The Elwha’s Living Laboratory: Lessons From the World’s Largest Dam-Removal Project

Two dams removed from Washington’s Elwha River were branded as salmon-restoration projects, but their watershed and scientific impacts are just as significant.

For just over four years now, the Elwha River has run free.

Today the river drains, uninterrupted, from a snowfield in the mountains of Washington’s Olympic National Park to the Strait of Juan de Fuca in the Pacific Ocean. But for about a century before, this course of 45 miles was blocked by two dams, the 105-foot-tall Elwha Dam and 210-foot-tall Glines Canyon Dam. The impenetrable barriers prevented salmon from migrating, devastating their populations as well as the human and ecological communities that depended on them.

The dams’ removal, intended to reverse those problems, was decades in the making and the result of advocacy led by the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe and conservation groups, along with years of political wrangling and scientific studies. The removal process itself began with the first blast to the Elwha Dam in September 2011 and ended when the last of Glines Canyon Dam was gone three years later.

With the dams no longer an obstruction, nature didn’t waste any time.

As the river waters came rushing back, so did a multitude of species. Researchers continue to monitor the river and nearby wildlife and have already compiled a crucial library of information about the world’s largest dam removal and restoration project to date. What they’ve learned, and how they are measuring success, will be a guiding light for future dam-removal projects.

Salmon Recovery

By most accounts the dam removal and river restoration on the Elwha has been a success, or it’s headed that way. It’s still too early to tell how large the rebound will be for salmon populations, and scientists will spend years studying the long-term impacts. But initial results are encouraging.

“It’s this constant revelation of new life and new connections,” says Amy Souers Kober, national communications director of the nonprofit American Rivers, which works on dam-removal issues. “The restoration continues on the river, with everything from insects to birds to elk to otters.”

She adds: “It’s all because of the salmon.”

The Elwha historically had several species of trout and five runs of salmon — Chinook (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha), coho (O. kisutch), sockeye (O. nerka), pink (O. gorbuscha) and chum (O. keta). The number of fish returning each year plummeted from 400,000 in the early 1900s to just 3,000 after the dams’ construction blocked much of the river and its tributaries.

With the dams now down, scientists are hoping those numbers will rebound significantly, especially since most of the river runs through the pristine Olympic National Park. The first step is for the fish to take advantage of their newly expanded habitat — a process that has already begun.

“Salmon of all species very rapidly moved into habitats they haven’t been able to get to for 100 years,” says Ian Miller, Coastal Hazards Specialist with Washington Sea Grant. “That was happening effectively in the same season as the blockages were removed in most cases.”

Scientists report adult fish from all the species have returned, including Chinook and coho. “We’re seeing increases in sockeye salmon, and we also see bull trout,” says George Pess, watershed program manager at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center. “We’re not seeing as much pink and chum as we’d like, but overall we’re seeing a positive response for the majority of the populations in terms of where they are going in the watershed.”

Big kings coming back to the Elwha River, five times as many as before dam removal already. pic.twitter.com/rLoHFZCveG

— Lynda V. Mapes (@LyndaVMapes) September 29, 2018

But Pess says it’s really too early yet to claim victory. For some of the salmon species, the first fish generation born after dam removal is just beginning to return to the river. It will take a few more cycles to begin to understand the impact to the populations. “We see a lot of positive changes,” he says. “A lot of things we would like to see are happening.”

How many salmon come back, and how much of the river they use, will have a significant impact on the larger food web.

Nutrients From the Sea

The lifecycle of salmon — from stream to ocean and back to natal stream again — makes them a crucial part of the watershed and a keystone species that numerous other kinds of wildlife depend on. “It’s going to take a while for salmon to come back in large numbers,” says Kim Sager-Fradkin, a wildlife biologist with the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe. “But they’re hugely beneficial to pretty much everything out there.”

Salmon put on the bulk of their mass during their time in the ocean, where they pack their tissues with enriched sources of carbon and nitrogen, she explains. When the salmon return to the river to spawn and die, these marine-derived nutrients are then brought back to riverine and terrestrial environments as, essentially, fertilizer.

“When you think about what salmon do to a river, it’s almost like this infusion of giant vitamin pills up into the river basin,” adds Kober. As the salmon die or are eaten, they nourish plant and animal life along the riverbank. The impacts can be felt for miles, as far-ranging animals like bears also spread these marine-derived nutrients deep into the forest.

Since the Elwha dams have been removed, at least one species has started taking advantage of salmon’s greater range in the river. Research published in the journal Ecography in 2015 showed that access to salmon dramatically improves the lives of a riparian bird species called American dippers (Cinclus mexicanus). “It changes everything for them,” says a co-author of the report, Christopher Tonra, now an assistant professor in avian wildlife ecology at Ohio State University.

The research, which was co-authored by Sager-Fradkin and Peter Marra of the Smithsonian’s Migratory Bird Center, found that when female dippers get nutrients from salmon (usually from eating salmon eggs) during the birds’ breeding season, they are in better energetic condition. Their chicks, especially the females, grow larger. The birds are less likely to migrate in search of food, and they’re much more likely to raise two broods of chicks in a single year, says Tonra. That’s something dippers without salmon in their diets almost never do.

When Tonra and his colleagues analyzed blood samples from dippers for stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen after the first dam had come down on the Elwha, they saw the presence of marine-derived nutrients in the birds thanks to returning salmon, which quickly swam past the former dam site.

Even though these dipper populations hadn’t seen salmon for 100 years, they rapidly integrated the fish — and their nutrients — back into their diets. “The salmon being in the system creates a completely different life history for those dippers,” he says. “I think salmon changes the entire dynamic of the river system because they are these pulses of resources that are coming in every year.”

Coastal Changes

One of the key areas researchers were hoping to learn about following the removal of the two Elwha dams was sediment. They had three key questions: How much of the 30 million tons of sediment trapped behind the dams would move downstream, how would it alter the coastal environment, and what would the ecological impacts be?

“We didn’t know, once the dams were removed, how quickly material would make its way down the river and hit the coastline,” says Miller. “We didn’t know if that would take two years or two months.”

In fact, he says, it took about two weeks.

Despite some initial concerns that the arriving sediment would line the coast at the river mouth with mud and turn it into an ecological wasteland, Miller says nothing close to that happened.

He’s part of a team of divers that have monitored 15 sites before and after dam removal. Some of those sites, he says, did receive a heavy dose of sediment — one to three feet of sand — as the river moved the accumulation from the reservoirs. But it was far from an ecological disaster. Instead Dungeness crab, shrimp and forage fish liked by salmon, birds and other marine life quickly moved in to colonize the new sandy terrain.

More significant changes were visible and audible, too. Over the past century the sediment-starved river had carved away much of the natural estuary at the river’s mouth. Dam removal reversed that process. And quickly.

“Imagine going to the river mouth before [dam removal] and closing your eyes and listening and all you would hear is cobbles banging with the surf,” says Pess. “And now you go there and it sounds like a sandy beach.”

One of the lessons that researchers have learned with the Elwha is that rivers are efficient at transporting sediment. “Getting these obstructions out of the way has really allowed the river to recreate its natural sediment regime,” says Pess. An estimated two-thirds of the sediment behind the dams has now moved downstream, with 90 percent of it reaching coastal habitats.

Pess says the most dramatic impact of the removal of the dams has been the recreation of the estuary, which has moved the mouth of the river about half a mile further out, he says. In the process, it has provided new habitat for salmon and other species.

“When we go into these large-scale ecosystem-restoration projects, it’s hard for our human brains to wrap our heads around what to expect from the standpoint of those details, because it’s a very complex ecosystem,” says Miller. “But in general, you walk away with a sense that these ecosystems can be very resilient to these large-scale perturbations.”

Ongoing Research, Ongoing Lessons

Now that the dam removal is a few years in the past, some researchers are turning their attention to wildlife that are taking advantage of the nearly 800 acres of new habitat in the former reservoirs, where more than 300,000 plants and thousands of pounds of seeds have been planted in revegetation efforts led by the tribe and Olympic National Park.

Planting vegetation in 2012. Photo: Olympic National Park (public domain)

The most “intrepid little explorers” have been rodents like tiny Keen’s mice (Peromyscus keeni) and related species, says, Sager-Fradkin, who is working with colleagues from the United States Geological Survey, the National Park Service and Western Washington University to look at recolonization of wildlife in the reservoirs.

The researchers are gathering animal droppings to track how often deer and elk are venturing from the forest into the previously flooded habitat. And they’ve already found shrews, moles, woodrats and weasels, and have documented recolonization by beavers.

She says she’s happy with what they’ve seen so far. “We’re seeing animals coming back to the reservoir bed, so that’s great — new habitat for all of those species is beneficial.”

When thinking about lessons for future dam-removal projects, she says it’s important for researchers to think about the whole variety of creatures that could be impacted and try to do as much research as possible before dam removal.

“Collectively, we did a lot of baseline research on bears, the mid-sized carnivore communities, small mammals and amphibians,” she says. “I think the thing we missed was the riverine bird community. We did study dippers, but I think we should have started studying the fish-eating birds and the birds at the mouth of the river more, too.”

What the collective body of research has shown so far, though, is that rivers can be restored, says American Rivers’ Kober.

“I think people across the country have been inspired about what they have seen on the Elwha, and it has made them think big about what’s possible on their own river,” she says. “Maybe it’s not dam removal, maybe it’s something else. But a river can be restored. They are resilient and we know what they need. I think that gives people hope.”

Previously in The Revelator:

To Restore Salmon, Think Like a Beaver

Extinction in a Handful of Cards

The “6th Extinction” card deck offers you a chance to lean about lost species — while playing poker.

Most people attending comic-book conventions go there in search of original art, rare toys, geeky collectibles or celebrity autographs.

I look for dead things.

As I wandered the aisles of Rose City Comic-Con in Portland earlier this month, my eyes kept taking in images of the dying and the deceased. Many of the attending artists, I found, were selling artwork and prints of endangered or extinct species. This included plenty of images of dinosaurs — you’d expect that from such an imaginative crowd — but also a fair share of tigers, rhinos, orangutans and polar bears.

And then there was one of the most unusual items I found at this year’s convention: a tiny pack of playing cards devoted to extinction. Called simply “The 6th Extinction,” it’s like any normal deck of cards — except that in addition to your traditional hearts and clubs, each card also contains a painting or drawing of a species that has been lost due to human activity.

The images, though small, are incredibly well executed. Thirty-four wildlife illustrators and cartoonists, including publisher Roz Gibson, provide 54 paintings of lost species ranging from the ivory-billed woodpecker to the Japanese otter and from the thylacine (Tasmanian tiger) to the golden toad (the only amphibian represented in the collection). There are even Joker cards, each depicting a lost hominid like the Neanderthal.

The art packs a lot of detail and personality into each painting. Most of the cards are quite realistic, like Kory Bing’s wonderful drawing of a perched passenger pigeon (which, bleakly, also shows hunters shooting at a passing flock in the background). A few artists take a more cartoony approach, like Gibson’s own drawing of a New Caledonian giant scrubfowl. A handful of the illustrators use slightly more surreal approaches, such as Tracy Reynolds, whose image of the last Kosrae crake about to be eaten by invasive rats is probably my favorite drawing of the deck.

Gibson published this project through Kickstarter earlier this year, and a few backers also got to also order a side project, a book called Art of the 6th Extinction which contains all of the paintings at a much larger size, along with histories of each species, maps of their historic ranges, and the reasons they went extinct. To me, the book (which I ordered from Gibson after the comic convention) is even more exciting than the card deck. For one thing, the large format provides a chance to really enjoy the detail the artists poured into each drawing — on the tiny card version of the passenger pigeon, for example, I didn’t notice the hunters. In addition, the stories behind the images are extremely well told. I’ve written about many of these extinctions, and even I learned a thing or two while reading this volume.

6th Extinction book — A sample page display, by Roz Gibson

Gibson doesn’t have an online store, but anyone interested in picking up either of these products can write to her at roz.gibson@gmail.com for ordering information. The card decks are $15 plus postage (around $4), while the books are $20 plus postage (about $2 media mail). She tells me there are only a handful of the books left, since they were intended only for high-level Kickstarter backers. If you’re interested, order quickly before they, too, go extinct.

Warming Cities, Dying Trees: Can We Keep Our Cities’ Tree-lined Streets?

Climate change may threaten the trees grown in inland cities. Adapting to that threat may help us protect city residents and mitigate future warming.

Municipal tree managers and other urban residents, especially those in the inland cities of California, should begin reconsidering their palettes of common street tree species to prepare for the warmer conditions brought on by climate change, according to our new research.

These surprising conclusions, published recently in the journal Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, are the result of a survey spanning 16 cities across California where we sought to evaluate how the common street tree species, such as the coast redwood and London planetree, might fare in warming climate. To accomplish this we used a method known as space-for-time substitution, which looks at current spatial patterns to model future trajectories of ecological systems.

First we tallied the most common street tree species in 16 “representative” cities in California, with each city representing a distinct climate zone: from Eureka on the cool North Coast to warm Burbank, east of Los Angeles, and hot Fresno in the middle of California’s Central Valley.

Next we determined each city’s “warm” counterpart, where the climate today approximates the expected conditions in the city about 80 years from now (specifically, where the daytime temperatures in July today approximate those that are expected in the target city in 2099). For example, Eureka can expect a climate at the end of the century to be a bit like Berkeley’s today, whereas Fresno’s climate in 2099 will resemble today’s climate of El Centro (see the complete list of cities below). The corresponding warm cities were chosen using climate predictions from Cal-Adapt, which synthesizes multiple climate change scenarios to estimate the magnitude of warming.

Climate zone	City	Corresponding city (approximates climate in 2099)
1	Eureka	Berkeley
2	Ukiah	Fresno
3	Berkeley	Santa Ana
4	King City	Stockton
5	Santa Maria	Santa Ana
6	Santa Monica	King City
7	San Diego	Santa Ana
8	Santa Ana	Burbank
9	Burbank	Fresno
10	Riverside	Barstow
11	Yuba City	El Centro
12	Stockton	Barstow
13	Fresno	El Centro
14	Barstow	El Centro
15	El Centro	Furnace Creek
16	Susanville	Barstow

Finally we compared the tree-species lists from each representative city to that of its warm equivalent: Eureka’s trees with Berkeley’s, Fresno’s street trees with those of El Centro, and so on. The results pointed to a sharp distinction between the coastal cities and those further inland. The warm equivalents of coastal cites contain most of the same common urban tree species of their representative cities, while the warm equivalent of inland cities seemed to lack most, and in some cases all, of the common trees found in those representative cities. In other words, while Berkeley — the “warm Eureka” — contains most of the street trees common in Eureka today, Barstow — the “warm Fresno” — lacks most of Fresno’s common street trees.

The main implication of these results is that the coastal California cities appear to be better suited to withstand 2099’s climate than the inland cities. According to our projections, some inland cities in our study may need to start changing their tree palette promptly. If they don’t start adding new tree species, these cities could lose the majority of their street trees as the climate warms.

While the study was not designed to evaluate underlying reasons, it appears that this difference in coastal and inland cities arises from a combination of two factors. First, less warming is expected to occur along the coast than in the inland cities. Second, the coastal cities were perhaps a bit luckier in historically selecting their common trees from among more adaptable species.

The other implication is that we should not take for granted the continued presence and health of our street trees, especially at this moment when we need to not only retain but substantially expand our urban forests. This is because urban trees are uniquely valuable in managing climate change. They, like other trees, sequester carbon, removing CO₂ from the atmosphere and thus reducing the greenhouse effect. This means street trees are a critical, irreplaceable element in mitigating climate change.

But urban trees, unlike their wildland cousins, provide shading to houses, people and infrastructure. In addition they cool, by evapotranspiration of water, the air in the cities, helping to make our cities more livable. In this way urban trees are also a unique factor in adapting our cities to climate change.

This twin nature of urban trees, important both in mitigation of climate change and in adaptation to it, makes them worthy of continued preservation — not just in California, but in cities around the globe.

The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity or their employees.

Conservationists: Don’t Give Up on the ‘Living Dead’

Small, remnant populations might look like they’re doomed, but a new study says they could still deserve protection.

When a population of any species gets too small and isolated, it may find itself at much greater risk of dying out. As a result, these tiny populations — which are often fatalistically called “the living dead” — sometimes don’t get prioritized for conservation.

That could be the wrong approach. A new paper points out that these small populations could actually be quite viable on their own and are still worthy of protection.

The study, published this summer in the Journal of Insect Conservation, was conducted at Narew National Park in northeast Poland, where a few dozen Alcon large blue butterflies (Phengaris alcon) live on 13.5 acres of hilly habitat surrounded by wetlands. The butterflies have managed to hang on there for years, despite the fact that they’re located more than 30 miles away from the nearest other population of the species and that the hills only hold about 300 marsh gentian (Gentiana pneumonanthe), the food-plants that the butterflies need to survive.

You might think that under such extreme, isolated conditions, this butterfly population would be too small and inbred to be worth exerting effort to save. But researchers from a group of Polish institutions proved exactly otherwise. They found that the Alcon blues do have fairly low genetic diversity, but they still have relatively long lives and can move around their habitat without much obstruction. On top of that, they also have a random mating pattern that helps reduce the risk of further inbreeding.

In other words, they’re doing just fine. As the paper concludes, “Our study indicates that very small size does not necessarily translate into low viability, and thus low conservation value of an isolated local population.”

Even the researchers didn’t necessarily expect that. “We were quite surprised to see that such a small and strongly isolated population still manages to persist against all odds,” says lead author Piotr Nowicki, an associate professor at Jagiellonian University’s Institute of Environmental Sciences in Kraków.

That’s actually a contrast to other butterflies in the genus. Because the Alcon blue and its relatives rely on very specialized ecologies — they need to eat specific plants and, in their caterpillar phase, parasitize on just one kind of ant before metamorphosing — they have become endangered species in many European regions and need dedicated conservation programs. “With the success of some of these programs, they achieved the status of flagships of biodiversity conservation in Europe,” Nowicki notes.

Those conservation programs might not normally prioritize a tiny population like the one in Narew National Park, but Nowicki and his coauthors argue they should. If a population of a few dozen Alcon blues can persist for decades, so could other populations of other species, given the right conditions.

“The main take-home message from our study,” Nowicki says, “is that there is no need to be overly pessimistic concerning small and isolated populations and to write them off as a rule in conservation programs, because some of them may actually do well, and thus be worth the efforts aimed at preserving them.”

So how should conservationists assess a species’ population, if not by size and isolation? According the paper, the parameters that should be considered — for insects, at least — include their ability to move around their habitat, the longevity of adults, their breeding success rates and strategies, and what times of the year the population is active. These parameters could conceivably carry over to other species groups as well.

Unfortunately, Nowicki doesn’t expect this particular Alcon blue population to benefit from the conservationists’ research or these conclusions. “This is because the population is located within the Narew National Park, where passive preservation measures are strongly promoted and where the butterfly is not listed among the priority species for the park,” he says. That doesn’t mean they’ll die out, just that they won’t get much of a helping hand on top of their own efforts to survive.

Still, the research exemplifies how species can hang on in a remote, degraded environment — something that’s all too common in today’s world. Hopefully it will serve as an example to other researchers and conservationists looking to study and preserve the living dead before they fade away into the darkness.

Previously in The Revelator:

The Philosophy of Insect Conservation

Tigers and Wolves: The Reigning Cats and Dogs in Conservation?

A new study finds that large, charismatic species get the majority of research into felid and canid species, possibly at the expense of others.

Do the species most in need of conservation also receive the most scientific research?

To answer that question, a new study examined the past five years’ worth of research into felids and canids — better known as wild felines and canines — and found some interesting patterns, as well as some notable omissions.

Of 4,351 published studies of the felid and canid families, 359 were devoted to tigers (Panthera tigris), and 579 examined gray wolves (Canis lupus). That’s more than 21 percent of all felid and canid studies focused on just two species.

On the other side of the spectrum, some species were rarely, if ever, studied. The rusty-spotted cat (Prionailurus rubiginosus) received just one study between 2013 and 2017, while no published studies examined the short-eared dog (Atelocynus microtis) or side-striped jackal (Canis adustus).

The results indicate a potential research bias toward large, charismatic predators that sit at the top of the food chain, at the expense of their smaller, less dynamic relatives.

Beyond simple counts by species, other potential biases emerged: Studies of felids mainly focused on conservation and wildlife management, while canid research tended to address diseases and other health issues.

The study, published in the journal Global Ecology and Conservation, was conducted by Laura Tensen, a postdoctoral research fellow in wildlife genetics at the University of Johannesburg. Tensen’s own research focuses on lions, leopard and African wild dogs, so she went into the study concerned about her own approaches. “The species that I have studied are in fact charismatic, which was part of the reason I wrote this article — perhaps to self-reflect my own research bias,” she says.

Two other observations inspired the paper: Tensen had found a lack of scientific information on some species, while others had a number of seemingly repetitive studies. “I noticed a lot of redundancy in science, where certain topics have been studied repeatedly,” she says. For example, her paper found that most conservation studies focused on population estimates and human-wildlife conflict, while only 1 percent of all studies tackled climate change or the illegal wildlife trade.

Crunching the numbers didn’t result in any real surprises — Tensen cites earlier studies that came to similar conclusions — but she hopes putting the results into clear statistics and graphs will have an impact on how future research is conducted. Researchers might, for example, decide to focus their work on species that are understudied, taxonomically unique, endangered, or which live in small geographic ranges.

“Ideally, researchers should take these factors into consideration and challenge themselves to broaden their horizon,” Tensen says. “In reality, however, it is more difficult to get funding for elusive and endangered species that are not commonly known by the bigger audience.”

Toward that point, Luke Hunter, chief conservation officer at Panthera, the global wild cat conservation organization, says the main value of Tensen’s paper is that it illustrates which species are not getting studied, notably small carnivores such as the rusty-spotted cat.

“I think there is terrific value in launching new research on such unknown species,” Hunter says. “It provides the fundamental data that helps better understand how to conserve them, but they also represent a great opportunity to do basic science. One would think that prospect, with the possibility of writing seminal papers on previously unknown carnivores, would be a massive beacon to researchers — especially those in academia, who are the main audience for Tensen’s paper.”

Tensen says she’s making that switch a bit herself. “I would personally very much like to move to the ‘underdogs,’ and I have recently started projects with black-backed jackals, caracals and black-footed cats,” she says. “However, I can’t deny that large carnivores fascinate me and I would never turn such projects down.”

In fact, Tensen acknowledges, the appeal of large carnivores such as tigers and wolves — which her paper points out are often studied specifically because of their important ecological roles — helps research to get funded and therefore helps broader conservation issues. “Large and charismatic species are often targeted by conservation initiatives, which motivates research as well,” she says. “This doesn’t have to be a bad thing, because at least it helps to conserve nature.”

Hunter adds that we can study both types of creatures. “It’s not a zero-sum game,” he says. “We need more conservation-focused science on many of the well-studied larger species in decline, such as African wild dogs, lions and tigers. These charismatic and endangered species will always attract researchers, and so they should. My hope is that we see a growth in research, especially in applied work that helps design effective conservation actions, on all carnivores.”

Meanwhile, researchers aren’t the only ones with biases. I asked Tensen if I should feel guilty knowing that The Revelator’s own home page frequent features charismatic species such as wolves and tigers.

“Don’t feel bad at all,” Tensen replied. “My desk is covered with wild dog and tiger pictures, so that makes me as guilty.”

Previously in The Revelator:

The Ethics of Saving Wolves

The Philosophy of Insect Conservation

We understand that insects have both intrinsic value and instrumental value, but even that binary approach falls short.

The starting point for insect conservation is to question why we should do it. After all, extinction is the norm, with 99 percent of all organisms on Earth having gone extinct from natural causes over time — so perhaps we should just let events take their course as a part of an evolving planet?

Two things weigh against this. First there’s the intrinsic value of insects: They must be conserved for their own sake, embodying the immense complexity of life. The argument for intrinsic value is that we are sentient, and aspire — since after all we’ve given ourselves the epithet sapiens — to be a wise and caring species. Quite simply, we share this lonely planet with an amazing variety of life and a stunning selection of insect forms. Are we so crass that we wish to simply send them to oblivion? Second, and quite bluntly and selfishly, they have instrumental value, value purely for us. Yet few people actually appreciate this value.

With humanity having recently received its “Second Warning” from more than 1,700 independent scientists about global ecosystems in major decline, we cannot carry on as we have been up to now. We require a radical change in thought and action. We need a good philosophical base for steering practice. Many people consider that conservation is instrumental and must benefit humans. This approach stems partly from the logic that by taking this approach, those who hold power will listen. In short, it is considered by many as the only hard currency of insect conservation.

The binary approach of intrinsic versus instrumental value of itself has shortcomings, as it focuses on entities, such as insect species or landscapes, rather than how we relate to nature. There is now a move away from this binary approach to one that focuses on personal and collective wellbeing, based on how we value and relate to nature to achieve this wellbeing. This focus on relational value is built into our need for nature, and the fact that we have a shared destiny, with biodiversity as a whole. This also means relating to insects as most of them are fundamental to our health and happiness, because without them we would have an impoverished and dangerous world as resources decline.

Quite simply, we need to look after insects, and they will look after us. We can no longer ignore this fact if there is any future for our grandchildren.

Excerpted from “Insect Conservation for the Twenty-First Century,” a chapter from the book Insect Science: Diversity, Conservation and Nutrition, and published under a Creative Commons license.

Interactive Map: Air Pollution in 2100

Our exclusive map shows where pollution is projected to increase, county by county, thanks to climate change.

Having a little trouble breathing lately? That’s no surprise. Air pollution is already bad in many parts of the country, and climate change is only going to make it worse. Even though many industries are reducing their emissions, a warming climate could actually offset these reductions by intensifying the rates of chemical reactions and accumulation of pollutants in the environment.

Scientists already identify air pollution as the largest environmental health risk around the world today. In order to understand future risk, researchers from MIT recently modeled the impacts of unmitigated greenhouse gas emissions on toxic air pollutants. They found increased levels of air pollution across the country, with some regions being hit hard enough to create unhealthy conditions. These predicted changes, according to the EPA, could cost the country 57,000 additional premature deaths and $930 billion in lost economic benefits by the end of the century. That’s bad enough, but even those projections leave off the temporary effects of wildfires and other air-quality threats, which will also be made worse by climate change.

So how bad are your neighborhood’s conditions in these projections? Explore our map below to see which regions can expect the biggest annual changes in the most dangerous levels of particulate air pollution — PM2.5 — by 2100.
(Darker colors indicate greater increases. Click on counties on mobile, or mouse over them on desktop.)

Sources and Methods:
Estimated change in annual-average fine particulate matter (PM2.5, μg m-3) from 2000 to 2100 under the Reference scenario from EPA.

Annual PM2.5 concentration for 2000 by SEDAC/NASA.

Projected PM2.5 2100 level obtained by adding estimated change data to PM2.5 2000 data.

Tools:
ArcGIS Pro

Strengthening Mussels for Cleaner Rivers

A hatchery program puts freshwater mussel benefits on center stage.

When Danielle Kreeger works in the small, glass-walled hatchery at the Fairmont Water Works in Philadelphia, she feels she’s on display. “Come see the scientists raising baby freshwater mussels,” she jokes. “It’s like working in a bubble.”

And that’s exactly the point, says Kreeger. She’s senior science director at the Partnership for the Delaware Estuary, a nonprofit organization designated by Congress to protect a three-state area where the freshwater of the Delaware River meets saltwater of Delaware Bay. The demonstration hatchery lets the Fairmont Water Works’ 100,000 annual visitors witness the complex process of raising freshwater mussels and explains why anyone would want to raise them.

“This freshwater mussel recovery program is designed to restore mussels for various ecological benefits, and in particular, for clean water,” Kreeger says.

As she explains, a freshwater-mussel bed covering a stretch of river bottom a bit smaller than two football fields will filter 10 million gallons of water a day and remove 10 tons of suspended matter, such as silt, algae and bacteria. “Those are real numbers,” based on surveys of healthy freshwater mussel beds, she says.

There are other programs that restore oysters and marine mussels in saltwater habitats. And there are other programs hatching freshwater mussels to save them from extinction — they’re one of the most endangered groups of animals in the world. But the Partnership for the Delaware Estuary has the country’s only program raising relatively common freshwater mussel species to put them to work as nature’s own water filters.

Photo: Lance Butler, Philadelphia Water Department. Used with permission.

It’s no accident that the demonstration hatchery is in a water-treatment plant. In theory, healthy populations of freshwater mussels in rivers and streams can reduce the cost of water treatment. Kreeger doesn’t want to oversell their benefits as water purifiers, though; she says freshwater mussels can’t clean up every mess. They’re sensitive to toxins, metals and acid mine drainage.

But they still clean up a lot. As visitors tap and swipe the interactive displays outside the hatchery’s glass walls, they learn that freshwater mussels filter out particles and let enough sunlight reach the bottom of rivers and lakes so that submerged aquatic vegetation can grow. These underwater plants provide oxygen and food for other water-dwellers, such as fish. Together, the freshwater mussels and the underwater plants engineer healthier aquatic ecosystems.

adult mussels with fish — Photo courtesy Partnership for the Delaware Estuary. Used with permission.

“Absolutely, it’s a good idea,” says Teresa J. Newton, a fishery biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Upper Midwest Environmental Sciences Center in Wisconsin, who researches the ecosystem services of freshwater mussels. “How practical it is, time will tell.”

Once upon a time, natural populations of freshwater mussels filtered sediment out of rivers and lakes. Then pollution, development and dams wiped out some of their populations and reduced others. Today 95 percent of Pennsylvania’s rivers and streams that were once home to freshwater mussels no longer have them, Kreeger says.

Raising freshwater mussels is complicated by their strange life cycle. Larval mussels spend a few days to a few weeks living as parasites on the gills of specific species of fish; many mussel species rely on just a single fish species for this parasitic relationship.

For a short time each spring, visitors to the Water Works see blueback herring (Alosa aestivalis), American eels (Anguilla rostrata), sometimes largemouth bass (Micropterus salmoides), banded killifish (Fundulus diaphanus) and white perch (Morone americana) swimming in buckets or tanks in the hatchery as they serve as hosts for the newly hatched mussels. A larger facility in Virginia, the Harrison Lake National Fish Hatchery, bred mussels from the same local stock and sent the young mussels back to the Delaware estuary program.

In the program’s first year, in 2017, it raised mostly one species of freshwater mussel, the alewife floater (Utterbackiana implicata), along with a few eastern elliptio (Elliptio complanata). This year it added tidewater muckets (Leptodea ochracea), eastern pondmussels (Ligumia nasuta) and yellow lampmussels (Lampsilis cariosa), bringing its stewardship up to five species.

The work has been a long time coming. “We’ve only gotten really good at propagating freshwater mussels in the last decade,” says Caryn C. Vaughn, a freshwater mussel researcher and professor at the University of Oklahoma. “We not only had to figure out the fish hosts, but also how to rear the young freshwater mussels.”

That second step requires some complex procedures. The young mussels babied at the Water Works hatchery require research by Kreeger and other staff to find the perfect water sources to circulate through their small tanks, as well as the best-sized food to dribble into the water through an automated system of tubes and holding tanks.

When the young mussels are about half a millimeter in size, they are moved out of the limelight at the hatchery to rearing ponds, where they live protected in floating baskets until they grow to fingernail size — too big to be a snack for every creature out there.

This month, a year and a half after they hatched, the first 30,000 freshwater mussels from the program will start to leave their ponds and be released into their permanent homes. Some, Kreeger says, will become part of a living shoreline project on the Christina River in Delaware. Others will provide the start for freshwater mussel gardens tended by schools and nonprofit organizations.

The rest will be placed in rivers and streams that Kreeger has been studying for years. At first, she’s targeting middle quality streams — not impaired streams where the mussels might quickly die out or high-quality streams that already have mussels.

Kreeger expects the project to enter a new phase this month when it gets the funding to build a larger hatchery. “For 30 years, I’ve studied the ecosystem benefits of filter-feeding bivalves,” Kreeger says. “Now I’m seeing my dreams come true.”

The demonstration hatchery at the Fairmont Water Works was built with a $300,000 grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts and run in partnership with the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, Philadelphia Water Department and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Its main function is education, with research coming second and the propagation of mussels third.

Kreeger says the planned production hatchery will cost $7.9 million to build and $400,000 to $500,000 a year to run. The dollar value of the mussels’ ecosystem services hasn’t been calculated in a scientific way yet, but Kreeger’s past research leads her to believe the hatchery is a bargain.

The new hatchery will raise a half-million to a million new freshwater mussels each year. That’s how many it takes to make a real difference in river health, Kreeger says, and also where ethical issues may come up.

Will these common species compete with rarer species? Should lower-quality streams that can’t sustain freshwater mussel populations naturally be restocked periodically, the way hatchery trout are restocked? To guide the way, Kreeger is putting together an advisory council of researchers and conservationists.

“I think that the Delaware estuary program can serve as a pilot that can demonstrate to other areas of the country that this is worthwhile,” Vaughn says. The eastern United States have the bulk of the freshwater mussel species diversity and numbers, but much of the country has at least a few species whose numbers can be enhanced for cleaner water.

Newton says she’s heard real interest in freshwater mussel restoration for clean water from cities in the upper Mississippi watershed. But will cities see a calculable benefit from restoration, or are they better off spending their money on new water treatment plants?

She says it will take economists crunching numbers from projects like Kreeger’s to know for sure. “Until we try it in a few places, as Danielle is doing, we won’t know.”

Thirty years ago the benefits of freshwater mussels were hidden beneath the surface of rivers, lakes and streams. Kreeger has put them on display at the Fairmont Water Works. With the new, larger hatchery and a return to their original habitat in the lower Delaware River watershed, they may star on an even larger stage.

Prickly But Unprotected: 18 Percent of Cactus Species at Risk

A new study — the first of its kind — finds that the world’s conservation areas fail to protect hundreds of rare cactus species.

Nearly a fifth of the world’s cactus species are unprotected by the world’s national parks and other conservation areas, making them one of the most at-risk groups of species on the planet, a new study finds.

The study, published in the journal Conservation Biology, maps out where each cactus species grows and how those ranges compare to protected areas. The results were not good: 261 cactus species, or 18 percent, only grow outside of protected areas.

Many other species have only a portion of their ranges protected. All told the study calculates that 80 percent of cactus species are either completely unprotected or only partially sheltered by the world’s network of protected areas.

This is the first time an entire plant group has been assessed with a “gap analysis” — in conservation science, a measure of how much of the range of a particular species, taxonomic group or other form of biodiversity is formally protected by the nation or government that controls it.

“We should care about cacti,” says the study’s lead author, Bárbara Goettsch of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, “because they’re very important species in arid environments, providing, food, water and shelter for many species. This is also a plant group that’s heavily utilized by people for food, medicine, construction or ornamental purposes.”

The IUCN previously assessed 1,400-plus cactus species and found that 31 percent were threatened with extinction due to illegal trade and agriculture. Even with that knowledge, Goettsch says the results of the new study surprised her. “We found that more threatened cactus species lack protection by the current network of protected areas than amphibians, birds or mammals,” she says. Similar analyses have found that 9.7 percent of all mammal species and 5.6 percent of birds exist completely outside of protected areas. Of species already assessed as being endangered, 32 percent of cacti have ranges outside of protected areas, compared to 26.5 percent of amphibians, 19.9 percent of birds and 16 percent of mammals.

As an example of where cacti are at risk, Goettsch points to Mexico, a country where a lot of cacti species have very limited ranges. “The level of microendemism of cacti there is very high and therefore there are many gap species,” she says, although she points out that Mexico “is also the region with some of the highest proportions of species appropriately covered by protected areas.”

Conservation biologist Stuart Pimm, president of SavingSpecies, who was not affiliated with the research, says the study provides a significant contribution to conservation. Pimm was the lead author of a paper, published last month in Science Advances, which found that the world’s largest protected areas are located in arid or places, where they safeguard a relatively low number of mammal, bird or amphibian species.

“The topic is vitally important,” Pimm says, adding that he’s especially enthused to see the threats facing an entire group of plants tackled in this manner. He points to a 2013 paper he coauthored about the challenges of conserving plant species. “Most data on plant species are too coarse,” he says, meaning does not provide enough guidance for protective efforts.

Despite this latest bad news for cacti, the study also presents opportunities for hope and a strategy for action. The paper’s supplemental data provide information on each cactus species, its range and what percentage of that range is protected — information that can help countries improve their conservation efforts. Some priority areas identified by the study include the Sonoran Desert, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, the Andes and the Atlantic Forest region of Brazil.

“The next steps would be to look at these results at the regional level in order to develop conservation action plans,” Goettsch says. Plans would need to involve national or regional stakeholders who could establish their efforts based on what each species needs and the threats it faces.

These actions should come quickly, says Michiel Pillet, a conservation ecologist with the University of Arizona who studies endangered cacti. “While research of this type highlights where efforts should be concentrated, it is clear that for successful conservation of this many species — especially given additional threats of climate change — only immediate international efforts will suffice,” he says.

Is the United States About to Lose Its Best Conservation Program?

For 50 years the Land and Water Conservation Fund has helped support thousands of projects across the country, but its funding may be gone by the end of the month.

Time is running out for one of the United States’ most successful — and least-known — conservation programs.

Virtually every county in the United States has benefited from the Land and Water Conservation Fund, signed into law in 1964 with the goal of protecting natural areas and cultural resources and increasing recreational opportunities. In its more than 50-year history, the fund has helped 42,000 projects across the country, ranging from wilderness areas and historic battlefields to local tennis courts and trails.

“It’s an amazingly unknown program for all that it has accomplished,” says Kathy DeCoster, director of federal affairs at the Trust for Public Land, a nonprofit that helps acquire and protect natural spaces.

The Land and Water Conservation Fund was originally authorized for 25 years and then extended another 25 years. When expiration loomed again in September 2015, Congress gave it a short three-year extension, which is now about to expire. If legislators fail to reauthorize the program before September 30, the fund will immediately run dry and will no longer be able to dole out money, which in recent years has averaged about $450 million annually.

Proponents of the fund like to highlight that it does not rely on taxpayer dollars. Virtually all of the money for the fund comes from revenue generated by offshore oil and gas leases on the Outer Continental Shelf. A small fraction of the money comes from a tax on motorboat fuel and sales of surplus federal property.

“It’s a balance, if you will,” says DeCoster, “an asset-for-asset arrangement when you deplete one natural resource, then take some of those revenues and make sure the American people get something permanent back from that.”

But if the fund isn’t reauthorized and that dedicated source of funding is no longer available, it could have both ecological and economic impacts affecting local, state and national parks, as well the outdoor industry, an economic driver in many communities.

“It would be a threat to some of the major ways that people engage everyday with the outdoors and wildlife,” says Mike Saccone, associate vice president for communications at the nonprofit National Wildlife Federation.

Far-reaching Impacts

Even ardent supporters of the fund have a hard time pointing out their favorite projects, because there are so many and they’re so varied.

The money from the fund serves two main purposes. The first is to enable federal agencies such as the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service and Forest Service to acquire more public lands for recreation.

One of the big things these acquisitions accomplish is to secure “inholdings.” These are areas of privately held lands that are within or adjacent to federal public lands and have high conservation or recreation value. The fund is used to protect these areas from development when there’s a willing seller.

It’s helped to bolster projects all across the country, including in the Allagash Wilderness Waterway in Maine, the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge, Everglades National Park and Everglades Headwaters National Wildlife Refuge in Florida, Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve in Colorado and California Coastal National Monument, to name just a few.

cape may — Shorebirds at Cape May National Wildlife Refuge. The Land and Water Conservation Fund protected 5,486 acres of this important bird habitat. Photo: USFWS

The second aspect of the fund is a matching-grant program that helps states enhance their recreation facilities and planning. Local recreational opportunities have gotten a big boost from the fund, helping to support new hiking and biking trails, baseball and soccer fields, tennis courts and parks in urban communities and underserved neighborhoods.

“People think getting outdoors and engaging kids with nature always involves wilderness, when in fact, for the vast majority of families it’s urban parks, trails, etc. — and those are the things that the Land and Water Conservation Fund supports,” says Saccone.

Since 1998 some funds from the program have also gone to related federal programs, including the Forest Service’s Forest Legacy program, which helps to preserve lands through conservation easements, and the Cooperative Endangered Species Conservation Fund of the Fish and Wildlife Service, which helps to protect vital habitat for critical wildlife.

It also has helped acquire and protect areas of historical importance like the Women’s Rights National Historical Park in New York, the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site in Kansas and the Martin Luther King. Jr. National Historic Site in Georgia, as well as battlefields in Gettysburg and Vicksburg.

“The Flight 93 Memorial was also funded through the Land and Water Conservation Fund,” says DeCoster. “History doesn’t stop being made, and the fund is the premier source of funding for that kind of work.”

Legislative Hopes

While hailed by many as an incredible success, the fund has also not been able to live up to its full potential. The Congressional Research Service reported last month that the fund has accrued $40 billion in revenue since its inception, but only $18.4 billion has been appropriated by Congress. The fund can accrue up to $900 million annually, but none of the money gets distributed until it’s appropriated by Congress, and Congress does not have to appropriate all the money. In recent years about half has been appropriated, and the rest remains part of the general treasury to be used by other programs.

“Despite this history of underfunding, [the Land and Water Conservation Fund] remains the premier federal program to conserve to our nation’s land, water, historic and recreation heritage,” said a March 2018 letter from more than 200 members of Congress, which was sent to the chairman and ranking member of the House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on Interior, Environment and Related Agencies.

The fund has always had bipartisan support, even from the beginning. When the act authorizing the fund was passed in 1964, just one member of each house voted against it, according to a report issued last month by the Center on Western Priorities, a nonpartisan conservation organization.

In the five decades since, Americans have embraced outdoor recreation activities with gusto, which has meant big business. The trade group Outdoor Industry Association reported that each year the outdoor recreation economy rakes in $887 billion in annual consumer spending, creates $124.5 billion in federal, state and local tax revenue, and supports 7.6 million jobs.

great dismal swamp — Virginia’s Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, nearly nearly 47,000 acres of which were conserved by the Land and Water Conservation Fund. Photo: USFWS

The Trust for Public Lands has shown the fund is also a good investment. The organization’s research found that for every $1 invested by the fund on acquiring federal public lands, $4 in economic value is generated over the next decade.

When it comes to the politics of the moment, the fund still has huge bipartisan support, with over 230 cosponsors to legislation in the House and substantial support in the Senate as well. But action to reauthorize it has still stalled.

“It boils down to a bit of a bottleneck in the House Natural Resources Committee, where the chairman and some of the members don’t see the Land and Water Conservation Fund as being as much of a positive as pretty much everyone else does,” says DeCoster. “They control that agenda.”

The committee’s chair is Congressman Rob Bishop (R-Utah), who has a notorious record of voting against environmental issues. In 2015 he called the fund a “slush fund” for the Department of the Interior.

One of the biggest champions of the fund has been Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who has been placing holds on other pieces of legislation, trying to rally action from his colleagues or stall other legislation until action is taken on the fund.

“I’ve proposed numerous times this year that the Senate take up this issue to give it the fair consideration that it deserves,” says Burr. “However, we’ve been denied a vote, even while bending over backward to accommodate my colleagues’ objections.”

Jonathan Asher, senior representative of government relations at the environmental nonprofit The Wilderness Society, explains that some Congress members are opposed to the idea of the federal government growing its landholdings. “Those voices, especially in the current administration where there is a big of a vacuum of leadership on land conservation issues, have gained prominence,” he says.

In 2016 the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, published a report arguing that the Land and Water Conservation Fund should be retired, explaining that over the years it has been used to “grow the massive landholdings of the federal government.” It advised directing federal dollars to maintenance of existing federal public lands.

“Congress should allow the [Land and Water Conservation Fund] to expire and enable more state and local government and private control of America’s land and water,” advocated the foundation report. “Sunsetting the fund will result in more efficient and accountable land management, creating and preserving opportunities for economic development, outdoor recreation and environmental protection.”

Despite this opposition, environmental groups seem cautiously optimistic. While Saccone says he’s “reasonably confident” Congress will do something before the fund expires at the end of the month, it’s not clear what exactly that may be.

It’s possible Congress will punt again on the issue and only reauthorize the fund for a short period.

Conservation groups are pushing for as much certainty as possible for the program, with the best result being full funding and permanent reauthorization. Second best would be a long-term extension, like another 25 years, and a high level of dedicated revenue for the fund.

“We’ve had pretty good appropriation numbers in recent years, but they can come and go and are always based on the whims of members of Congress,” says Asher.

It’s unlikely that a standalone piece of legislation would be passed at this point, but action on the fund could be included in another big legislative item that also needs to get passed. And there’s one more avenue, which would be a potential “grand bargain,” explains Saccone. The biggest win for conservation groups would be a package that addressed three related issues — the Land and Water Conservation Fund extension, funding for other wildlife conservation issues and addressing funds needed to remedy the backlog of maintenance on public lands and parks.

While that best-case scenario may not come true, proponents are still pushing hard for the fund.

“It is my sincere hope that we can reauthorize the Land and Conservation Fund before the end of the month to give vital conservation projects currently underway, and those in the planning process, the certainty they need to carry out their essential work,” says Senator Burr.