Ongoing research finds that trashcans can feed and boost crow populations, which comes with a potentially deadly cost for some other bird species.
Last summer a team of researchers from the University of British Columbia headed into the field to study the food web linking a local bird community. But their destination wasn’t a temperate rainforest or rocky coastline — it was urban Vancouver on trash day.
Their goal: untangling hidden ways in which food in the city’s trash cans may shape its ecosystem.
The project is the brainchild of Dan Forrest, a Ph.D. student at the university’s Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, who says urban trees held special significance for him while he was growing up in Philadelphia.
“I depended on these urban parks and green spaces to get a bit of respite from the urban hustle and bustle,” he says.
But not everyone enjoyed the same benefits he did. “I saw that these spaces weren’t distributed evenly everywhere around the city.” Some people, often those in richer, whiter neighborhoods, had greater access than others to urban nature. Even then, he worried the trend would expand and worsen. “I knew that urbanization was fast becoming one of the major forces for change in our world.”
When he arrived in Vancouver as a grad student, he and other students and faculty members noticed large numbers of crows and gulls coming onto campus to raid trash cans. How, they wondered, was the easy availability of food waste affecting the urban ecosystem?
It’s not a small question, as 30-40% of food in the United States — and as much as 60% in Canada — ends up uneaten and in the trash. This can be a bonanza for urban wildlife — including crows, who tend to thrive in cities.
But if food waste attracts unusual numbers of these gregarious, intelligent birds, could it create ripple effects through the rest of the local bird community?
In addition to eating trash, crows often prey on other birds, raiding their nests to eat eggs and young. According to Forrest, Vancouver’s robin population has been declining for decades, while black-capped chickadees have been holding steady or even increasing; he wonders if this could be, at least in part, because robins’ open cup nests are more vulnerable to crows than chickadee nests hidden in tree cavities.
These questions eventually became the focus of his dissertation research, which began last summer. Forrest and a group of undergraduate research assistants woke up before sunrise to walk through neighborhoods across the city, note trash receptacles with visible food waste, and observe the behavior of birds in the area. “What were they doing? Were they eating, calling, interacting with another species?” says Forrest. “And if they were eating something, what was it?”
He’s still analyzing the data, but it’s already clear that human trash “is making up a substantial portion of crows’ diet [in Vancouver],” says Forrest, and “they’re congregating in areas where there’s lots of food waste.”
The next step will be to connect the presence of crows with overall urban bird diversity across Vancouver neighborhoods, drawing on a range of data sources. In addition to nest predation, “there could be a number of different reasons why there are fewer [bird] species around where there are crows — because they’re scared of the crows, or they’re being outcompeted by the crows,” says Forrest.
Forrest is already in touch with the city government, and if it does turn out that crows attracted by trash are having negative impacts on bird communities, he hopes to work with officials to make changes that will benefit both birds and people, such as introducing more crow-resistant trash bins or improving trash pickup services in lower-income areas — changes that could be made in other cities, too.
Forrest’s project adds to a rich body of research on the dynamics of urban bird communities. Past studies have uncovered complex relationships between bird feeders (another artificial source of food for wildlife), nest predators, and songbirds’ nesting success. And as Forrest has noticed in both Philadelphia and Vancouver, socioeconomic and racial inequality among human communities affects birds, too — for example, neighborhoods in Los Angeles where Black people were once prevented from buying homes by “redlining” still have greater bird diversity than historically Black neighborhoods, which tend to have denser housing and fewer trees.
Although it’s still in the early stages, other experts are intrigued by his project’s potential. Desirée Narango of the Vermont Center for Ecostudies, an ornithologist and urban ecologist who is not involved in Forrest’s research, says he is embarking on “an ambitious study, which is definitely admirable. I think it’s exciting that he’s already having conversations with the city, because that’s how urban ecology can really make a difference, by actually having these conversations, determining what sort of actions can help people and wildlife, and then making it happen.”
Forrest notes that his research isn’t intended to vilify crows — or any other species. Crows may be a threat to smaller birds, but as Forrest acknowledges, a lot of people like them, too. On his surveys, he met people who carried peanuts in their pockets to feed crows while walking in their neighborhoods.
“I don’t necessarily want to make a judgment call on behalf of the community,” Forrest says. Instead, he wants to help residents make better-informed decisions by revealing the hidden dynamics of the urban ecosystem they’re part of. That may start by paying better attention to what we eat — and what we, as a society, throw away.
Conservationists agree that Oregon’s Owyhee Canyonlands are an ecologically important area, but how to protect them isn’t as simple.
Outdoor adventurers visiting Oregon often flock to the rocky coastline, climb snow-capped Mount Hood, or peer into the gleaming blue waters of Crater Lake. But few make it to the Owyhee Canyonlands, in the remote southeast corner of the state. Here millions of acres of desert wilderness stretch into southwestern Idaho and northern Nevada — a sea of sagebrush interrupted by jagged red-rock canyons, clear streams, rollicking whitewater, riverside hot springs and darky, starry night skies.
The Owyhee offers recreation opportunities for bikers, hikers, paddlers, fishers and other travelers. But it’s the area’s conservation potential that has attracted attention recently. It contains a huge expanse of sagebrush steppe, a habit in decline as the desert West has been plowed, paved and grazed. Intact sagebrush steppe is needed by far-ranging animals like pronghorn, elk and bighorn sheep, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has identified the Owyhee as a priority conservation area for imperiled greater sage grouse. It’s home to some 250 species, including 28 endemic plants and 14 bats — wild, diverse, and largely unprotected.
But that could change.
Wilderness or Monument
Protecting the Owyhee has long been a goal of conservationists, and legislation now in Congress could help — depending on who you ask. The Malheur Community Empowerment for the Owyhee Act would designate 1.1 million acres as wilderness in the Owyhee that’s currently managed by the Bureau of Land Management. It’s supported by Friends of the Owyhee, Oregon Natural Desert Association, the Wilderness Society, Conservation Lands Foundation and other regional and national organizations.
The bill also has the backing of Oregon’s two senators. It was introduced in the summer of 2023 by Sen. Ron Wyden and is cosponsored by Sen. Jeff Merkley. It passed the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources in December with bipartisan support, which is further than previous versions of the bill introduced in years past have made it. But that could be as far as it goes.
Three Forks Recreation site in the Owyhee, Oregon. Photo: Bureau of Land Management (CC BY 2.0 DEED)
“We recognize that we’re in an election year and that the House of Representatives hasn’t been prioritizing conservation legislation,” says Ryan Houston, executive director of Oregon Natural Desert Association. “Actually getting this bill all the way through both houses of Congress and getting it on the president’s desk before the end of this Congress at the end of December are really long odds.”
That’s why supporters are also pursuing another strategy: calling on the Biden administration to designate the area a national monument.
“We know that the Biden administration is interested in monuments and given the groundwork that’s been laid here, we believe this is a good, viable alternative to the legislation if Congress doesn’t act,” he says.
Land designated as “wilderness” comes with protections under the Wilderness Act, which includes closing the area to future mining claims. A monument would come with whatever protections are in the president’s proclamation, which can also include limitations on road building and industrial development.
Preventing any industrialization of the Owyhee would be particularly important.
The sagebrush steppe landscape across the intermountain West is a heavily fragmented type of habitat, which makes large remaining swathes critical for wildlife. “When we have intact areas where wildlife can move across tens of thousands of acres without having to interface with industrial facilities, we can maintain strong wildlife populations, we can maintain good healthy habitat,” says Houston. “But once it gets fragmented, that can have significant impacts on wildlife.”
An uninterrupted landscape will also better help plants and animals cope with climate change as they need to shift their ranges to higher elevations as temperatures warm.
“Species need to be able to move across elevation gradients to be able to accommodate and adapt to a changing environment,” he says. “Having connected habitats across elevational gradients, soil types, geology, moisture and precipitation regimes — all of those kinds of forms of connection are fundamentally what help protect biodiversity on a landscape like this.”
The Grazing Problem
While that’s true, not all environmentalists see the current legislation or national monument effort as the best ways to protect the area’s wildlife and wilderness characteristics. One of those is Katie Fite, director of public lands for Wildlands Defense.
[The legislation] “would be a tragedy for biodiversity and for anyone seeking a real wilderness experience on public lands,” she says. “It’s a ticket for destroying the very wilderness-worthy and monument-worthy values that are out there in the Owyhee landscape.”
At issue is the fact that the vast majority — upwards of 90% — of Oregon’s high desert lands managed by the BLM are used for cattle grazing, and this includes the 1.1 million acres proposed for wilderness designation, says Houston. Grazing can threaten the ecological health of sagebrush steppe landscapes. Cows trample native vegetation, pollute water sources and cause streambank erosion. Under either the wilderness bill or a potential national monument, that grazing is likely to continue. Under the 1964 Wilderness Act existing active grazing permits are allowed to continue.
Cattle grazing in an allotment east of the Owyhee River Canyon. Photo: Bureau of Land Management (CC BY 2.0 DEED)
In the case of a national monument, the president has the choice. “But in this case, based on the other monuments the president has established, based on the politics here, based on who’s around the table, we would fully expect that the president would establish a monument that would allow for the continuance of grazing subject to existing law and regulation,” he says. “It can change in the future because the BLM has the role and the responsibility to manage grazing. So in the future, there could be more, there could be less, it could be different. But a wilderness designation itself isn’t a trigger that changes it.”
While Houston says that “impacts of grazing on that landscape have been significant.” He also sees a path for better management. “In both cases there are ways that management could improve conditions on the landscape,” he says. “The first goal is to protect the habitat, the next to manage for conservation.”
The BLM is charged with managing for multiple uses, which includes goals that are often opposed — like protecting wildlife and managing grazing. Designating land as a monument or wilderness can help narrow the focus, says Houston.
But Fite sees grazing in a wilderness area like the Owyhee as fundamentally problematic.
“I view this as an attack on the Wilderness Act, on wilderness as a whole and on public lands by enshrining grazing,” she says. “It would degrade the very meaning of monument and wilderness.”
And it would greatly imperil the ecosystem the conservation effort seeks to protect, she says.
Grazing can fuel the spread of nonnative invasive plants such as cheatgrass and Medusahead, which are highly flammable, she says. It’s a problem made worse as ranchers haul water into more remote areas for livestock, and further spread invasive plants, which proliferate near water sources in the arid landscape.
“Areas of extensive trampling disturbance around water sources are epicenters for weed infestation,” she says. “They’re hauling the water along these roads and then putting the trough out in the middle of nowhere. Once you get these weeds going out there, there’s really no going back.”
Additional Risks
Besides grazing, other threats loom, such as industrial development and the roads that come with it. That includes mining for minerals such as silver, gold and uranium; oil and gas production; industrial wind and solar development; and the transmission systems that accompany all kinds of energy infrastructure.
Wilderness protections would ward off those advances, but Fite worries that they miss the most at-risk area: the McDermitt caldera, which isn’t included in proposed land for protections in the Owyhee. The Thacker Pass lithium mine has already been permitted on BLM land at the southern edge of the volcanic crater just across the border in Nevada and would be on the Owyhee’s doorstep.
“Oregon senators are totally looking away from the biggest threat out there in this very water-starved landscape, which is lithium mining and uranium mining in the McDermitt Caldera,” she says.
As Houston sees it, wilderness protections aren’t perfect but still a necessary step.
“We care about protecting [the Owyhee landscape], and we care about managing it better. Protecting it is something like wilderness. It shuts down those [development] threats. Period. Done. Permanently,” he says. “Managing it better is about things like grazing and other types of decisions that the BLM makes continuously over time. Fundamentally managing it better is a longer-term conversation.”
But if more protections do come, that would also mean more people. Despite the fact that the Owyhee isn’t a well-known travel destination, it also isn’t undiscovered. Growing Boise sits just an hour to the east, and recreationists of all kinds hike, drive, and fish the Owyhee. More could join them.
“Change is happening regardless of what happens with the designation, so what we need is better management, and we need the BLM to have the resources and the direction from leadership — whether that’s Congress or the president — to manage the recreation well,” says Houston.
There’s one thing that all conservationists are likely to agree on: “It’s a special, majestic landscape, and that’s why fundamentally we’re interested in protecting it,” he says.
Wildlife ecologist Bruce McLellan lived in the remote Flathead Valley in Canada and followed some bears for upwards of 30 years.
Bruce McLellan recalls seeing his first grizzly bear when he was only 4 years old. It must have made an impression. He became a wildlife ecologist and devoted his career to studying the hulking bruins — much of it in the same remote place.
He moved to the wilds of the Flathead Valley in Canada in 1978 with his wife, Celine, and spent more than 40 years there, capturing, radio-collaring and then following the lives of 170 different grizzlies. He and Celine, who often accompanied him during his work, built a cabin along the Flathead River, where they raised two children.
During that time they contended with wildfires, floods, wildlife and even creepy neighbors. But living there also allowed McLellan to live amongst the animals he was studying. He followed the whole lives of several female bears who lived into their late 20s and early 30s.
“It’s interesting, but it also gets emotional,” he told The Revelator.
McLellan chronicles his personal and professional adventures in a recent book, Grizzly Bear Science and the Art of a Wilderness Life: Forty Years of Research in the Flathead Valley. The book combines anecdotes of his field work and personal life — collaring grizzlies is no easy task, and neither is raising children in the wilderness. The book also delves into his scientific findings about bear behavior and ecology.
The Revelator spoke with McLellan about how research methods evolved over his career, what climate change will mean for grizzlies, and how people can be better neighbors to bears.
You’ve spent decades studying grizzlies. Why write this book now?
There are a few reasons. One is that I’ve written several dozen scientific journal papers, and I don’t think anyone, besides other scientists, really reads them. And when I’m out in the forest, which I am a lot, I bump into various hunters and campers and other people, and they’re very unaware of what we [scientists] are doing. Yet they’re very curious. Given that ultimately these taxpayers have paid for my work, I thought it was my duty to let them know what I’ve done in the last 45 years.
I also think that there’s a disconnect happening between scientists and the general public in our greater society. And I hope [the book] lets people know what scientists do and to realize that scientists are just normal people. We’re not trying to make stuff up. We’re not lying. No one’s telling us what to say. We’re just trying to learn and provide information so that decision makers — whoever they are — can make better decisions.
There’s also a lot of personal stories in there. I’m sure if it was just all grizzly bear science, it wouldn’t be quite as easy to read. So I broke it up with stories about our life. I think it was fairly unique what we ended up doing, building our cabin and raising our kids in the wilderness.
How have methods of studying grizzlies changed over the course of your long career?
When I started on grizzly bears in 1978, the radio collars that [researchers Frank and John] Craighead invented in the Sixties were just becoming fairly reliable. Somewhat uniquely is that we lived [where we were tracking bears]. So I’d track these bears every day with radio telemetry. I didn’t know it at the time, but most studies don’t do that. They just put on collars and then locate the bears from an aircraft every week or two. But we followed these individuals daily and watched them all the time.
Of course that also included animal capture, and the drugs we used for that have evolved a lot over the 45 years, and so too have the capture methods.
Then as far as radio tracking goes, around the late 1990s and 2000s is when GPS technology became available. Then seven or eight years later uplinks through satellites became available. All of a sudden you have very accurate locations, but you never had to actually go out and track the bears.
Right now all the data just comes to your computer. You don’t have to go outside. These days you can hire a helicopter company to put radio collars on and then take them off. You get wonderful data, but sometimes I wonder if people really know what’s going on because there’s many things happening in the wild.
Another big change in technology that we were involved in was DNA. The group I was working with designed the hair-trapping method of getting hair from an animal. From that we can identify individuals and sex. That allowed us to finally count bears properly in forested areas and look at gene flow. We also used chemical isotopes to look at trophic levels of bears’ diets.
Lots of things have changed, and I think we can learn a lot more now, but I still worry that all these technological advances more or less mean more time in front of a computer and less time in the forest with the animals. And that’s too bad, in a way. You learn a lot by just observing.
What did you learn about their behavior?
From a behavioral point of view, grizzly bears aren’t territorial. Neither sex is. They have big home ranges that overlap. The males compete for breeding opportunities with females, and the females are promiscuous. They’ll mate with several males, often to confuse paternity so that the males don’t want to kill the babies because they think they’re the dad.
The males fight and compete over the females. Most males we catch in the spring are all beat up because they’ve been scrapping.
Most females don’t disperse much. They stay near their mother’s home range, which is very beneficial because that allows areas to have a fairly high density of bears because the females aren’t big wanderers, which makes them not as vulnerable.
These are still big areas, but not compared to males’ ranges. There’s nowhere on the continent big enough for males to live without being killed. But females have smaller ranges and smaller dispersal distances. Many females die of natural causes.
How well are grizzly bears doing?
In the United States two or three centuries ago they were found over enormous areas — from New Mexico through California. And in Canada they were across the prairies and Saskatchewan into central Manitoba. The European settlers had a war on carnivores and more or less wiped out grizzly bears, wolves and cougars.
In British Columbia we didn’t lose them nearly to the level that you did in the lower 48, largely because a lot of our province is pretty mountainous and relatively inhospitable for humans.
Since the Endangered Species Act listing of grizzlies in 1975, I think the mentality has changed in the United States and Canada. Since then populations have been recovering in both countries.
In the last 50 years, Yellowstone has gone from roughly about 200 bears to 1,000. And the northern Continental Divide has gone from 400 or 500 up to over 1,000. In southern British Columbia it’s the same. The Flathead population tripled in the years I was down there.
With my first publication in the 1980s on the Flathead bears, I had them increasing quite rapidly, and I was concerned that my results were questionable because it was generally thought that bears don’t go up very fast and they’re not doing well. The belief was that they were going extinct.
In general they’re recovering after nearly being wiped out. But we still have a few very troublingly small populations, including in the southern Coast Range of British Columbia and in the North Cascades in Washington.
But as their numbers are coming up, now we’re dealing with more conflict issues [with people]. People aren’t used to it, and some people are quite nervous. They have to habituate to bears.
The biggest challenge now is coexistence. How do we live with grizzlies in our farmlands and our yards and our rural 5-acre subdivisions?
How can we be better neighbors?
The number-one thing is to get rid of your attractants. Bears are driven by food, and humans have great food, whether it’s apple trees or garbage or the list goes on. If you don’t want bears around and you want your fruit or your chickens or whatever to yourself, you have to protect it. You’ve got to have electric fences. If not, you’re giving it to the bears and you’re also having them come around your place.
The Flathead National Forest hosted an educational Bear Fair on August 11, 2012. Participants learned tips and tools for living and recreating in bear country. Photo: US Forest Service Northern Region, CC BY 2.0 DEED
I have a small vineyard and fruit trees, and I have electric fences. The bears can’t get into what I want. However, I also have a bunch of apple trees, and I have a big sockeye salmon stream right through the middle of my property.
They can have that. But they’re safe here, and they’re not safe everywhere.
The other thing is that you’re going to have to learn to have them around. As my daughter points out, putting on bear spray should be just like putting on your coat if you go for a jog or something. Where she lives in another part of British Columbia, it’s just what you do.
Her daughter, who’s 12 — when she wants to go biking, she takes bear spray, and she knows how to use it. Those are the things we’re going to have to start learning to deal with. There’s lots we can do. It’s going to take effort, education, money and skilled people.
How could climate change affect grizzlies?
It’s a bit of a wildcard. I’m not a climate biologist, but when I look at the models, I have a feeling that there’s going to be some areas, like the fruit systems, that may end up actually getting better because there’ll be more wildfires.
Most fruits do way better in the sun. Huckleberries and buffalo berries are two very major fruits that do really well after fire. Perhaps with more fires, we’ll have big berry fields. That’s certainly been the case. The big berry fields in the Flathead were all caused by big fires in the 1930s, when there were record-high temperatures.
But other areas will suffer. Salmon is an obvious one. They’re not doing well all through coastal Alaska, British Columbia, Russia and Japan for many reasons, but a warming climate is a big one — whether it’s warming in the ocean or the melting of the glaciers or the warming of the streams.
Then there’s the whitebark pine — that’s another major bear food in Yellowstone and the dry side of the Coast Range and the interior mountains of British Columbia. It’s doing quite poorly.
Another issue is climate refugees. What happens to the people in Texas or Oklahoma when it gets too hot to live there? Where are they going to go? They might start moving into Montana and into British Columbia. Humanity will be shifting northward, I assume. And that’s where the bears are. So that’s also a great concern for me.
How we live with an increasing number of bears I think will be the future challenge.
Supporting the reintroduction of buffalo on Tribal lands in the United States and Canada requires international, interagency cooperation.
CHIEF MOUNTAIN BORDER CROSSING— When two bison belonging to the Blackfeet Nation of Montana attempted to enter Canada in September, rangers from Parks Canada, the country’s national park agency, met them before they could cross the border and gently steered them home.
It’s not that American bison, or buffalo, haven’t been welcome in Canada. When bison were on the brink of extinction in 1907, the Canadian government moved nearly 700 of them by train from Montana’s Flathead Valley to Alberta to ensure the keystone species’ survival. The Canadian program was so successful that the animals had to be moved again, to what is now Elk Island National Park. There, for more than 80 years, genetically pure stock has served as the base for an ambitious program reintroducing bison across Canada, into the United States, and around the world.
It’s from this herd that the Blackfeet Nation — part of the four-nation, boundary-spanning Blackfoot Confederacy — reintroduced 87 bison onto their land in Montana in 2016 with the help of wardens and biologists from Parks Canada. In summer 2023 the Blackfeet released 49 of these bison within a large section of the Blackfeet Tribal lands adjacent to the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park and the Canada-U.S. Border.
The bison summer paddock at Waterton Lakes National Park, filled with bison originally from the Elk Island herd. (Photo: Molly McCluskey)
And it’s from this land that bison keep finding their way into Waterton Lakes or Glacier National Park or up to the border — indifferent to political lines and simply roaming through their territory, as their ancestors did for centuries.
That territory, of course, has since been carved up into parcels now owned by different countries, public-land management agencies, and private entities, as well as Tribes.
Bison roaming freely presents challenges and potential threats to the massive animals, not the least of which is international bureaucracy. Every stray wandering near the border requires the cooperation of 20 government agencies, including the Blackfeet Tribal Business Council and Alberta government, as well as the blessing of private landowners to turn them homeward.
“There’s a cultural connection to returning the buffalo back to the Blackfeet from Elk Island,” says Troy Heinert, executive director of the Intertribal Buffalo Council, based in Montana. “The Tribes that have sister Tribes or a presence on both sides of the border… it’s a little easier for them to work with international agencies in their buffalo program. But the paperwork is not very easy when you’re transporting buffalo across international borders.”
A press conference marking a commitment between US National Park Service and Parks Canada to support Indigenous-led conservation and increased collaboration with Indigenous peoples and advancing nature-based climate solutions and climate change adaptation. L to R: Chief Roy Fox of Kainai Nation; Chief Ouray Crowfoot of Siksika Nation; Council member Samuel Crowfoot of Siksika Nation; Kate Hammond, intermountain regional director, National Park Service. Photo by Molly McCluskey
Bison reintroduction programs have gained traction on Tribal lands in the United States and Canada in recent years amid growing understanding of their role in ecosystem management and the impact their eradication has had on First Nations and Indigenous people. The overarching initiative — often requiring vast interagency cooperation — shows no signs of slowing despite its challenges.
The Canadian government views the bison program as part of its fundamental responsibility to address past harms against its First Nations.
“With our truth and reconciliation objectives within the government of Canada, rematriating bison to First Nations and Indigenous peoples is one of our first priorities,” says Brad Romaniuk, Parks Canada’s resource conservation manager, who oversees wildlife transfers and is part of the team that helps turn wandering bison back from the border. Rematriation, he explains, is an overarching initiative to restore the relationship between Indigenous peoples and their ancestral lands that takes many forms, including the return of bison. “If a [Tribal] nation approaches us and they have the facilities and we can help them get set up, they’re the first ones to get buffalo from us.”
In September the U.S. Department of the Interior also reaffirmed its commitment to herd reintroduction, allotting $5 million to the restoration of bison and grassland ecosystems in Tribal communities.
“The American bison is inextricably intertwined with Indigenous culture, grassland ecology and American history,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland wrote in a statement. “While the overall recovery of bison over the last 130 years is a conservation success story, significant work remains to not only ensure that bison will remain a viable species but also to restore grassland ecosystems, strengthen rural economies dependent on grassland health and provide for the return of bison to Tribally owned and ancestral lands.”
There are more than 80 Tribes in the buffalo council across 32 million acres of lands, managing 30,000 animals. Heinert says he receives calls from newly engaged Tribes nearly every day requesting information on joining the program. While some, like the Blackfeet, will receive herds from Elk Island, ultimately the source of each herd will depend on the reason for the request: whether bison are to be used to heal the land, reestablish a cultural and spiritual connection, restore a food source, or something else.
The bison summer paddock at Waterton Lakes National Park, filled with bison originally from the Elk Island herd. (Photo: Molly McCluskey)
“Wind Cave, Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Badlands, those other national parks and grasslands that we take surplus buffalo from, it really comes to the intended purpose for that Tribe,” Heinert says. “Some Tribes are looking for specific genetics. Some Tribes are looking for genetic diversity, so maybe they have received Badlands buffalo for years and now they want to bring some Teddy Roosevelt in.”
Reintroducing a herd isn’t simply a matter of releasing it into a new location. The buffalo council provides technical services, training in management techniques and herd health, support with herd development grants and other financial resources, trainings for bison workers or herd managers, and more. In addition to providing the bison, Parks Canada helps with transport, collaring, and other services.
“Some of the challenges are obviously making sure Tribes are prepared to manage buffalo,” Heinert says. “We have Tribes that have managed buffalo for decades and Tribes that are brand new, so making sure they have the infrastructure and the right numbers on the landscape that they have dedicated to their buffalo program… that all takes resources, and Tribes very seldom have extra resources to dedicate to their buffalo program.”
It’s all “so much more than just backing up a trailer and opening a gate,” Heinert says. “In some cases there’s years of preparation before the first buffalo is ever unloaded.”
Ensuring the bison live where they’re meant to once they’ve been reintroduced is another difficult task. Some, like the ones Romaniuk and his team encountered in the fall, can be turned back before crossing international lines. Others, such as a cow and calf who made it across the border on Sept. 29, have to be rounded up and sent back. Leaving them to roam could jeopardize their survival.
The threat doesn’t come from Canadian government agencies. It doesn’t come from the U.S. government, either, which named the bison the “national mammal” in 2016, or the National Park Service, which claims it’s an “honor” to support the Blackfeet Nation in “their historic achievement.”
Rather, the potential threat lies on privately held ranches and other lands outside the parks.
“Our respect for our neighbors and stakeholders outside the park, where there’s no real social acceptance for the bison, is a concern for us,” Romaniuk says. “They’re welcome into Waterton Lakes, but where they’re not welcome currently is on the private lands to the east of us,” where they could eat food intended for livestock or knock down fences. “Don’t get me wrong, there are landowners adjacent to tribal lands that are supportive, but the ranching industry, some of them just can’t afford to have bison on their lands because of fences and feed.”
When asked about turning herds away, Naaman Horn — a public affairs specialist with the Intermountain Regional Office in Denver — sent a statement that read in part, “The park looks forward to working on a co-stewardship agreement with the Blackfeet to coordinate bison conservation and management in the Chief Mountain area. In the event this herd enters Glacier National Park, ensuring the safety of our visitors as well as the bison is our top priority. As a free-ranging herd, these bison will be treated as any other wildlife in the park and be allowed to roam freely on the landscape.”
Both governments stress that their role is simply to support the Tribes. All officials interviewed were careful not to take any credit for the initiatives, or even to propose a five- or 10-year plan, which they say is entirely Tribal-led. It’s a sentiment Heinert shares on behalf of the buffalo council, which he says is following the Tribes’ leads, even as he is often a driving force, quite literally, behind some of these reintroductions.
“I’ve been fortunate enough to drive a lot of those trucks delivering buffalo,” Heinert says. “When we show up to a Tribe, especially when it’s a Tribe that’s getting buffalo for the first time in maybe ever, knowing that when you see those Tribal members, knowing that the elders have never known buffalo on their lands, and the kids that are there, knowing that there will always be buffalo on their lands from that point forward, that to me is a reconnection and a reestablishment of that relationship that Indigenous people have had with buffalo.
“A lot of times it’s about healing and reconnecting to a life way that was a good way for many Tribes for a long time,” says Heinert. “We’ve seen the devastation with the decimation of the buffalo. A lot of Tribes view this as a way back to that lifestyle.”
This little-known neotropical megafauna offers hope for boosting conservation and fighting climate change.
It’s 6 p.m. in the lowland tropical rainforest; darkness and the drone of insects descend upon two camouflage-clad individuals. They hunker on an elevated wooden platform to conceal their scent from a potential passerby. For the next 12 hours, their senses will remain fixed on a pile of mangoes, bananas and a dash of molasses below — a powerful animal attractant.
The two women — wildlife veterinarian Priscila Peralta-Aguilar and biologist Sarah Wicks — take turns, one attempting to sleep and the other standing guard. Even the scuttling sound of a raccoon excites the weary observers sitting quietly amongst the famously biodiverse forests of Southern Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula.
“Around 1:30, I heard a noise — something very soft,” Peralta-Aguilar tells me later as she recounts the night. “I thought — is it the raccoon again? I turned my red light in the direction of the sound.”
Her anticipation is understandable. She’s been holding this nightly vigil for four months. And as a media fellow working for the same nonprofit, Osa Conservation, I sometimes joined her arduous efforts to track and await a notoriously elusive creature. But on this night, the gentle giant now illuminated by her headlamp induces an adrenaline rush.
She stares the giant in the face: the largest mammal in the Neotropics. In a single motion — for which she has practiced well — Peralta-Aguilar grabs the tranquilizer, darting a Baird’s tapir (Tapirus bairdii) on the forest floor. Vets and biologists arriving at the prompt of a late-night call work in methodical silence to fit the female with a GPS collar, take biomorphic measurements, and collect biological samples that will help them understand the endangered animal’s health and genetics. Mere minutes after administering a reverser drug, the tapir awakes and departs nonchalantly; the team finally breathes a sigh of relief.
While passing months of insect-infused nights on a trying schedule may seem peculiar, the animal for whom these biologists patiently wait is more peculiar yet. Weighing in at an average of 660 pounds, the Baird’s tapir’s physical enormity has yet to confer its recognizability.
“As humans we tend to value more what we miss than what we have,” says Esteban Brenes-Mora, senior Mesoamerica associate at the conservation nonprofit Re:Wild and referred to colloquially as the “tapir guy.” He has dedicated his career to studying Baird’s tapirs, a species for which scant published research exists. We know shockingly little about the animal’s natural history and ecology; one is more likely to know of its two closest relatives, the rhino and horse, than this neotropical megafauna.
But here’s something we do know: We’d miss tapirs if they disappeared. And once before, they nearly did.
A Fragile Existence
Baird’s tapirs are currently listed as endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, with population estimates of around 4,500 remaining individuals — fewer than their critically endangered and popular cousin, the black rhino. Despite that troublingly low number, things would have been worse without efforts by conservationists, over the past 30 years, to expand and enforce protected areas.
Costa Rica is the only place where Baird’s tapir populations have recovered — a success largely owed to a socioeconomic model adopted in the 1990s to disincentivize destructive industries while incentivizing forest protection and restoration. This restructuring fueled forest recovery and fostered livelihoods conducive to human-wildlife coexistence. The country successfully maintains a network of protected areas where conservation groups, local communities and governments work together to prevent and mitigate threats to the species.
But problems remain across the animal’s range, which stretches through Mexico and Central America. One of the biggest threats is habitat loss, which has reduced the tapir’s distribution by as much as 50% in three decades. At least 70,000 square miles of forested habitat were lost between 2001 and 2010.
The largest mammal to survive the Pleistocene will require large, well-connected and diverse areas to continue its existence.
But areas for living and finding food have an alarming lack of connectivity and suitability. Half of the Baird tapir’s remaining habitat lies within protected areas, and even in these conserved regions, poaching, deforestation and wildlife trafficking further reduce populations.
Tapirs will need to make use of human-dominated landscapes, too, but the scientific community still lacks information on the species’ movement ecology within unprotected areas, which makes their study so important.
Friends of the Forest
“If we start imagining a planet without tapirs,” Brenes-Mora says, “we’d see a cascade effect down through the whole trophic net.”
Tapirs are a seldom-recognized backbone of neotropical ecosystems. Often described as “gardeners of the forest,” they eat seeds that smaller animals can’t, making them an essential dispersal agent for larger tree species once consumed by now-extinct megafauna. It’s likely tapirs have played a key role in keeping large-fruited species alive.
And while the Baird’s tapir is smaller than its vanished predecessors, it doesn’t skimp on meals. A 2015 study found one animal in Corcovado National Park consumed an average of 26 pounds per day. Its fecal matter, meanwhile, is essential for seed and plant-microbe dispersal.
Tapirs also provide another critical service: Their abundant dung-making increases a forest’s carbon capacity. The tree species that tapirs disperse also tend to be those that sequester more atmospheric carbon. Tropical forests store 55% of the forest carbon stock globally, so we need tapirs’ ecosystem-stabilizing services to maintain one of our planet’s most critical carbon sinks.
Their diet is diverse, and so are the landscapes they inhabit. Where other species of conservation concern, such as jaguars, remain constrained to the most stringently protected habitats, Baird’s tapirs roam from the deepest reaches of protected national parks to regions as unexotic as a cucumber field.
But those same cucumber fields illustrate a problem: Humans and tapirs don’t always get along. The successful recovery of tapir populations in Costa Rica, thanks to stringently enforced protected areas, has caused increased interactions between tapirs and farmers, where tapirs raid crops and cause significant losses.
Jorge Rojas-Jiménez, a wildlife veterinarian, works with the Baird’s tapir in northern Costa Rica’s Bijagua. It’s an area where successful habitat protection and community-led conservation have ushered the return of these notoriously elusive animals to areas where they now exist more conspicuously, like people’s backyards.
“They are an adaptable species — they can shape any ecosystem and feed from any plant that isn’t necessarily inside a primary forest,” he says. Recent studies show Baird’s tapirs to be more resilient and capable of utilizing available habitat in fragmented corridors than previously suggested; the species commonly uses secondary forest tracts to move between primary forest patches.
Tapirs’ ability to utilize human-disturbed landscapes should be heeded for three main reasons. Firstly, the Baird’s tapir demonstrates that we shouldn’t discount deforested or human-modified habitat patches — critical to fostering connectivity in a fragmented Mesoamerica — for their potential to become protected areas. Secondly, tapirs’ magic dung may be just the natural restoration strategy needed in a world of conservation limited by resources and time. Finally, and importantly, tapirs aren’t just sowing trees but the seeds of social change, too. Their readiness to move into human-disturbed landscapes means these alluring animals have profound potential to be a “flagship species” for Central American biological corridors.
“Tapirs have become an icon for ecotourism and income,” Brenes-Mora says. “People have seen that one hectare with cows is less profitable than a hectare with a nice forest and a couple of trails.”
On the Move
Large mammals often generate public support for biodiversity protection — tigers, elephants and rhinos have been lauded for supercharging conservation and sustainable tourism. Tapir recovery in areas like the Tenorio-Miravalles Biological Corridor in Costa Rica represents a living example of community-fueled species recovery seldom witnessed in the age of extinction. But we can’t take this heartwarming tale for granted — endangered megafauna and communities living in harmony results from decades-long, dedicated efforts to create and rigorously enforce habitat areas.
Given adequate protection, we know tapirs will, albeit slowly, creep outside the bounds of protected areas into habitat corridors and human-dominated landscapes, where similarly imperiled yet more disturbance-sensitive species like jaguars remain out of the public’s eye. Corcovado National Park, Costa Rica’s largest national park in the country’s south Pacific region, demonstrates precisely the effectiveness of creating and enforcing protected areas to recover endangered species populations.
Eleanor Flatt, an ecologist at Osa Conservation, has lived adjacent to this biologically intense, protected ecosystem for nearly a decade. She’s witnessed Baird’s tapirs recover within the park’s bounds and move willingly into secondary forested areas and landscape matrices. As an author on a 2021 study investigating tens of thousands of camera trap photos from the region, Flatt can testify to both the rebound of the species and the excitement with which local landowners describe hosting endangered species on their properties.
“People don’t know much about tapirs, even those who live in the area, because they wouldn’t have seen them for the past 30 years,” she says. “As soon as you learn about their importance, they can be a definite key flagship species for conservation.”
That’s why researchers have spent countless hours trying to tag and track the animals in the hope of learning more about them — and protecting them. Baird’s tapirs harbor massive conservation potential, both ecologically and socially, yet we still lack a complete picture of their movement and range requirements outside protected areas and within biological corridors. Transmissions from a GPS collar will produce precisely this valuable information.
“For conservation, we need to know how species move in unprotected areas,” says Flatt. “That’s where our efforts are needed most, to guide how you manage, improve and establish functional biological corridors regarding habitat connectivity and climate change.”
More GPS-toting tapirs mean more data from which conservationists can accurately pinpoint and protect priority landscapes, designate corridors critical to the species’ survival, and predict where and when local extinctions may occur. Live-tracking technologies also enable scientists to understand where and when wildlife-human conflicts arise, allowing negative interactions between wildlife and humans to be settled with participative and sustainable solutions co-created between conservationists, communities and farmers.
“This is the largest collaring and movement ecology project done with the tapir — it is the most extensive study of the species so far,” says Brenes-Mora. “Costa Rica is in a stage where we must start looking at how people-dominated landscapes can feed into wildlife conservation.”
Wild animals will require not only refuge within protected areas but also the space, resources, and ability to migrate offered by human-dominated landscapes. Tapirs exemplify the possibility of sharing in our planet’s riches, how human-wildlife coexistence can, and must, be central to social and economic systems. Tapirs show us the way of the future.
Camera trap footage from the secondary forests surrounding Osa Conservation’s wilderness preserve — land completely devoid of both trees and tapirs just 40 years ago — recently revealed a female Baird’s tapir with a small, dappled calf in tow. By enforcing protected areas, we’ve already saved the species from extinction once — efforts that paid dividends ecologically and socially.
Now, in the face of changing climate patterns, land use, and reduced wildlife populations, it’s imperative that we expand conservation beyond protected areas. Tapirs show that a conservation model premised on coexistence can come at little or no cost to human livelihoods. If the tireless platform-sitting biologists are any testament, tapirs are an indispensable species, their size a metaphor for their sheer potential to spearhead novel conservation models. Brenes-Mora summed it up poignantly — “Tapirs need us to save them,” but “we need them more.”
If we give tapirs what they need — first protected areas, and next the ability to inhabit and move through human-disturbed landscapes — they’ll be sure to reciprocate. A simple fecal gift, rich with potential, maybe the only favor required in return.
Scientists warn that rising sea surface temperatures and more frequent marine heat waves will have profound effects on ocean dwellers.
Billions of missing crabs in the waters off Alaska are a grim harbinger.
In October the Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced, for the second year in a row, that the Bering Sea snow crab population had plunged so low they had to close the fishery.
Snow crabs were once plentiful in the frigid waters, but researchers calculated that more than 10 billion had vanished from the eastern Bering Sea since 2018. They posited that the crabs had either moved or died. Research confirmed the latter.
The culprit, the study explained, was a marine heatwave in 2018 and 2019 that pushed water temperatures up — not high enough to kill the crabs outright, but enough to increase the amount of calories they needed to consume. Many crabs couldn’t find enough to eat and starved. Others were eaten by Pacific cod, who were able to extend their range into suddenly warmer waters.
We should take heed.
“The Bering Sea is on the frontlines of climate-driven ecosystem change, and the problems currently faced in the Bering Sea foreshadow the problems that will need to be confronted globally,” the researchers wrote.
As we’ve pumped more and more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the ocean has been working overtime, absorbing more than 90% of the excess heat since the 1970s. But the bill for that is coming due.
2023 was the warmest year and on record, and that extend to the ocean, too. There were five consecutive months with global sea surface temperatures hitting record monthly highs. August recorded the highest monthly sea surface temperature anomaly in 174 years of NOAA’s recordkeeping. In addition to rising average global sea surface temperatures, marine heat waves are also becoming more common.
Scientists attributed it to a combination of long-term climate warming and a growing El Niño in the Pacific Ocean, which causes warming-than-usual water temperatures.
“Over the long term, we’re seeing more heat and warmer sea surface temperatures pretty much everywhere,” says Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “That long-term trend is almost entirely attributable to human forcing — the fact that we’ve put such a huge amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere since the start of the industrial era.”
Changes Ahead
High water temperatures can throw ecosystems out of balance, as was the case with a persistent marine heatwave in the northern Pacific Ocean from 2013 to 2016 called “the Blob.” The warm waters fueled a bloom of toxic algae, which poisoned a host of marine life ranging from shellfish to sea lions. It also caused a shutdown to the crab fishery to protect human health.
“The Blob” marine heatwave from 2014-2016. Image: Joshua Stevens / NASA Earth Observatory with sea surface temperature data from Coral Reef Watch
When catching crabs was deemed safe again, fishers set their traps in the same area where humpback whales were feeding on anchovies. The turf war caused a record number of whale entanglements.
High water temperatures don’t just alter ecosystems; they can also cause direct mortality. Corals, for instance, have a symbiotic relationship to the algae that lives on them and gives them their color. But when water temperatures get too hot, the animals expel the algae, turning a whitish color. If this bleaching is prolonged, they succumb to disease and starvation.
Between 2014 and 2017 heat stress caused bleaching in 75% of tropical reefs around the world, resulting in mortality at nearly 30% of them. Even deep reefs, once thought protected, are now vulnerable. Researchers found coral bleaching in the Indian Ocean 300 feet below the surface.
This summer a marine heat wave scorched Florida’s waters, with one location recording triple digits in August. The ideal temperature range for most corals is between 73 and 84 degrees Fahrenheit. But temperatures well above that caused widespread bleaching and mortality on Florida reefs.
“This year’s bleaching event is proving to be more than many of even our hardiest corals can cope with,” the Coral Restoration Foundation reported in August. “Cheeca Rocks has experienced almost total bleaching and widespread mortality already. Sombrero, Newfound Harbor, Eastern Dry Rocks, and Looe Key have also succumbed to the heat.”
The loss of coral reefs threatens the homes and foods of 30% of marine fish and countless other species, while also leaving coastal communities more vulnerable to storm waters.
On the Move
For some marine species, survival will depend on being able to move if they’re unable to adapt to the rate of warming or prolonged ocean heat waves. Already we know that some haven’t been able to keep up.
A 2019 study in Nature found that local extirpations related to warming were twice as common in the ocean as on land. A likely contributor is that fish and other marine ectotherms — animals that don’t have internal mechanisms for regulating their body temperatures — live closer to the upper limit of tolerable temperatures. Nowhere is this truer than for fish that live in the tropics.
Water temperature is important for regulating basic functions for fish, such as metabolism, reproduction and growth. A study published in May in Global Change Biology looked at how 115 species of marine fish were responding to rising ocean temperatures. They found the majority of those populations were shifting their ranges toward the cooler water of the poles. This was especially true in the Northern Hemisphere, which has seen faster rates of warming.
School of tuna . Photo: United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization/ Danilo Cedrone (CC BY 2.0 DEED)
Where species adaptations allowed them to go deeper, they did that too. And it may be a last resort for Arctic fish that are limited in poleward expansion.
The ecological implications for these changes are vast.
“While relocation to cooler water may allow these species to persist in the short-term, it remains to be seen how food webs and ecosystems will be affected by these changes,” says Shaun Killen, a professor at the University of Glasgow and study co-author, of the research. “If the prey of these species don’t also move, or if these species become an invasive disturbance in their new location, there could be serious consequences down the road.”
Even more serious will be if climate warming remains unchecked and we continue along a high-emissions path. If that’s the case, we’re likely to see mass extinction on par with those in Earth’s history, found researchers of a 2022 study in Science. The highest risk of extinction is for species living at the poles, but the biggest drop in species diversity will happen in the tropics.
Concerted global action to tackle climate change could make a significant impact in curbing this impending loss.
“Reversing greenhouse gas emissions trends would diminish extinction risks by more than 70%, preserving marine biodiversity accumulated over the past ~50 million years of evolutionary history,” the researchers wrote.
The world’s largest land mammals are finding ways to navigate a landscape that’s becoming increasingly developed.
Species name:
African savanna elephant (Loxodonta africana)
Description:
African savanna elephants are one of the most iconic species on the planet with their enormous stature, big ears, long tusks, and of course unmistakable trunks. They’re the largest species of elephant and the largest extant land mammal.
IUCN Red List status:
Endangered.
Where they’re found:
The current range of African savanna elephants extends across parts of 23 African countries, including the Maasai Mara ecosystem in southwest Kenya. This large expanse of wilderness is interspersed with human settlements belonging to the Maasai people.
Nestled within the ecosystem is the world-renowned Maasai Mara National Reserve, and nearby across the border in Tanzania is the equally famous Serengeti National Reserve. Often viewed as one whole and very large ecosystem, both areas are a crucial haven for many species of wildlife, including elephants.
Major threats:
The most significant threats to the elephants include poaching, hunting, habitat loss and, increasingly, conflict with people. Around 70% of wildlife exists outside of protected areas in Kenya, and in the Mara ecosystem many species, including elephants, live outside the reserve and in between conservancies.
In recent years the Mara ecosystem has undergone many changes as land laws and land-use practices in Kenya have changed. Where there were previously “group ranches” — communally owned areas — in this region, there are now individual plots of land where landowners have erected fences. Many of the parcels exist within or border on the habitat of elephants.
Elephant faces a fence. Photo: Gini Cowell/Elephant Aware
Since the emergence of fences, incidents of human-elephant conflict have spiked and natural corridors that elephants once used have been blocked. Elephants often find themselves in the crosshairs of conflict when they try to follow traditional routes — or they raid agricultural crops, devastating human livelihoods.
These conflicts often result in terrible tragedy for both people and elephants.
Notable conservation programs or legal protections:
With the exception of four southern African countries, the Convention of International Trade in Endangered Species lists both species of African elephants on Appendix I, prohibiting all trade pertaining to the species. In Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe elephants are included in CITES Appendix II, which means the animals there are “not necessarily now threatened with extinction,” but could be without strict trade regulations.
My favorite experience:
There are so many amazing elephant experiences my team and I have had over the years. But one forever changed how I look at elephants, and it has invigorated my passion for their conservation.
In September 2017 we found a tuskless matriarch, Nalakite, our team knew well. She was very sick as a result of a spear injury.
The Mara Mobile Veterinary Unit was called in on two occasions and worked tirelessly with our team to save her. She had become separated from her herd due to her weak state, but her three calves remained by her side. Sadly, when Nalakite went into a mud wallow one day, she couldn’t get up again, and despite our collective teams working for more than 10 hours to free her, she eventually succumbed to her condition.
All of us observed quietly as the calves grieved for their mother, refusing to leave her side even when predators approached. The emotions this family of elephants were experiencing was obvious and heart wrenching.
What else do we need to understand or do to protect this species?
Global awareness, in tandem with conservation efforts at the local and government level, are crucial components in protecting African savanna elephants and ensuring their future in the wild.
This should include prioritizing the needs of the Maasai people who own the land, ensuring there are long-lasting mutual benefits, as well as securing wild habitat and linking protected areas through the establishment of designated land for corridors.
There are a number of organizations actively combating human-elephant conflict. Elephant Aware, a project in the Mara ecosystem where I work, uses a method referred to as “gentle persuasion,” which incorporates patience and collaboration with landowners to resolve incidents of human-elephant conflict.
This is especially crucial in situations where elephants get stuck in fences, which can turn dangerous very quickly without intervention. The Elephant Aware team, which includes Maasai rangers, must keep community members a safe distance away to allow the elephant(s) to get out of the fences peacefully. The rangers also monitor different herds of elephants every day to prevent conflict before it happens.
The fabled rainforest is starting to release its carbon as climate change, deforestation and other human threats drive it toward the limits of survival.
A version of this article was originally published by Nature. The Pulitzer Center supported travel for Daniel Grossman, photographer Dado Galdieri and videographer Patrick Vanier.
Luciana Gatti stares grimly out of the window of the small aircraft as it takes off from the city of Santarém, Brazil, in the heart of the eastern Amazon forest. Minutes into the flight, the plane passes over an 18-mile stretch of near-total ecological devastation. It’s a patchwork of farmland, filled with emerald-green corn stalks and newly clearcut plots where the rainforest once stood.
“This is awful. So sad,” says Gatti, a climate scientist at the National Institute for Space Research in São José dos Campos, Brazil.
Gatti is part of a broad group of scientists attempting to forecast the future of the Amazon rainforest. The land ecosystems of the world together absorb about 30% of the carbon dioxide released by burning fossil fuels; scientists think that most of this takes place in forests, and the Amazon is by far the world’s largest contiguous forest.
Since 2010 Gatti has collected air samples over the Amazon in planes such as this one, to monitor how much CO2 the forest absorbs. In 2021 she reported data from 590 flights that showed that the Amazon forest’s uptake — its carbon sink — is weak over most of its area. In the southeastern Amazon, the forest has become a source of CO2.
The finding generated headlines around the world and surprised many scientists, who expected the Amazon to be a much stronger carbon sink. For Carlos Nobre, a climate scientist at the University of São Paulo Institute of Advanced Studies in Brazil, the change was happening much too soon. In 2016, using climate models, he and his colleagues predicted that the combination of unchecked deforestation and global climate change would eventually push the Amazon forest past a “tipping point,” transforming the climate across a vast swath of the Amazon. Then the conditions that support a lush, closed-canopy forest would no longer exist. Gatti’s observations seem to show the early signs of what he forecast, Nobre says.
“What we were predicting to happen perhaps in two or three decades is already taking place,” says Nobre, who was one of a dozen co-authors of the paper with Gatti.
I’ve travelled to Santarém, where the Tapajós River joins the Amazon River, to join Gatti and other scientists trying to determine whether the forest is heading for an irreversible transformation toward a degraded form of savanna. Another big question is whether the forest can still be saved by slowing climate change, halting Amazon deforestation and restoring its damaged lands, something Nobre suggests is possible.
Rows of pepper plants grow at a former rainforest site. Photo: Dado Galdieri
The large-scale deforestation we saw from the air is the most visible threat to the Amazon. But the forest is suffering in other, less-obvious ways. Erika Berenguer, an ecologist at the University of Oxford and Lancaster University, UK, has found that even intact forest is no longer as healthy as it once was, because of forces such as climate change and the impacts of agriculture that spill beyond farm borders. In 2023 a large international team of researchers, including Berenguer, reported that such changes were having effects across 38% of the intact Amazon forest.
Gatti first visited Santarém in the late 1990s, when most of the farming in this part of the Amazon was practiced by smallholders for subsistence purposes. Now she’s astounded by the scale of destruction that has ravaged the jungle. While passing over one huge, newly razed parcel of Amazon forest, Gatti’s voice crackles over the plane’s intercom. “They are killing the forest to transform everything into soybeans.”
Breath of the Forest
The plane that collects air samples for Gatti is housed in a cavernous hangar at Santarém airport. On a rainy day in May, she visits the hangar to meet with Washington Salvador, one of her regular pilots. Gatti checks on the rugged plastic suitcases she has had shipped to Santarém and stored in her tiny office at the airport. Inside them, cradled in foam, are 12 sturdy glass flasks the size and shape of one-liter soft-drink bottles.
Gatti doesn’t need to accompany Salvador when he collects the samples. That’s fortunate, because she gets air sick flying in small planes. The pilots who work with her fly twice a month to specific sampling locations, one in each quadrant of the Amazon basin. Once they reach an altitude of 2,750 feet over a landmark, the pilot presses a button, opening valves and turning on a compressor that fills the first flask with air taken through a nozzle from outside. Then they dive in a steep, tight spiral centered around the landmark, collecting 11 more samples, each at a specified altitude. At the final level, the pilot practically buzzes the canopy, sometimes barely 60 feet above the ground.
Gatti will measure the amount of CO2 in the samples in her laboratory at the National Institute for Space Research. She calculates how much the forest soaks up (or releases) by comparing her measurements with those taken over the Atlantic Ocean, which is upstream of the trade winds that blow over the Amazon.
Scott Denning, an atmospheric scientist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins who has collaborated with Gatti, says that her research has been an “amazingly logistically difficult project. The beauty of Luciana’s work, and also the difficulty of her work, is that she’s done it over and over and over again, every two weeks for ten years.”
Lax Enforcement
Some of the forces transforming the Amazon biome are on display at Santarém’s port, where a trio of eight-story-high silos looms over the city’s fish market. Each silo can hold 20,000 tons of maize (corn) or soya beans, waiting to be shipped to other parts of Brazil and then around the globe. As of 2017 more than 13% of the Amazon’s old-growth forest had been cleared, largely for ranching and for growing crops. Almost two-thirds of the biome is in Brazil, which had lost more than 17% of such forest by that year, and its deforestation rates surged in 2019 during the administration of former president Jair Bolsonaro.
Rows of tractors waiting to be sold to agricultural operations. Photo: Dado Galdieri
Brazil’s Forest Code is supposed to protect the country’s woods. One key provision requires that in the Amazon, 80% of any plot, a portion known as the Legal Reserve, must be left intact. But many scientists and forest activists argue that lax enforcement makes it too easy to circumvent the law, and that fines for not complying aren’t effective deterrents because they are rarely paid.
Also, people often get title to public or Indigenous land that they illegally occupy and clear, through a process called land grabbing. Philip Fearnside, an ecologist at Brazil’s National Institute for Research in Amazonia in Manaus, says, “Brazil is basically the only country where you can still go into the forest and start clearing and expect to come out with a land title. It’s like the Wild West of North America in the eighteenth century.”
After a one-hour drive south from Santarém, we meet the Indigenous chief — the cacique — of the tiny village of Açaizal in the reservation known as Terra Munduruku do Planalto. He sits on a deck at a rough-hewn wooden table, positioned so he can watch for unwanted outsiders who might drive past.
Josenildo Munduruku — as is customary, his surname is the same as his tribe — says that decades ago, non-Indigenous homesteaders began establishing smallholdings on land that he and his ancestors had occupied for generations. He says that they built houses and opened up cattle pastures without ever asking permission or obtaining legal rights. Previous generations of his community didn’t object. “Our parents did not have this type of understanding — they were not concerned about it,” he says.
The land eventually ended up in the hands of commercial growers, who buy up adjacent plots then raze huge swaths of jungle. “They do not care about these trees from which we extract medicine. For them, these trees are meaningless, useless,” says Munduruku. He says that his community has tried unsuccessfully to get help from the government to stop the logging and to recover some of the land.
The high value of some tropical hardwoods is an ongoing threat to the forest. Off a highway just west of Açaizal, a timber-mill worker sends a massive log through an industrial saw, which slices off a plank as thick as an encyclopedia. Other workers shape the rough board into standard dimensions.
Ricardo Veronese, the timber mill’s owner, says that his family members, a small lumber dynasty, came to the state of Pará from Mato Grosso state 17 years ago. “We came to Pará because there was plenty of virgin forest left,” he says. The situation today in Mato Grosso is different: Since the mid-1980s, roughly 40% of its rainforest has been cut down.
Every year Veronese’s mill saws up about 2,000 giant trees, mostly for high-end flooring and porch decks in the United States and Europe. With obvious pride, he says that he takes only “sustainably harvested” wood. The huge trunks, stacked by the score in a yard, come from state-regulated logging operations that practice selective logging, he says, where only large trees are cut, leaving the remaining trees to grow and fill gaps in the canopy. And he says that his company follows the government’s rules for selective logging, which require firms to take steps to reduce their impact.
But many ecologists say that the selective logging permitted by the Forest Code is often not sustainable in the sense of preserving the jungle’s stock of carbon sequestered in trunks and retaining its hyper-diverse flora and fauna. That’s because the trees that grow back after a logging operation aren’t the same species as the ones that were removed. The original ones are generally slow-growing species with dense wood, whereas the replacements have less-dense wood. They absorb less carbon in the same space.
Erika Berenguer says that the rules for selective logging on the books are rarely obeyed in practice. She says, for instance, that few companies follow the requirements for limiting road construction or the number of trees that can be cut. “About 90% of selective logging in the Amazon is estimated as illegal, and therefore doesn’t follow any of these procedures.”
Carbon Counting
It takes patience and perseverance to monitor the Amazon for long periods. Berenguer and her team have been measuring 6,000 trees in the Tapajós National Forest every three months since 2015. From this, they estimate changes in the amount of biomass in the forest and how much carbon is stored there.
Censuses such as these, and atmospheric measurements such as Gatti’s, are two common techniques climate scientists use to study the uptake and release of carbon. Each has strengths and drawbacks.
The censuses directly measure the amount of carbon (in the form of wood) in a forest. If paired with measurements of debris on the ground and CO2 released from soil, they can also take account of decay. But censuses look only at a limited number of sites. Atmospheric measurements can assess the combined impact of changes in forests at regional and even continental scales. But it’s hard to decipher the cause of any changes they show.
In 2010 Berenguer began monitoring more than 20 plots in and around the Tapajós forest. Her goal was to compare the carbon uptake of primary forest with that of jungle degraded by selective logging — legal and otherwise. But in 2015 an unprecedented heat wave and drought hit the eastern Amazon.
Eight of Berenguer’s plots were burned, killing hundreds of trees that she’d measured at least twice. She recalls the day in 2015 that she visited a recently scorched plot. Her assistant, Gilson Oliveira, had run ahead. “And he just started screaming, ‘Oh tree number 71 is dead. Tree number 114 is burning,’” Her equipment was destroyed. Some favorite trees had died. “I just collapsed crying; just sat down in the ashes.”
Under normal conditions the Amazon forest is almost fireproof. It’s too wet to burn. But by the time this long dry season ended, fires had scorched 3,800 square miles of primary forest in the eastern Amazon, an area the size of Lebanon, killing an estimated 2.5 billion trees and producing as much CO2 as Brazil releases from burning fossil fuels in a year. Some of Berenguer’s research was, literally, reduced to ashes. Still, she saw the chance to study a problem that is expected to become increasingly common: the combined effect of multiple issues, such as severe drought, fires and human degradation caused by selective logging and clearcutting.
On a tour of where Berenguer’s team works in the Tapajós forest, her field director, Marcos Alves, takes us to a site that burned in 2015. Not long before the fire, illegal loggers removed the biggest, most economically valuable trees. The forest has grown back with plenty of vegetation, including some fast-growing species that are already as thick as telephone poles. But there are none of the giants that can be found elsewhere in the forest.
Alves and Oliveira take Gatti and me to a site two miles up the highway that has never been selectively logged or clear cut, and which escaped the 2015 fires. It’s dimmer here because the high canopy is so thick. And it’s noticeably cooler: Not only do the trees block sunlight, but they also transpire vast quantities of water, which chills the air.
Gatti marvels at the size of a Brazil-nut tree (Bertholletia excelsa) that forms part of the canopy. “It’s amazing! How much water this tree puts into the air.”
Gatti stands in front of a giant tree. Photo: Dado Galdieri
In 2021 Berenguer and a team of co-authors from Brazil and Europe published a study of carbon uptake and tree mortality in her plots during the first three years after the 2015–16 burning. They compared plots that had been selectively logged or had burned in the years before 2015–16, with ones that had not been logged or burnt. The study found that more trees died in degraded plots.
Although plots that weren’t degraded fared the best in her study, Berenguer says that there is no such thing as “pristine forest” anymore. Climate change has warmed the entire Amazon forest by 1°C in the past 60 years. The eastern Amazon has warmed even more.
Amazon rainfall has not changed appreciably, when averaged over the year. But the dry season, when rain is needed most, is becoming longer, especially in the northeastern Amazon, where dry-season rainfall decreased by 34% between 1979 and 2018. In the southeastern Amazon, the season now lasts about 4 weeks longer than it did 40 years ago, putting stress on trees, especially the big ones. Still, Berenguer says that, so far, the measurable effects of climate change on the forest are relatively subtle compared with those of direct human impacts such as logging.
Fading Forests
David Lapola, an Earth-system modeler at Brazil’s University of Campinas, says that deforestation alone can’t explain why the Amazon carbon sink has weakened — and has reversed in the southeast. He and more than 30 colleagues, including Gatti and Berenguer, published an analysis last year noting that carbon emissions resulting from degradation equal — or exceed — those from clearcutting deforestation.
What’s more, even intact forest with no obvious local human impacts is accumulating less carbon than it used to, as seen in some tree-census studies. A 2015 analysis of 321 plots of Amazon primary forest with no overt human impacts reported “a long-term decreasing trend of carbon accumulation.” A similar study published in 2020 reported the same things in the Congo Basin forest — the world’s second-largest tropical jungle.
That’s a change from previous decades, when censuses indicated that such primary forest in the Amazon was storing more carbon. There is no consensus explanation for these slowdowns, or why primary forest was accumulating carbon previously. But many researchers suspect that the carbon gains in earlier decades stem from the positive influence of extra CO2 in the atmosphere, which can stimulate the growth of plants. In some studies that expose large forest plots to elevated CO2, known as free-air carbon enrichment (FACE) experiments, researchers have measured gains in biomass. But in the handful of such experiments in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, only one has yet shown an effect that lasted more than a few years. The others either produced only short-term gains or have yet to show any increased growth at all.
All of the forest FACE experiments have so far been conducted in temperate regions, however. And many scientists suspect that tropical forests — and the Amazon, in particular — might follow different rules. The first tropical-forest FACE experiment is finally under construction, 30 miles north of Manaus. Its plumbing system for releasing carbon dioxide into test plots is expected to be started sometime next year. Nobre hopes that the experiment could help to predict whether continued increases in CO2 will benefit the Amazon.
For several decades Nobre and his students have used computer models to forecast how climate change and deforestation will affect the Amazon. The research grew, in part, from work in the 1970s showing that the Amazon forest itself helps to create the conditions that nourish it. Moisture blowing in from the Atlantic falls as rain in the eastern Amazon and is then transpired and blown farther west. It recycles several times before reaching the Andes. A smaller or seriously degraded forest would recycle less water, and eventually might not be able to support the lush, humid forest.
In their 2016 study, Nobre and several colleagues estimated the Amazon would reach a tipping point if the planet warms by more than 2.5°C above preindustrial temperatures and if 20–25% of the Amazon is deforested. The planet is on track to reach 2.5°C of warming by 2100, according to a report released by the United Nations in 2022.
Nobre now wonders whether his earlier study was too conservative. “What Luciana Gatti’s paper shows is that this whole area in the southern Amazon is becoming a carbon source.” He is convinced that, although the Amazon is not at the tipping point yet, it might be soon.
Susan Trumbore, director of the Max Planck Institute of Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany, is not a fan of using the term tipping point, a phrase with no precise definition, to discuss the Amazon. But she says that the forest’s future is in question. “We all think of a tipping point as it’s going to happen and it’s going to happen fast. I have a feeling that it’s going to be a gradual alteration of the ecosystem that we know is coming with climate change,” she says. Regardless of whether the change will be fast or slow, Trumbore agrees with the majority of scientists who study the Amazon that it is facing serious challenges that might have global ramifications.
Some of those challenges are directly linked to politics in the region. On Aug. 23 Gatti and her colleagues reported that assaults on the Amazon — including deforestation, burning and degradation — had increased dramatically in 2019 and 2020 as a result of declines in law enforcement. And that doubled the carbon emissions from the region.
The fate of the Amazon is on Gatti’s mind as she climbs a lattice tower in the Tapajós forest — one of the landmarks her pilots fly over as they collect air samples. The metal structure rattles and creaks as she ascends. On the deck, 15 stories above the ground, she gazes at the forest spreading in all directions out to the horizon. It looks unblemished. But she says that it is suffering.
“We are killing this ecosystem directly and indirectly,” she says, choking up. She wipes a tear from her eye. “This is what scares me terribly and why it’s affecting me so much when I come here. I’m observing the forest dying.”
Several months after visiting the Tapajós forest, I contact Erika Beringuer to ask about her research plots. Nearly the entire Amazon Basin is experiencing a deep drought combined with a series of intense heatwaves that began in August. Beringuer says that the area around Santarem has been enveloped in smoke from scores of wildfires. There are “hectares and hectares of burned forest,” including at least one of her plots, she says in a text. The smoke is too thick for her to assess the effect on her research so far.
“Something that I find particularly distressing is that feels like 2023 is a remake of 2015,” she says. “How many remakes will we have until there are some actions in place to avoid forest fires?”
These unique ecosystems face threats from invasive species, development and pollution.
The Place:
Nestled in valleys between the mountains of the Western Ghats of southern India are pockets of tropical evergreen forests. These forests are better known by the local name sholas. Sholas are separated by montane grasslands spread across the rolling slopes, forming habitat complexes that date back 20,000 years. These habitat mosaics are found on isolated mountain tops, distinguished from lower reaches by their cooler climate, like islands in a sea of clouds. Hence the name: Shola Sky Islands.
Why it matters:
The shola-grassland habitat complexes are home to many endemic species across all taxa, a number of which are also endangered. Nilgiri tahrs (Nilgiritragus hylocrius), for example, are an endangered ungulate found only in Shola Sky Islands above 14,000 feet. Nilgiri langurs (Semnopithecus johnii), a vulnerable primate, are also restricted to these hilly areas. In 2017 laughingthrushes in Shola Sky Islands were discovered to represent a previously undescribed genus, with four distinct species separated by wide gaps in the mountain ranges. Named Montecincla, this genus is a striking example of the isolation of these sky islands.
Doddabetta Peak is one of the places where you can get a good glimpse of an endangered Nilgiri laughingthrush. Photo: Nisha Bhakat
The aptly named resplendent shrub frog (Raorchestes resplendens) is known from only two sky islands within the 37-square-mile Eravikulam National Park. It is one of many species found in just a few Shola Sky Islands. New species continue to be discovered there, including a jumping spider, Pancorius sebastiani, just described in November.
The importance of Shola Sky Islands reaches beyond wildlife. They are home to many tribal groups including the Todas, Kattunayakans, Kotas and Kurumbas. Their lives and cultures are intricately entwined with the shola-grassland ecosystems, and many people continue to depend on them for sustenance.
Additionally, sholas have often been likened to sponges for their ability to retain water, and they feed numerous streams and ultimately major rivers like the Cauvery. This affects the lives and livelihoods of millions of people downstream.
The threat:
Over the past several centuries, human activities have chipped away at these unique ecosystems. Both grasslands and sholas have been razed for plantations that grow tea, coffee, cardamom and other crops. After 1856 under British colonial rule, nonnative tree species such as eucalyptus (Eucalyptus globulus) and Australian blackwood (Acacia melanoxylon) were introduced to increase timber and firewood production. That has come at the cost of native flora and birds like Nilgiri pipits (Anthus nilghiriensis).
The loss of grassland habitat to exotic tree invasion also puts human-nature relations at risk. Among the affected are the Todas, who use specific native grass species — plants that are getting harder to find — to build their traditional temples.
Many of these mountains are also popular hill stations that are seeing increasing tourism pressure, particularly in summer. The soaring footfall is burdening a waste-management system already stretched to its limits. Untreated waste leads to soil and water pollution, the spread of disease, and the increased risk of human-animal conflict. Open garbage dumps tend to be lucrative foraging grounds for gaurs and sloth bears, especially if the surrounding habitat is a resource-poor exotic tree plantation.
Natural forests and grasslands have been replaced by tea estates in the In vast regions of the Shola Sky Islands. Photo: Nisha Bhakat
Climate change, of course, poses an additional level of concern. Species endemic to the sky islands are at particular risk since their climatic niche is already small. As temperatures rise, the size of the sky islands can effectively shrink.
My place in this place:
As a researcher for the National Center for Biological Sciences, I’ve been studying endemic birds in the Nilgiris region of the Western Ghats for the past year. Even finding shola patches has become its own task, leading me to realize the extent of habitat loss and fragmentation. The hills are now dominated by plantations instead of grasslands and forests. And I’ve seen the effect of increasing development, more tourism, and inadequate waste management.
The sight of endangered Nilgiri laughingthrushes congregating at a garbage dump to feed on Maggi (Indian instant ramen) is something I won’t forget.
Who’s protecting it now:
There are several protected areas in the region looked after by the state forest departments. However, many of the sholas lie outside of these protected areas. Nongovernmental organizations such as the Keystone Foundation, Nature Conservation Foundation, Bombay Natural History Society, Shola Trust, Wildlife Conservation Society India, Centre for Wildlife Studies, Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, and many more have also stepped up to carry out research and conservation work in the landscape.
What this place needs:
To save what’s left of this unique ecosystem, strict regulations are needed to adequately manage waste and sewage-treatment facilities, early warning systems to reduce human-wildlife conflict, and collaboration with local leaders. More research on how to reduce the heavy impacts of tourism would help, as well as ecological restoration of degraded forests and plantations.
A female grey junglefowl, endemic to Central and South India, has fallen victim to a speeding vehicle near Ooty, upper Nilgiris where an intricate network of roads weaves through remnant forest patches and timber plantations. Heavy tourist pressure ensures busy traffic. Photo: Nisha Bhakat
Lessons from the fight:
It’s easier to prescribe mitigation measures than to put them into practice, as on-the-ground realities tend to be far more complex than they appear on paper. Currently, the same tea and coffee plantations that have negative impacts on the environment are crucial to the economic security of hundreds of thousands of people. Such is the case with tourism as well.
But there are measures that can help. Many scientists have called for ecological restoration of the timber plantations strewn across the hills. Even the Madras High Court directed the removal of exotic plants from the Western Ghats nearly a decade ago. While this seems a massive venture, work has already begun.
And the Keystone Foundation is working with Indigenous communities on ecosystem restoration in the region. Traditional ecological knowledge held by these communities, in partnership with modern scientific research backed by sufficient funding and governmental support, is critical for restoring these habitats.
Share your stories:Do you live in or near a threatened habitat or community, or have you worked to study or protect endangered wildlife? You’re invited to share your stories in our ongoing features, Protect This Place and Species Spotlight.
The popular app can help you identify species, but its global community of naturalists is contributing even more to biodiversity protection.
A lot has changed since 2008. That’s when Ken-ichi Ueda turned his master’s project at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Information into a website called iNaturalist, which allowed people to post pictures and help identify species.
Since then iNaturalist has grown as technology has evolved — first becoming a mobile app in 2011 and eventually adding more sophisticated machine-learning models to streamline the identification of plants and animals.
It’s also grown in numbers. When Scott Loarie — now codirecting with Ueda — joined in 2010, he was the 477th user. Today the platform has almost 3 million users across the world who have recorded 150 million observations of 430,000 species. That’s made iNaturalist the leading source for biodiversity data for the majority of species — data that’s been used in more than 4,000 scientific papers.
That growth has come amidst a changing world. Global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, and species extinctions are occurring at 1,000 times the natural rate. iNaturalist’s data on hundreds of thousands of species can help us better understand some of the ways global changes are affecting individual species — and spur action for better protections, says Loarie.
The Revelator spoke to him about the conservation potential of iNaturalist, the biodiversity questions artificial intelligence can help answer, and what he’s learned from his 27,000 observations posted to the platform.
How has iNaturalist evolved?
I met Ken-ichi in the fall of 2010, two years after he started iNaturalist. At that time I was a postdoc at Stanford, and my research was focused on trying to scale and find new ways to generate and deal with biodiversity data. I immediately quit academia and got involved.
We ran iNaturalist as an LLC for five years, and then in 2011 we launched the first mobile app. In 2014 the California Academy of Sciences invited us to join them as an initiative of the museum. We were at Cal Academy for three more years, and then National Geographic also got involved. We ran another six years as a joint initiative between Cal Academy and Nat Geo. At the end of that contract, everybody realized it was a good time for us to spin off as an independent nonprofit organization, [which we did in July].
Initially iNaturalist was a website, which was combining some photo-sharing things that you could do on sites like Flickr with taxonomic labeling. Increasingly it’s been something that people are experiencing using on their mobile devices. When we launched, the idea that everybody would have a camera and a GPS in their pocket wasn’t a reality. Now obviously that’s totally changed, and I think a huge amount of iNaturalist’s growth has been on the backs of that.
Scott Loarie. Photo: Courtesy
Secondly, when iNaturalist started it was all crowdsourcing. You would post a picture of a butterfly and then you’d have to wait for someone in the community to say, “Hey, this is a western swallowtail.” But then in 2017 we were approached by a bunch of machine-learning researchers who were interested in facial recognition computer-vision work. They said, “You have the biggest data set of labeled images of living things. We would love to do some more research on this.” We realized we were in a position to use our own data to train the artificial intelligence to help recognize species automatically.
The AI is really just a synthesis of the expertise that’s already in our own community.
What can the platform help people do?
Most people think of iNaturalist as a place that gets species identified. A typical use case is that you’re in your backyard, you see this butterfly that interests you and take out your phone and take a picture of it. The iNaturalist app will identify it and tell you this is a western swallowtail.
What excites me more about that is that you can share that observation with the global community on iNaturalist, which can give you some context. They can help with the identification. A lot of times artificial intelligence isn’t perfectly accurate. They can also tell you something interesting about it, “Hey, this is really weird. These aren’t normally found this time of year.” And it’s that interaction with the community where a lot of the learning happens.
iNaturalist has become this really important source of biodiversity data. At the moment it’s producing most of the biodiversity data for most species around the globe. It’s an important tool for generating the biodiversity data that we need to help come up with solid conservation strategies and outcomes. But we’ve also realized that just as important is that what we’re doing is also connecting people in nature and getting them excited about what’s in their backyards.
You personally have 27,000 observations recorded on the platform. What have you learned?
I think that the ecosystem that you’re in wherever you are is such an important lens. It’s so exciting for me when I go visit a place I’ve never been before to just think about what kind of things live there.
It’s funny you mentioned the number of observations because when I had kids and I had less time to go out and find new things and go to remote places, I’ve become a much larger identifier on iNaturalist. I have many more IDs than I have observations. And those are IDs I’ve made for other people.
It’s helped me vicariously live through what other people are seeing. All of a sudden, I can be in South Africa and see what kind of interesting creatures are showing up in the intertidal zone and how that differs from going around the corner to Mozambique. I think it just taps into this lifelong interest I’ve had in geography and biogeography.
How can iNaturalist help drive conservation?
Our main goal is to make sure that iNaturalist is a tool for conservation impact. The three ways that we’re doing that are by connecting people to nature, which changes their hearts and minds. That whole saying that “you conserve what you love, and you love what you understand,” I believe is true. I think that by getting people to get to know a butterfly in their backyard, they’re more likely to stand up for that butterfly in any sort of local conservation. Effective conservation often happens from the bottom up. It comes from local land-use policy and local government action and things like that.
Secondly, just by generating all this data and getting this data into the hands of the scientific community through publications, that’s where a lot of the policy and the advocacy happens at a different level. We know at least 4,000 scientific papers have been published using iNaturalist data.
An observation of a western swallowtail on iNaturalist. Photo: newpawpaw, iNaturalist (CC BY-NC 4.0 DEED)
The third way is that this community isn’t just monitoring biodiversity — they’re also taking steps to steward the land. We see a lot of local naturalist groups who use iNaturalist to do a “bioblitz,” which are these monitoring events where people come together and see how many species are in a certain area. But they’re also taking steps to improve the habitat. Maybe they’re removing invasive species or bringing back native plants to help pollinators.
Are you seeing users recording information about how climate change and extinction are affecting ecosystems?
Every day we’ll see a paper published or some article in the popular media about one of three big changes. The first is that native species are eroding away. The classic one is the pika at the top of a mountain that has nowhere to move. The range of the pika is getting smaller and smaller every year as the planet gets warmer.
The second is that climate refugee story, which is that all of a sudden we’re seeing species off the coast that have never been seen there before — it’s the march of climate refugees moving as the climate changes. The third isn’t just a climate change story, but we see invasive species show up and really have an impact.
I think the climate change story has turned conservation on its head in some really important ways. The conservation plan used to be that we had to protect these pieces of land. If we can get enough of these species and these pieces of protected land, our job is done.
But now we have to have enough capacity to monitor these species as they’re shifting with the climate and hopping from one piece of land to another to make sure we don’t lose any on the way.
We’ve been using machine-learning tools to synthesize iNaturalist data to try to get at some of biogeography questions, such as: Can we really detect if a species is showing up at a weird time of year or a weird area, or a species is actually eroding away, or a new invasive species is showing up, or climate refugees are moving?
I think that’s really exciting because it combines our mission, which is really to have conservation impact, with some of the things that we’ve shown we can do with computer vision, which is take this data and use it to train these really complicated machine-learning models to pull out some really interesting insight.
It’s a much more dynamic problem, and I think it demands a lot more real-time information, which iNaturalist is really good at collecting.
Species name:
The Place: 
