Forests vs. Climate Change: Researchers Race to Understand What Drought Means for the World’s Trees

We’re already seeing signs of accelerated forest mortality around the world. And it’s not just arid regions that may see forest die-offs, new research finds.

Much of the world watched in horror as Australian wildfires that burned late last year and into the beginning of 2020 incinerated an area the size of Wisconsin, killing 33 people and, by some estimates, more than a billion birds, mammals and reptiles.

But the area of forest that burned pales in comparison to the total area affected by drought worldwide, says Tim Brodribb, a professor of plant physiology at the University of Tasmania. That could lead to a larger, though less headline-grabbing, crisis — and one that’s not confined to just Australia.

Brodribb is the lead author of a new study in the journal Science that analyzed 10 years of research on how forests react to droughts, which are becoming more common and severe due to climate change, even though the damage may be less evident to the eye than the Australian bushfires.

wildfire — Australian bushfires in 2020. Photo: BLM Idaho, (CC BY 2.0)

“There’s no smoke,” he says, “but there’s a big problem.” In fact, another paper in the same issue of Science found that climate change is driving a decades-long “megadrought” in the U.S. Southwest.

Across the world, forests cover almost a third of all land — and in some places, the ratio is even higher. But if climate change continues unabated, many forests will suffer.

Researchers have used models to understand potential changes to the forest canopy, and “you can easily see 40 to 50% of forests being destroyed in 40 years,” says Brodribb.

The effects could be far-reaching.

Tree species “from rainforests to arid woodlands face similar exposure to stress or damage during periods of drought,” the researchers wrote in their paper.

That would be an astounding change for countless species, as well as humans. Trees provide oxygen and medicine, and they help comprise some of the most diverse ecosystems in the world. Their ability to absorb CO₂ is also important, many experts feel, in mitigating the effects of climate change.

“There are already clear signs of accelerated forest mortality, globally,” says Brodribb. “It looks pretty bad.”

Changing Forests

Understanding how forests may respond to climate change is critical, but also complicated.

In laboratory scenarios trees grew faster and larger when there was more CO₂ in the atmosphere. That’s led some researchers to wonder if climate change could be good for forests. Faster growth might mean that species can more easily adapt and more quickly spread their young into new areas. More robust trees might help forests survive the other challenges that climate change will bring: more drought, fires, pests and pathogens.

Outside the lab, though, it’s more complicated. For trees, carbon emissions have one big upside, but a lot of downsides.

Dead trees surround lake — Due to California’s drought conditions, trees are dying at the Castaic Lake State Recreation Area, April 13, 2016. Photo: Florence Low / California Department of Water Resources

Brodribb and study coauthor Jennifer Powers, an ecologist at the University of Minnesota, say it’s clear now that the calamity that climate change will bring to forests will offset any positive impact that more carbon dioxide might have.

For one thing, high levels of CO₂ might spur more leaf growth, but “if you make 20% more leaves, each plant will actually need more water in a high CO₂ world,” Danielle Way, an associate professor of biology at the University of Western Ontario who was not associated with the study, wrote in an email.

In a world with more droughts, that’s a problem for trees.

Water molecules are sticky. They cling to one another and pull each other up the inside of a tree’s trunk through the xylem. As the water evaporates out of the leaves, it draws on the water behind it. Most of the time this process, known as transpiration, provides leaves with the constant supply of water they need for photosynthesis, but it also puts water and xylem under extreme tension.

When there is not enough water, the tension can collapse the xylem, a process known as hydraulic failure. Higher temperatures make this failure even more likely because trees “kind of sweat,” says Brodribb. When there is little water, cells called stomata usually close up to keep a tree’s water from evaporating, but under higher temperatures trees keep the stomata open. Water escapes and the tree draws even more moisture out of the soil.

This is what the authors of the Science study call a “universal vulnerability.” Some species may be better adapted to drought and less susceptible to hydraulic failure, but with a perfect storm of warming temperatures and drier conditions, every tree in every forest in the world could be vulnerable.

California has already seen what this will look like. Warming temperatures, combined with the state’s recent five-year drought, killed nearly 150 million trees in the Sierra Nevada.

“I think that the emerging consensus now is that elevated carbon dioxide levels aren’t going to rescue trees from the negative effects of drought,” says Powers.

But some researchers think it’s too early to draw this conclusion.

“Fundamentally there is this tug-of-war between the benefits of CO₂ and the stresses of temperature and drought, and we don’t really know when and where which of those two forces might dominate,” says William Anderegg, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Utah who was not involved in the study. “It could vary by region and by forest and of course by climate future.”

It’s also not simply a matter of whether trees may benefit or be harmed — there are degrees of change in forests that could result.

Lucas Cernusak, a biologist at James Cook University who was not part of the study, wrote in an email that if new trees grow quickly where the older trees die, “the 40% mortality over 40 years could take place without a net change in stem density or canopy cover.”

That means the forests of the future could look a lot different from the forests we know today. They’d be more likely to be dominated by faster-growing, weedier trees that die and more rapidly replace themselves. Even then, droughts, pests and temperatures may push trees to their limits. And any major change in the type of forest would have big implications for the species adapted to live in those habitats. When the trees change, whole forest communities could too.

Planning for the Future

Trees that can’t adapt to these new conditions will need to find some better approximation of the world they evolved to live in, rather than the one people are creating. For trees, that’s a slow process and many species may not be able to migrate fast enough to keep up with climate change. For those that do, more research could identify which species handle drought best and how susceptible they are to hydraulic failure, a useful tool for conservationists helping to rejuvenate a forest.

“We can say, ‘Hey, if you’re going to invest a lot of money in restoring a forest, don’t choose these species. They seem very vulnerable to drought,’” says Powers. “With this knowledge, we can help practitioners choose species that will cope better with future climate change.”

smoke on the forest floor — A prescribed burn is used in a western Oregon forest for management. Photo: Bureau of Land Management, (CC BY 2.0)

Still, Powers and Brodribb are skeptical of efforts by organizations like Plant for the Planet to plant more trees in order to soak up carbon and curb emissions. It is much better, says Powers, to help support the forests we do have using tools like assisted natural regeneration, in which people can help speed up the natural way a forest grows.

But in order to conserve the forests of the future — whatever they may look like — more research is needed, and fast. There’s still much we don’t know about how individual species will be affected, and what implications that will have for the myriad organisms that depend on the forests. And of course, much of it hinges on how much carbon dioxide we will emit into the atmosphere.

That uncertainty is what concerns Brodribb. Without accurate information to create robust predictions of what forests look like in a changed world, we risk learning the answers firsthand.

“If we’re not predicting this right, if we don’t get it right,” he says, “then the impacts are so unimaginably bad that … it does keep you up at night.”

How COVID-19 Is Eroding Scientific Field Work

The pandemic has changed how conservation research is conducted today, and the effects could be felt long into the future.

Editor’s note: Summer is prime time across much of North America for scientists to do field research outdoors. But this year the COVID-19 pandemic is forcing many researchers to cancel or scale back their plans. Two scholars explain the long-term effects of a missed or downscaled field research season.

By Richard B. Primack, professor of biology, Boston University

Holes in the Data

For the first time in 50 years, ornithologists at the Manomet nature observatory in Plymouth, Massachusetts are not opening their mist nets every weekday at dawn to catch, measure and band migrating songbirds. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the center has essentially canceled its spring field season and will be doing only very limited sampling. Going forward, its long-term banding data will contain only a fraction of the usual information on songbird migrations during the spring of 2020.

Across the world, field stations, nature centers and universities have shut down long-term research to protect scientists, staff, students and volunteers from COVID-19. There’s good reason for this step, but it comes at a cost.

Collecting data over many years allows scientists to detect gradual trends and short-term anomalies in the health of forests, bays and other ecosystems and biological communities. Long-term research has been crucial in detecting how climate change is affecting the abundance and distribution of species and the timing of spring events, such as bird migrations and plant flowering.

Multi-year data has been vital to understanding how ecosystems bounce back after major disturbances like hurricanes and wildfires. Long-term research has informed policies addressing air and water pollution and wildlife conservation in ways that would have been impossible through short-term studies alone.

Since 1980, the U.S. National Science Foundation has supported a network of Long Term Ecological Research sites that now spans 28 locations, from northern Alaska to Antarctica and across North America. These sites are leaders in detecting effects of air pollution, land use and urbanization on ecosystems. The data they produce is available to the public and the scientific community.

Working Solo

Many long-term studies also take place in national parks, where researchers track subjects like water quality, wetland health and endangered species. In a normal year, armies of researchers and students would be at work in national parks and Long-Term Ecological Research sites. Now, however, just small groups are collecting data, aided by automated equipment.

Richard Primack wears a face mask while repeating Henry David Thoreau’s spring flowering and leafing observations in Concord, Massachusetts. Photo: Richard Primack, (CC BY-ND)

Some small-scale projects are managing to continue. Over the past 18 years, my students and I have recorded wildflower flowering and the first appearance of spring leaves in Concord, Massachusetts, repeating observations made by Henry David Thoreau in the 1850s.

We’re doing this to study the ecological effects of climate change. Our studies have shown that plants are flowering about 10 days earlier in the spring than they did in Thoreau’s time. We have also found that cold-loving northern wildflower species are becoming less abundant, and nonnative species are increasing.

Now I wear a mask, go out early in the mornings when few people are on the trails and work without students. None of this is how we typically work, but it allows me to continue this research and capture anomalies that might occur this year.

But maintaining a few long-term studies won’t make up for irreplaceable losses to science that will occur this year, especially for two-year experimental studies that were supposed to start or end this year. My colleagues and I hope that this pandemic ends soon, so that scientists can get back to analyzing the long-term workings of ecosystems — and the ecological impacts of coronavirus.

By Casey Setash, PhD student in fish, wildlife and conservation biology, Colorado State University

Abundant Uncertainty

Ecologists like me often measure a field season by the numbers: 40 birds captured, 85 nest plots searched, three times when the truck got stuck. This year we’re thinking about Colorado’s coronavirus case count.

My field site sits at an elevation of about 8,500 feet in northern Colorado’s Jackson County. The landscape and lifestyles here have remained largely unchanged over the last century. Jackson is also one of the few counties in Colorado without a positive case of COVID-19.

I’m conducting field work that will inform my dissertation on waterfowl breeding in flood-irrigated agricultural systems, as well as a long-term waterfowl monitoring project run by Colorado Parks and Wildlife.

Answering my proposed questions requires capturing 40 female mallards and gadwall, two common duck species. We mark them with GPS transmitters, conduct biweekly samples in the flooded fields for invertebrates — small crustaceans that ducks eat — and carry out daily nest searches within a 250-square-mile area.

sun on water — Dawn at Casey Setash’s research site in northern Colorado. Photo: Casey Setash, (CC BY-ND)

The Top 10 Ocean Biodiversity Hotspots to Protect

A new study took a deep dive into critical aspects of ocean life to identify the areas of the high seas most worthy of conservation effort.

The Sargasso Sea, an area of the Atlantic Ocean between the Caribbean and Bermuda, has bedeviled sailors for centuries. Its namesake — sargassum, a type of free-floating seaweed — and notoriously calm winds have “trapped” countless mariners, including the crew of Christopher Columbus’s Santa Maria.

For the past 500 years, most of the stories that have come from the Sargasso have been about stranded ships and sunken vessels. But in recent years scientists have rewritten the sea’s narrative. It’s not a life-stealing sea, but a life-giving one. The seaweed alone helps support 100 species of invertebrates, 280 species of fish and 23 species of birds.

That’s one of the reasons why a team of scientists from 13 universities and institutions included the Sargasso Sea as one of 10 biodiversity hotspots in the high seas — areas of the ocean outside of national boundaries — that their research indicates should be considered for designation as marine protected areas.

Their recommendations, published earlier this year in the journal Marine Policy, took more than a little bit of work to develop.

Map of conservation areas from study — Results from the global data-driven conservation planning analysis showing priority areas to be considered for protection (green) in marine areas beyond national jurisdiction. Image: Visalli et al

Quantifying the Great Unknown

The high seas make up two-thirds of the ocean, much of which is remote. Scientists are still learning about the diversity and complexity of life there.

“We’re discovering new species in the high seas all the time,” says Morgan Visalli, lead author of Marine Policy study and a project scientist with U.C. Santa Barbara’s Benioff Ocean Initiative.

But at the same time, her colleague and study coauthor Douglas McCauley, director of the Benioff Ocean Initiative, says there’s also a lot we do know that can help guide conservation.

They began their study by reaching out to networks of colleagues across the world to help gather data.

“I was really impressed by how much we actually know — how much data we have for what is out there, biologically speaking,” he says. “And also what people are doing in that space. We can’t fall back on the excuse of not knowing enough.”

The researchers ended up analyzing 22 billion data points — a huge data-processing challenge — to identify areas of the high seas that could warrant protection.

That included looking at indicators such as seafloor habitat, ocean productivity, diversity and richness of species, and extinction risks. They also identified certain physical features — like seamounts and hydrothermal vents — where changes in elevation and temperature help foster biodiversity.

Their results identified priority regions in nearly all the major ocean basins, with the largest areas in the South Pacific Ocean. Key areas also included the Sargasso Sea, as well as the Costa Rica thermal dome in the Pacific Ocean; the South Tasman Sea; the Emperor Seamount Chain northwest of the Hawaiian Islands; the Mascarene Plateau in the Indian Ocean; and the Walvis Ridge, an undersea mountain range off southwestern Africa.

map — Sources: UCSB analysis; Marineregions.org; Natural Earth. © 2020 The Pew Charitable Trusts

Their model avoided areas of high fishing activity in order to avoid what the study calls “real or perceived negative socioeconomic impacts” of setting aside conservation areas. It also took into consideration how climate change could alter biodiversity by selecting areas critical today and ones likely to be important in the future as well.

The Need for Protection

The research comes at a critical time for the future of the ocean — and the high seas, specifically.

A new United Nations treaty to protect and conserve biodiversity in the high seas is currently being negotiated, and a focus of those talks is how to create a framework for establishing marine protected areas outside of national waters. This could help ensure that unique ecosystems like the Sargasso Sea and others identified in the Marine Policy study aren’t overexploited.

The current law that governs the high seas, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, was finalized in 1982. But since then, our collective impact is starting to reveal gaps in governance.

Marine shipping traffic is up 1,600% and plastic pollution has increased 100-fold. At least one-third of fish stocks are being overharvested, and many migratory fish species, such as tuna, have declined more than 60%. Technological advances have led to more prospecting in the ocean’s depths for minerals and other genetic resources, as well as more destructive practices, like trawling along the ocean floor. Climate change, which is warming waters and increasing acidification, poses even more risks to ocean life.

bleached coral — Coral bleaching in the Gulf of Thailand. Photo: Petchrung Sukpong, (CC BY-SA 2.0)

This has all taken a toll.

A landmark report last year from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services found massive declines in biodiversity globally — including in the ocean, with one-third of all reef-forming corals and marine mammals threatened with extinction.

A recent study in the journal Nature, published just a few days after the Marine Policy study, suggests that we’ve come to a critical crossroads.

“We are at a point at which we can choose between a legacy of a resilient and vibrant ocean or an irreversibly disrupted ocean, for the generations to follow,” wrote the researchers, led by Carlos Duarte, a professor of marine science at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.

They posited that with enough resources and global will, we can see a “substantial recovery of the abundance, structure and function of marine life” by 2050. But to do that, we need to scale up efforts to protect vulnerable species and habitats, reduce pollution and — most critically — curb climate change.

That’s why Visalli and McCauley believe efforts like the emerging high seas treaty are important.

So far fully implemented marine protected areas span just 5% of the ocean. And the vast majority of these reserves are in national waters, which are only one-third of the ocean. But a high seas treaty would help create a framework to more easily set aside conservation-rich areas in a much greater expanse.

“Even though there is industry out there and it has been increasing over the past several decades,” says Visalli, “there is still a lot of wilderness in the high seas, and we are at this moment where we have an opportunity to protect these wild places before industry continues to expand even further.”

To truly protect and restore ocean health, scientists have been calling for a bare minimum of 30% of the ocean to be protected. More protected areas in the high seas are important for meeting that goal. But just as crucial as how much space, is also where that space is.

The Need for Protected Spaces

The major driver for changing and threatening biodiversity in the long term is climate change, says McCauley, which makes protecting these spaces vital in the short term.

“We are already seeing the first manifestation of these threats and we need to think about climate change and always manage the oceans — from fishing regulations to ocean parks — with that in mind,” he says. “Climate change is changing where biodiversity will be in the high seas, and we can use data to plan for that.”

Duarte and authors of the Nature study wrote that “Climate change is the critical backdrop against which all future rebuilding efforts will play out.” But well-managed marine protected areas, they said, can help ecosystems be better equipped to handle threats from climate change, like warming temperatures and changing ocean chemistry.

Getting there won’t be cheap. A global network of marine protected areas that conserves 20–30% of the ocean could cost $5–19 billion a year, the researchers write in Nature.

But supporting local economies, feeding communities, and fostering biodiversity don’t have to be mutually exclusive. The money spent on conservation will be more than returned in economic gains from the new jobs, revenue from ecotourism, restored fisheries, and protections for coastal areas, their research found.

But establishing the policy and international agreements, like the high seas treaty, to set plans in motion will require a lot of compromise, says McCauley.

“We need that space to have an ocean economy and we need that space to have biodiversity,” he says. “Can we find a sweet spot?”

18 New Environmental Books to Help You Through COVID-19 Isolation

May’s publications cover the amazing lives of elephants, butterflies, eels and fungi, and offer solutions for eco-anxiety and other environmental ills.

When I can’t get outdoors, I like to curl up at home with a good book.

As you might guess, I’m reading a lot of books these days.

And as I read, I’m finding powerful sources of inspiration for the days that will come after our current times of COVID-19 isolation.

Here’s the scoop on 18 fantastic new books — all published this month — offering insight into our natural world, the environmental problems we all face, and strategies for saving the planet and ourselves. You’ll find books about wildlife, climate change, pollution, and environmental justice, with selections for adults and kids. We’ve even got a few novels on the list this month, providing some thought-provoking entertainment.

Obviously most local bookstores are still closed to in-person shopping, but many shops offer curbside pickup or shipping, while publishers and libraries may provide e-books for immediate download. Many of this month’s titles are also available as audio books.

No matter how the books end up coming your way, may they offer the inspiration and tools you need to keep going and protecting the planet.

How to Talk to Your Kids About Climate Change: Turning Angst into Action by Harriet Shugarman

How do we embrace the urgent need for change without getting bogged down by overwhelming fear and anxiety about the future? The founder of the ClimateMama website offers a concise resource guide that, despite its kids-oriented title, is geared toward motivating entire families — and through them, their larger social circles — into creating positive change for the planet.

Fire in Paradise: An American Tragedy by Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano

The full story of the notorious and horrific Camp Fire that ravaged Paradise, California, in 2018. The authors covered the fires for daily newspapers as flames raged through the town, and now they expand upon their reporting to present the full history and the stories behind the tragedy. Along the way, they provide a potent example and warning of things to come in an increasingly warm, dry, overly developed world.

The Language of Butterflies by Wendy Williams

A book as colorful and varied as its titular subjects, from the bestselling author of The Horse. It’s a thoroughly engaging mix of science, history, culture and personal narrative, as well as a testament to the need to conserve our fluttering friends. It also comes with the best subtitle of the month: “How Thieves, Hoarders, Scientists and Other Obsessives Unlocked the Secrets of the World’s Favorite Insect.”

Fire on the Water by Scott MacGregor and Gary Dumm

This stunning graphic novel tells a slightly fictionalized version of one of the first major environmental disasters in the United States, the Lake Erie tunnel fire, and the entrenched racism that nearly made its death toll much, much worse. This book serves as a painful reminder that people died — horribly — so cities like Cleveland could have fresh, disease-free drinking water, and that corrupt politicians and corporations were just fine with the human cost of their actions. (Sound familiar?) MacGregor and Dumm also bring to light the story of Garrett Morgan Sr., the pioneering African-American inventor whose contributions and heroic sacrifices during the tragedy have been mostly erased from the history books — until now.

Poisoned Water: How the Citizens of Flint, Michigan, Fought for Their Lives and Warned the Nation by Candy J. Cooper with Marc Aronson

We’ve already seen several bestselling and powerful books address the Flint water crisis, but this is the first one specifically written for young-adult readers. When you consider that kids were among the worst affected by the Flint tragedy, that makes this a story they need to read and understand — so they can grow up and help prevent it from happening to anyone else.

The Green New Deal and Beyond: Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still Can by Stan Cox

The operative word in the title is “beyond.” Cox, lead scientist at The Land Institute, walks us through what the current iteration of the Green New Deal misses and what it would take to get to a zero-emissions future. Noam Chomsky provides the foreword.

Elephants: Birth, Life, and Death in the World of the Giants by Hannah Mumby

Part autobiography, part science, all elephant. And it’s a dynamic call for conservation action, to boot.

Industrial-Strength Denial: Eight Stories of Corporations Defending the Indefensible, from the Slave Trade to Climate Change by Barbara Freese

The author of Coal: A Human History continues her digs into the past, this time to examine how and why corporations so consistently employ delusion and deception to get their way, why so many of us keep falling for it, and how we can shift the narrative.

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake

Fungi are having their moment in the sun, with a magical new documentary and now this entertaining book that dives into the world of mushrooms, molds, yeasts and so much more. Utterly fascinating and eye-opening. The mouther-watering chapter on truffles is worth the price of admission.

Unnatural Companions: Rethinking Our Love of Pets in an Age of Wildlife Extinction by Peter Christie

As much as we love our pets, our desire for animal companionship comes with a laundry list of environmental ills. Free-roaming housecats and invasive pythons kill native birds (and just about anything else they can find). Dogs carry diseases and harass wild animals. Parrots, songbirds, lizards and other exotic pets are often poached from habitats around the world. Even the toys and food we buy for our pets have an environmental impact. This informative book isn’t about shaming pet owners, though; it serves as a call to action to change the ways we acquire, interact with and support our pets, while also providing us with a sustainable path forward.

Shuri: A Black Panther Novel by Nic Stone

An environmentally themed young-adult novel based on Marvel Comics characters, in which T’Challa’s younger sister must save an endangered plant from extinction — and simultaneously preserve a critical element of Wakandan culture.

The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World by Patrik Svensson

If you only read one translated-from-the-Swedish treatise on the philosophy, history and science surrounding weird, slippery animals, make it this one. Seriously, it’s bizarre and engaging.

A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet

Full disclosure: This powerful, funny and emotional novel about climate change and extinction comes to you from The Revelator’s copyeditor, but really, isn’t that even more of a reason to give it a try?

Indigenous Environmental Justice edited by Karen Jarratt-Snider and Marianne O. Nielsen

When pollution harms your physical, financial and spiritual health, it’s more than an injustice. But that’s what happens time and time again in Indian Country. This book addresses situations ranging from Standing Rock to uranium mining on Navajo and Hopi lands through lenses of colonization, sovereignty and — perhaps most importantly — victory.

Hidden Prairie: Photographing Life in One Square Meter by Chris Helzer

Most photo books take on an epic scope and try to capture massive concepts or landscapes. This one goes the opposite direction. Helzer spent a year pointing his camera lens at the same tiny plot of prairie land until he captured photos of 113 diverse plant and animal species and the drama that surrounded them. The book also includes a dozen short essays about his experience and the natural history of that one square meter. The whole thing adds up to a magical reading and viewing experience that will inspire you to get down on all fours and stare at the microcosms around us the next time you’re outdoors.

International Conservation Law: The Protection of Plants in Theory and Practice by Rob Amos

We try not to include too many expensive textbooks on this list each month, but we couldn’t resist this book dedicated to the thorny issues of the laws behind protecting endangered plants. Amos starts by the book by addressing why readers should care about the world’s vegetation and ends it with a chapter critically addressing “humanity’s failure to protect plants.” In between, he discusses threats ranging from climate change to international trade and invasive diseases and devotes two major sections to ways to move forward. This book isn’t for your average home gardener, but it could set the stage for important action toward plant conservation around the world.

Valuing Nature: A Handbook for Impact Investing by William J. Ginn

If this pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that our current capitalistic systems need an upgrade. This book, by the former chief conservation officer of The Nature Conservancy, aims to help nonprofits and others invest in the land, water and green infrastructure. As such, it unfortunately still embraces the ideal of placing and extracting a financial value from natural systems — heck, the final chapter is even entitled “Finding Wealth in Nature.” That might seem like an immediate contradiction, and yes, there are plenty of questions about how much impact “impact investing” truly has, but at least there’s a values system behind the concept. As such, this might serve, at the minimum, as an important piece of the conversation about our future as we move forward.

Gender and Environment, 2nd Edition by Susan Buckingham

This fully revised edition of a classic textbook looks at solving our environmental woes through the lens of social inequality, making it the perfect learning tool for the Greta Thunberg/Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez era of activism and progress.

That’s it for this month. Stay safe and stay tuned for another batch of books on June’s list in a few short weeks. Until then you can find dozens of additional eco-books in the “Revelator Reads” archive.

Working From Home During the Pandemic Has Environmental Benefits — But We Can Do Even Better

Transportation, especially commuting, plays an oversized role on global-warming emissions and air pollution. Here’s how much telework matters, and what we can do to improve.

For many Americans across the country, staying home to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) means adapting to long-term telework for the first time. We’re doing a lot more video conferencing and working out all the kinks that come along with it.

While this particular situation is not ideal for many — for example, I’m currently writing this with an infant in a baby carrier on my chest and our almost-three-year-old belting “Let It Go” in the background — in many ways we’re playing out a real-time experiment on whether telecommuting is possible on a large scale.

Matt Casale working — Caption: The author (above) wrote this while working from home, baby in tow. Photo: Emily Anderson (author’s wife/home office mate).

The coronavirus will pass, but it’s looking more and more like remote work will stick around. This time has demonstrated that, despite the ups and downs many of us have experienced, telework works for way more of us than we knew.

Even before this we knew that there were several benefits for both employers and employees to sidestepping the office. Studies have shown that it can lead to increased productivity, higher morale and lower employee turnover. It can also reduce real estate and office operation costs for employers.

We may now also be seeing some larger societal benefits that make the case for taking telework even further. Our current situation has provided a window into how a reduction in driving, buoyed, in part, by a greater adoption of telework, could relieve some of the stress on our overburdened transportation system and help heal at least a portion of the environmental damage it causes.

Today, roads that would normally clogged at all hours of the day are virtually empty, even during rush hour. And the reduced car travel leads to fewer crashes and less air pollution, which harms human health and contributes to global warming. Air that’s usually cloudy with smog has cleared. Los Angeles, which has notoriously pollution-choked skies, could recently boast having the cleanest air in the world. And this year, experts predict, the transportation transformation will contribute to the largest-ever annual decline in global carbon emissions.

Empty Los Angeles — Virtually empty Los Angeles streets on May 7, 2020. Photo: Chris Yarzab (CC BY 2.0)

Clearly not every job can be done from home, and it’s not just commuting for work that has come to a halt during coronavirus lockdowns. In 2017 only around 28% of total miles driven were work-related. Even if telework continues or expands on a much larger scale, non-work-related car trips — shopping, recreation, visits to doctors, and the like — can be expected to go back to normal.

Still, telework’s potential for taking cars off the road can clearly have an impact on global warming emissions and air pollution. Just how much of an impact could telework have? As it turns out, the answer is a significant one — and with a few important steps, the benefits can be even greater and more sustainable.

How Much of the Workforce Could Reasonably and Permanently Transition to Telework?

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 5.2% of U.S. workers — around 8 million people — worked from home in 2017. But that’s still just a fraction of potential teleworkers. Earlier this month researchers at the University of Chicago found that 37% of U.S. jobs can plausibly be performed at home. The U.S. workforce reached 164.5 million in February 2020, before the pandemic, meaning approximately 61 million of those workers could plausibly telework permanently once the economy starts up again.

Of course, the full economic consequences of this public health crisis are still unknown. It’s possible that coronavirus-related job losses will impact the overall number of those employed for some time. But for these purposes, this assumption of 53 million new remote workers will be useful to illustrate the potential impacts of telework.

How Much Driving Would Full-Capacity Telework Avoid?

In 2019 Americans drove a total 3.23 trillion miles, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. The DoE doesn’t break that down by reasons driving, but we know that in 2017 there were 683 billion total commute miles driven. Reducing the commuting workforce by about 32% (37% of total workers who could telecommute minus the 5.2% of them who already do) would theoretically decrease commuting totals by about 219 billion miles.

A traffic jam on January 17, 2020. Photo: Raphael Labaca Castro (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Of course telecommuting won’t let us avoid logging all of those miles, since people may occasionally still need to travel to an office for meetings and may need to make new trips they wouldn’t otherwise have taken (you can’t stop at the grocery store on the way home from work when you work at home). Various studies have found that telecommuting actually reduces driving somewhere between 60 and 90% of commute vehicle miles traveled (VMT). We’ll split the difference and calculate that telework reduces commute miles by about 75%, meaning the new teleworkers could avoid around 164 billion miles driven.

miles traveled — Credit: U.S. Department of Energy, Alternative Fuels Data Center

Still, that much of a transformation may not work for everyone, as people will still need to do face-to-face work — and, let’s be honest, the other thing the lockdowns have taught us is to appreciate the value of regular social contact. That said, even if most people worked from home two to three days a week and the actual VMT reduction were closer to 2 or 3%, the difference would still be significant — especially considering that VMT has been steadily rising since the 1970s, except for a few years during economic downturns. Even if just a quarter of American workers started working from home one day a week, total vehicle miles traveled would fall by 1% — not a huge amount, but enough to make a difference on a grander scale.

Impact on Global Warming Emissions

The cars and trucks we drive every day are major sources of air pollution and global warming emissions. Transportation as a whole accounts for 28% of all greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, more than any other source. Light-duty vehicles and medium- and heavy-duty trucks are responsible for 82% of the transportation sector’s emissions.

The average American car or SUV emits 404 grams of carbon dioxide (CO₂) per mile traveled. So reducing commuting by 164 billion miles would avoid 66 million metric tons of CO₂ emissions annually. These are significant emissions reductions, but they’d only make a small dent in total transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions, which reached nearly 1.9 billion metric tons in 2018.

Nevertheless, it would help us move in the right direction. And while it only represents a small percentage of total emissions, it would still be the equivalent of more eliminating emissions from than 7 million homes’ total energy use for one year, or the same as shutting down more than 16 coal-fired power plants.

Impact on Health-harming Air Pollution

People across America regularly breathe polluted air, which increases their risk of attacks and other adverse health impacts, and even premature death. In fact, in 2018 108 million Americans lived in areas that experienced more than 100 days of degraded air quality. Our cars and trucks are a major source of this pollution, which includes ozone, particulate matter and other smog-forming emissions.

There’s a reason the air has cleared over many of our major cities during the coronavirus lockdowns. When you remove cars from the road, you also remove smog. The lockdowns have resulted in an extreme reduction of VMT — between 68 and 72% across the country (and in some places closer to 90%). Assuming that telework has contributed something close to its peak potential reduction of 7%, it seems likely that it has played at least a supporting role in helping to clear our skies.

Additional Emissions Reductions From Reduced Traffic

The average American commuter wastes 54 hours a year stuck in traffic. That’s lost time with friends and families, lost productivity at work, wasted money, tons of unnecessary stress, and a lot more pollution from idling cars.

Traffic patterns are complicated because traffic is non-linear, meaning there isn’t a one-to-one ratio of percentage of cars removed to percentage of traffic alleviated. As such, just a few extra cars on or off the road can have an outsize impact on traffic. Reducing commute VMT by up to 7% would have a huge impact on rush hour traffic (when bottlenecks are at their worst and most of that driving occurs). A greater adoption of telework could give people back some of those 54 hours so they can spend it doing the things that matter to them. And slow moving or stop and go traffic results in greater emissions than free-flowing traffic. So freeing up the roads and alleviating traffic for the remaining will result in even greater emissions reductions.

What Needs to Happen for Telework to Live Up to Its Potential?

It’s clear that telework can have significant societal benefits, including less global warming pollution and cleaner skies. But significant benefits are only possible if everyone whose job could plausibly be done from home has that opportunity.

To reach that goal, several barriers must be overcome:

Technology: We’ve all had technical mix-ups when using Zoom or Google Hangouts or one of the other conferencing platforms. But the real technological barrier is access to broadband. Roughly three-quarters of American adults have broadband internet service at home, but the rate of access is much lower in rural parts of the country, according to a report by Pew Research Center. Those locations often don’t have broadband infrastructure and even 14% of households in urban areas lack access, usually because they are not able to afford it. States should make funding available to develop broadband capacity in underserved areas.

Employer policies and managerial reluctance: Coronavirus lockdowns across the country have forced employers and managers to adapt to large-scale telework quickly on an emergency basis, meaning these barriers are less likely relevant now than before. But general employer and manager reluctance to embrace working from home has slowed this transition. Cities and states can encourage employer acceptance of telework by providing tax benefits or other incentives for greater adoption.

Car-centered transportation policies: Our current transportation policies often incentivize driving or parking. From commuter and parking benefits to decades of outsized spending on highway infrastructure, we tip the scales toward getting behind an automobile’s wheel. In other words, our transportation policies are meant to move cars rather than incentivize things, such as telework, that would take cars off the road.

We need to rethink this approach and shift toward better “Transportation Demand Management.” This requires the implementation of a set of strategies aimed at maximizing traveler choices. Those strategies should include greater employer and employee incentives for telework, as well as policies designed to facilitate more walking, biking, ridesharing, vanpooling and public transportation use.

Bikeshare in Milan, Oct. 2019. Photo: Guilhem Vellut (CC BY 2.0)

That’s important, because the potential gains we’d see from telework would only be sustained if that shift were paired with other policies to ensure those commuter miles aren’t just replaced with other trips. We usually talk about this in relation to widening or building new highways, but when you open up highway capacity, it usually fills quickly. This is what the wonks call “induced demand.” People who otherwise would have driven at a different time of day, taken a different route, taken public transportation or would have avoided traffic on the highway some other way, come back to the road. The same could happen here if additional measures aren’t taken.

It’s likely that, even after the coronavirus lockdowns are over, telework is going to become more and more common in the American workforce. As it does, the environmental benefits will be significant. In a time when climate change presents an existential threat to life as we know it and millions of people across the world are subjected to unhealthy levels of air pollution, we need to be taking an all-hands-on-deck approach to solving these problems. Telework can clearly be a significant part of the long-term solution — especially if we take further steps to maximize its potential.

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.

Antibiotics: Big Ag’s Can of Worms

Antibiotic use in agriculture is a ticking time bomb, posing looming health risks to people and the environment.

The emergence of multiple pandemics in the animal agriculture industry over the past few decades, coupled with COVID-19’s suspected origins in wildlife meat markets, has prompted renewed calls from experts to transform the global food system to prevent diseases harmful to humans.

Industrial agriculture puts humans in contact with scores of animals in cramped conditions, which is ideal for disease transfer.

But that’s only one of the health dangers it causes. Antibiotics are used ubiquitously in all kinds of large-scale agriculture, causing antibiotic resistance and environmental toxicity that studies show we’re not prepared to combat.

Watch our new video to learn more about issues arising from antibiotic use in agriculture.

How to Protect Both Wolves and Livestock

New research reveals clear guidance for reducing human-wildlife conflict and restoring wolf populations.

There’s one clear way to make both wolves and livestock owners happy: Make sure that predators have enough natural prey.

That may seem like an obvious answer, but now we have data to back it up. A team of researchers combed through nearly 120 previously published studies about the diets of gray wolves (Canis lupus) and found that in most cases the predators purposefully select wild prey when it’s available — even when livestock is nearby and abundant.

The paper, published March 20 in the journal Biological Conservation, pulled from research conducted in 27 countries and found consistent results across three continents.

Another conclusion: Owners who leave their livestock out to graze freely, especially in small groups, found their herds more vulnerable to predation. Sites that kept livestock under supervision and penned their animals, especially at night, suffered fewer losses. Using non-lethal deterrent methods such as fences and guard dogs also improved conditions. Not protecting herds, they found, increased the likelihood of predation by up to 78%.

The study also found that wolves show a tendency to eat native species that have their own defense mechanisms — horns, antlers and other sharp bits. Previous research has shown that wolves coevolved with antlered ungulates, making them the ideal, preferred prey.

These results offer clear guidance, according to the authors, who write that “wild prey populations should be maintained and restored wherever possible to provide enough food for grey wolves and to minimize the likelihood that they will attack livestock.” They add that their study may have relevance for reducing conflict between humans and other large carnivores around the world.

Of course, restoring prey populations presents its own set of challenges, but this research illustrates the value of having a healthy ecosystem: It keeps both humans and their domesticated animals safer.

COVID-19 Reveals a Crisis of Public Spaces

The problem of overcrowded public lands and insufficient urban green space predates the pandemic. Are we finally willing to fund the solutions?

Across the United States, local authorities have sealed off public parks and open spaces, blaming visitors who failed to maintain social distance. What started with closed urban playgrounds spread like a contagion in its own right. In California the city of Santa Cruz banned surfing. In Colorado San Juan County issued an order threatening to tow vehicles belonging to backcountry skiers. “Socially distant” gradually became synonymous with “indoors.”

It was only a few weeks ago that going for a hike was seen as a reasonable way to shelter in place. Then the sun came.

Beachgoers and picnickers turned out en masse, making headlines from San Francisco to London. Mayors and governors scolded the public on live television as they announced new restrictions.

closed playground — A playground closed during the COVID-19 pandemic in Vancouver, Canada. Photo: Rod Raglin, (CC BY-SA 2.0)

A common refrain on social media lamenting the park closures has been, “Why can’t we have nice things?” But blaming ourselves for crowded parks misses the underlying issue: In many parts of the country, there simply isn’t enough public space to go around.

This problem is most pronounced in urban areas. An analysis of the country’s 100 largest cities found that only half of residents live within a half-mile of a park. Access is especially limited for communities of color and low-income groups, where neighborhoods lack public spaces to exercise, relax, gather, or simply breathe clean air.

This lack of city parks puts further pressure on nearby rural areas. The Golden Gate National Recreation Area (near San Francisco) and the Blue Ridge Parkway (near Washington, D.C.) had 15 million visitors apiece last year — more than triple the number at Yellowstone or Yosemite.

In the past decade, the National Park Service has seen a 15% increase in visits. But in that same decade, funding grew by less than .5% in real terms, leaving the agency unable to build new trailheads, expand parking lots or address a $12 billion repair backlog.

lines of people — Crowds wait in line for shuttle buses at Zion National Park in 2017. Photo: Wayne Hsieh, (CC BY-NC 2.0)

When recreation sites become overwhelmed, access becomes self-limiting. In much of the country, finding a parking spot at a trailhead is a summer adventure in its own right. We’ve overcrowded and underfunded ourselves into this situation.

This problem has a straightforward solution. Safeguarding access to public spaces requires protecting more land and improving infrastructure in existing parks. Doing so has the double-effect of creating more space for nature while distributing the impact of visitors. These should be easy wins to support an outdoor recreation economy valued at $500 billion by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

There are any number of ways Congress could address this issue. A simple first step: Mandate that taxes on oil and gas drilling allocated to the Land and Water Conservation Fund are not diverted to other projects or left unappropriated. According to Congress’ in-house researchers, less than half of the $41 billion raised by the fund was spent to support public lands and recreation.

This lack of support is hardly accidental. “The Founding Fathers intended all lands owned by the federal government to be sold,” wrote William Perry Pendley in 2016. He is now the acting director of the Bureau of Land Management, overseeing a huge swath of federal public land.

Some officials are pushing a narrative in which landscapes are made whole through private development instead of public stewardship. Now, in the midst of a national emergency, we find ourselves unable to keep public spaces open at the time when we need them most — proof that this vision is gaining literal ground. With too little space to go around, staying home is the only way to stay safe.

The pandemic didn’t create this crisis. But in the confines of our homes, we should ask whether we’ve taken our parks for granted. Our stewardship of public spaces must be continually reaffirmed, so that we can all go out in search of social distance — and perhaps even solitude.

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.

Conservation’s Eyes in the Sky

Satellites can help monitor industry and highlight environmental harm. SkyTruth founder John Amos tells us how technological advances are driving conservation efforts — and how people can participate.

You never know what hidden truth may lurk in the background of a photograph.

John Amos learned that lesson more than 20 years ago, when he was working as a consulting geologist in Washington, D.C. There, a poster-sized image hanging on the office wall showed a satellite photo of Mount St. Helens taken about 10 years after its famous 1980 eruption. Most people looking at the photo were struck by the visible destruction caused by the blast and lava flows. But what grabbed Amos’s attention was another even larger area of destruction in the surrounding national forest, which bore the distinctive checkboard pattern of clear-cut logging.

“I didn’t really realize how our national forests were being managed,” he says. “And when I saw that the devastation from clear-cut logging greatly exceeded this apocalyptic, natural event … that was so stunning.”

That image stayed with him, along with others he saw over the years as a consultant for industry projects, including oil and gas drilling.

The mounting destruction of the landscape finally led Amos to take a big leap: In 2001 he left his well-paying D.C. job to start SkyTruth, a nonprofit aimed at harnessing the power of satellite imagery to inspire environmental protection.

Along the way SkyTruth has left its own big mark, using imagery, data and mapping technologies to reveal the true scale of oil spills like the Deepwater Horizon disaster and blow the whistle on a 14-year-long leak in the Gulf; to track the growing footprint of mountain removal mining in Appalachia; to monitor global fishing operations; and to bring greater transparency to the fracking industry.

The organization’s research has driven scientific studies, uncovered corporate and government malfeasance, and helped activists put a picture on their cause.

Nearly 20 years later the mission of SkyTruth hasn’t changed, but the available technology has vastly improved. So, too, has the potential to use these eyes in the sky to boost conservation and research efforts.

We spoke with Amos about the power of images, the next technological frontier and how ordinary people can begin “skytruthing.”

A big part of your work depends on satellite imagery. How do you access those images?

SkyTruth founder John Amos. Photo Courtesy of John Amos

There are satellites producing data that’s free for the public to access. And then there are satellites that have other capabilities that are operated commercially, where you have to pay for the data.

Luckily, one of the unsung great successes of the American space program was the launch of the Landsat series of earth-imaging satellites beginning in 1972. That has produced a tremendous body of images, although there have been times when it wasn’t really available to the public. During the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, as a consequence of the Reagan administration’s push to privatize government assets, they took the Landsat program data and gifted it to a private company. The data went from costing something like 30 or 40 bucks an image to $4,400. When I started doing this work, all but the biggest environmental groups were priced out of that technology.

Luckily that situation’s changed over the years. Now it’s all available for free. And in fact, as soon as it became available for free, Google downloaded all the Landsat satellite images at the time and made them publicly available. And then the European Space Agency has a tremendous earth-observation program, too. And their data is available for free.

But a lot of the work we do requires higher-resolution images than the ones that are publicly available. In some cases we’ve been able to get imagery gifted to us by the companies that operate those satellites so that we can demonstrate the kinds of things you can do with their imagery.

There’s so much that your organization has done with research and data, but the key mission all along has been focused on imagery. Why?

My initial motivation for starting SkyTruth was to produce pictures and give pictures away. You know, a picture’s worth a thousand words, seeing is believing, right?

I think images have the power to hit people at a brainstem level. So, rather than just hitting people over the head with well-documented reports, full of data about the impact of deforestation in Papua New Guinea, for example, show ’em a picture of what that looks like.

And because of this longtime series of earth-observation imagery that’s available, we can do time travel. We can show people what “normal” used to be, and what things look like now — and in some cases, project into the future.

That’s a really powerful tool because of this shifting baseline problem that we have. What we think of as normal is what’s around us right now, but a place could have been totally different 10 years ago. And people forget that. So showing that change is a powerful aspect of the imagery.

And over the years, tools have come along that have just exploded our ability to do that kind of visual presentation to people. One of the biggest ones was Google Earth. I just remember being amazed that I had imagery of the whole world at my fingertips and in a lot of places, very high-resolution, detailed imagery.

There can be a big gap between people getting information — or in this case, imagery — and actually taking action. How do you close that gap?

Producing unique data sets from imagery that are well documented and scientifically robust has become an increasingly important part of what we do. And it’s becoming increasingly doable with the advent of cloud-computing platforms.

One example is we use the Google Cloud platform that absorbed the millions of Landsat satellite images. We’ve built a process that analyzes those images once a year and creates a map of all of the land in Appalachia that’s actively being impacted by mining.

Map of DC — A map shows the footprint of the Kayford Mountain, West Virginia coal-mining operation superimposed on Landsat satellite image of Washington, D.C. Photo: SkyTruth, (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

And then we create a companion geospatial data set that anybody with any mapping skills can download and use. We give that away for free. I think seven or eight peer-reviewed studies have been done using that data set. One of them resulted in a legal action that went all the way up to the Supreme Court. There’ve been studies of not only environmental impacts, but human health impacts.

It’s our hope that there’s enough rational people in the world that science will still move the public policy needle occasionally in a positive direction.

We also don’t want to feel like we have to cover the whole planet all the time. So for anybody who’s interested or so inclined, we try to be public and open about the tools we use. And we point people in directions where they can start “skytruthing,” too.

One of the key tools for that is the SkyTruth alerts system, which is an interactive map where we publish environmental information that is timely and alert-worthy. People can sign up to get a notification anytime a new alert pops up within their area of interest. We’re hoping someday they can create their own reports and soon they’ll be able to create their own alert and publish it back into our system for anybody to see.

What are you focused on now?

Our organizational focus right now is applying machine learning to detect meaningful patterns in imagery and patterns in space and time.

We’re very excited by our continuing strong partnership with Google. They’ve been so helpful to us in being able to do really big projects, and now we have a new partnership with Amazon Web Services to use machine learning to automate the detection of oil pollution at sea.

We’re to the point where we’ve got a working prototype that we’re going to deploy this summer to be able to look at the whole ocean instead of just what a few interns can manage to do in a couple hours. That’ll open doors to a lot of other environmental monitoring opportunities.

As the satellite imagery constellations get better and better, and the prices come down, we will get access to imagery that is more detailed and capable. With that we’ll be able to notify people not only that we think something happened, but what we think it was, how big and bad it was, and when it happened.

Spill graphic — Graphic showing the cumulative oil slick footprint for the BP / Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the northeast Gulf of Mexico. Created by overlaying all of the oil slicks mapped by SkyTruth on satellite images taken between April 25 and July 16, 2010. Photo: SkyTruth, (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

What else do you see in the future of conservation with this kind of technology?

In conservation we’re heading toward near real-time surveillance of areas of high conservation value or environmental concern.

We have a new partnership with the Wildlife Conservation Society to work with them to figure out how to apply artificial intelligence-driven analysis of satellite imagery to better monitor enforcement and management of protected areas around the world — onshore and offshore.

Meet Cerulean — SkyTruth’s new project to automate the detection of #bilgedumping at sea by cargo vessels and tankers. https://t.co/6pIe0o3Ope

— SkyTruth (@SkyTruth) May 5, 2020

But we still have the problem that you described, which is that you can now see in real time that there’s chainsaws cutting down trees in that orangutan reserve. But what are you going to do about it?

And that’s the question that is going to be harder to answer.

Protected area managers might not yet be geared up to be able to take action on a real-time alert. But I think as people realize that they can know that there is illegal logging happening that day, then they’re going to build a program around taking action based on that knowledge.

In the early days of our Global Fishing Watch program, people would say, “Oh, you’re going to bust the bad guys, right?” Well, no, of course we don’t have enforcement vessels on the water.

But by making all this fishing activity visible, we’re creating space for new ways to manage national waters and high-seas fisheries, and new ways to measure what’s happening out there and model the impact on ecosystems.

It brings to light a whole area of activity that creates all these new opportunities for science, research, regulation and management. But it also opens a big window for consumers who more and more want to know that the dollars they are spending when they buy fish are not supporting a company that uses slave labor on their fishing vessel fleet or is not doing environmental harm.

So I think in addition to possibly providing better enforcement by government agencies, there may be an even bigger potential in shifting society’s attitude toward that problem in a way that businesses have to respond to.

Harlequin Found: ‘Extinct’ Toad Rediscovered After 30 Years

The Mindo harlequin toad, last seen in Ecuador in 1989, was feared a victim of the amphibian-killing chytrid fungus. Have other lost species survived, too?

If the Mindo harlequin toad had a yearbook photo, its caption might have read “most unlikely to be rediscovered.” The tiny, Christmas-colored species was declared “possibly extinct” two years ago, after not being seen in its Ecuadorian habitat since 1989. It and several other species from the same region have long been feared lost to the amphibian-killing chytrid fungus, which has already caused dozens of extinctions around the globe.

But you know what yearbook photo captions are like: They’re destined to be proven wrong.

And that’s what’s happened with the Mindo harlequin toad (Atelopus mindoensis). New research reveals that the long-lost species is alive — if not exactly well.

The rediscovery came as a surprise, since no one was looking for the lost toad.

“The team was not looking for Atelopus or even expecting them,” explains Alejandro Arteaga, president of Tropical Herping and the senior author of the paper announcing the species’ rediscovery. “The cloud forests where it lives are the most thoroughly documented in the country, and no one had seen them in 30 years.”

Instead, the research team — including experts from the Tropical Herping, the University of New Brunswick and other institutions — was on a private reserve documenting other Ecuadorian frog species. There, on a narrow path next to a creek, they saw a single juvenile frog sleeping on a leaf about a foot and a half off the ground. Upon inspection, they realized it bore the distinctive red-and-green coloration, elongated noses and mitten-like webbed fingers that had previously been used to describe the Mindo harlequin toad.

Amazed by what they’d found, the researchers returned to the site for a second visit and found five more frogs on the opposite side of the creek, including three juveniles and two adult males.

Mindo harlequin toad — Photo by Jose Vieira, used with permission.

Arteaga wasn’t present for the discovery, but the team quickly conveyed photographs — they just didn’t let him know in advance what the pictures contained.

“My friends actually videotaped my reaction, as they knew I was going to be blown away,” Arteaga reports. “They were right. It took me several minutes to even realize that I was seeing an actual living Mindo harlequin toad. It was one of the happiest moments of my life.”

And there was more good news: Skin tests on two of the juveniles revealed no sign of Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, the fungus behind the chytrid crisis. That doesn’t necessarily mean the fungus isn’t present in the reserve, or that other frogs or toads there aren’t affected, but it was another welcome discovery.

And while the rediscovery doesn’t indicate a very populous species, it does reveal that enough of them exist to keep breeding.

However, their survival remains precarious. The private reserve — the exact location of which remains undisclosed — has pristine waters and lacks predatory invasive trout that have caused amphibian declines in other parts of Ecuador, but that could change. The researchers caution that trout could easily make their way to the reserve, as could the pesticides currently being used upstream. Humans could also carry the Bd fungus or other infectious diseases to the habitat.

Now that the toad has been rediscovered, the real work begins. “We’ve already sent a proposal to obtain funding for monitoring and helping establish an ex situ conservation ‘backup’ colony,” Arteaga says. The paper also recommends intense additional searches both in the private reserve and throughout the toad’s historic range, as well as education programs to help local peoples understand the species and conduct citizen-science efforts to help assure its survival.

And, of course, this provides an incentive to see what other presumed-extinct harlequin toad species might still exist.

“After the rediscovery, we have started a ‘rescue mission’ project seeking to find the remaining 12 species that are still lost,” Arteaga says. Several other Atelopus species have been rediscovered in the past few years ago, so hope remains eternal.

Just like yearbook photos.