initial goal of understanding factors related to nest success. One of the questions is about ocean conditions and forage fish.
We’ve started to think about what the birds are eating, and we can get a sense of that from taking their blood and feather samples and looking at stable isotope values. Those give us a sense of how high in the food chain murrelets are eating. We can look at those values for different individuals and in different years. It will be interesting to see the potential difference in isotope values for birds that were captured this spring versus back in 2017 when none of them bred. I suspect they’ll be quite different.
We’re also getting interested in microplastics. It’s a threat to a lot of seabirds.
One of the things that we can do when we climb these nest trees and take measurements around the nest site is collect the fecal material from the chick. We can look through that and see what sort of plastics are there. And we have a woman on campus we’re collaborating with who does a lot of microplastics work. Her comment was, “it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of how much [microplastics] these birds are going to have.”
We’ve also been trying to understand where these birds are spending time on the coasts and whether or not their movements overlap with marine protected areas.
We’re kind of starting from the point of nesting ecology, but there’s lots of fun things that we can do that really broaden the work and help us understand the bird better.
A 2019 study of bird declines in North America told a heartbreaking story about hummingbirds: There are 
Sure, some of them carry diseases or have become invasive pests — I’m lookin’ at you, 
Tapirs are the largest neotropical mammals, with females reaching up to 600 pounds. They’re from the taxonomic order Perissodactyla, or odd-toed ungulates, meaning that they’re related to horses and rhinos. Unlike their cousins they have a short trunk called a proboscis, which they can use to grab foliage, seeds and other food. The largest seeds in tropical forests tend to be associated with slow-growing trees with dense wood, precisely the species of trees that sequester the most carbon. Large mammals like tapirs are the only animals capable of dispersing these seeds, and the reproduction of these trees depends to a significant extent on tapirs. This means that tapirs are not only important due to their roles as “gardeners,” but are also some of our strongest allies in our fight against global climate change.
