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NATIONAL WILDLIFE FEDER ATION | NWF.ORG | FALL 2025

Wıldlı ıldlıfe WHEN “GOOD FIRE” WORKS

MOVING SPECIES TO HIGHER GROUND

WEIRD, WONDERFUL PLAINFIN MIDSHIPMAN RETHINKING SAGEBRUSH STRATEGY

ACTION HEROES U.S. states and territories lay out the next decade of plans for wildlife conservation

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The Nature Play Space™ at Palmero in Nokomis, Florida, above, offers families year-round opportunities to connect with nature.

Recent studies show people of all ages who live near green spaces and spend time outside in nature experience a decrease in stress and improved physical well-being.

Since 2019, the National Wildlife Federation and Taylor Morrison have teamed up to restore and protect wildlife habitat, promote biodiversity through native plants and foster access and stewardship of nature in the homebuilder’s communities nationwide.

Green Hour® provides activities and tips for families and kids of all ages to spend time outside every day, discovering nature and the wonders of wildlife. Please scan the code for a guide to outdoor fun.

TAYLOR MORRISON

Fall in Love With Nature Play

CONTENTS National Wildlife® is published worldwide by the National Wildlife Federation.

Volume 63, No. 4 | nwf.org

fall

2025

FEATURES

22 | PLAN OF ACTION State wildlife action plans provide blueprints for saving thousands of wildlife species. As a major deadline approaches, revisit past wins and find out what’s next.

BY D E L A N E Y M C PH E R S O N

28 | SAGE WISDOM

40

Scientists say it’s time to flip the script to save what’s left of the sagebrush biome

BY B R I A N N A R A N DA LL

34 | FACES ONLY A FATHER COULD LOVE From their physical appearance and common name to their paternal practices and what they might teach us about the food web, plainfin midshipman are anything but plain TE X T A N D PH OTO S BY S H A N E G RO S S

40 | WHAT MAKES A FIRE GOOD?

“This period of male care may be one of the longest and most costly of the fish world.”

34

22

34

With state law and scientific research lending support for planned burns as a means of mitigating megafires, Indigenous and rural Californians are counting environmental and cultural benefits

BY K ATE G O NZ A LE S

48 | MOVING TO HIGHER GROUND Countless plant and animal species are threatened by rising seas. For some, translocation may be the only solution.

BY K ATA R I N A ZI M M E R

22 FROM TOP: MADDY RIFKA; SHANE GROSS; LINDA FRESHWATERS ARNDT (ALAMY)

NWF.ORG/NW 3

DEPARTMENTS

5 | EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK On tackling hard stories 6 | PRESIDENT’S VIEW Why we love national wildlife refuges 7 | PEER REVIEW Featured contributors and reader letters 8 | SCOPE The latest science news about wildlife 10 | NEXT GENERATION Celebrating two conservation leaders 12 | CASE STUDY Giving horned lizards a head start

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14 | COMMON GROUND How peatlands act as a key climate ally

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16 | GARDEN FOR WILDLIFE Rehabbing the reps of so-called pests 18 | COMMUNAL HABITAT Mitigating AI data centers’ eco-impacts 20 | NATURE’S WITNESS Angling to capture an elk road crossing

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54 | FIELD WORK What’s new from NWF and affi liates 57 | CROSSWORD Back to school with unlikely mascots

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22

18

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58 | FOOTPRINT Honoring Indigenous ways of life

On the cover: The North American river otter was named a Species of Greatest Conservation Need in 2015 by nine states and Washington, D.C. Read about the next decade of wildlife planning on page 22. Photo by Savannah Rose Wildlife.

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Follow us on Instagram: @nationalwildlifemagazine 4 NATIONAL WILDLIFE . FALL 2025

54 CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: NICHOLAS HESS; COURTESY OF ISOBEL LINGENFELTER; ROB G. GREEN; DAVID KEITH PHOTOGRAPHY; SEAN CRANE; IBRAHIM RAYINTAKATH; CLAUDIO CONTRERAS (NATURE PICTURE LIBRARY)

E D I TO R ’ S N OT E B O O K

JENNIFER WEHUNT

Editorial Director

TAKING CARE Writing about fire in a year that began with tragedy and devastation in Los Angeles and has continued with destructive blazes burning from rural California to Florida requires extreme sensitivity. We aim to walk that line in “What Makes a Fire Good?,” on the benefits of prescribed and cultural burns by reporter Kate Gonzales (p. 40). No fire, not even a meticulously orchestrated one, is without peril, but as source after source told Gonzales, in some circumstances, planned burns can help prevent out-of-control devastation to people, wildlife and entire ecosystems.

In putting this issue together, we visited a number of other at-risk landscapes. Brianna Randall talked to a bevy of experts to understand what approaches are most effective now in protecting the depleted but pivotal sagebrush biome (p. 28). Katarina Zimmer reported on relocating plants and animals in response to sea level rise (p.

48). And our assistant editor, Delaney McPherson, chased down updates for “Plan of Action,” on state blueprints for vulnerable wildlife species (p. 22). Every stabilized population of river otter or sage-grouse and every safely completed prescribed burn marks another conservation success. And as Lenya Quinn-Davidson, director of the University of California’s Fire Network, told Gonzales, “we need as many of those as we can get.” � SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS nweditor@nwf.org

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Fall 2025 | Volume 63 | Number 4 NATIONAL WILDLIFE FEDERATION MISSION Uniting all Americans to ensure wildlife thrive in a rapidly changing world

BOARD OF DIRECTORS Chair: Fred Kowal Vice Chairs: Allyn Dukes, Brad Powell, Rebecca Pritchett Past Chair: John Robbins Directors: Mark Berry, Arthur “Butch” Blazer, Robert Brown, Gerald Cobell, Priscilla De La Cruz, Jomar Floyd, John Goss, Andrea Keller Helsel, Arthur Johnson, Brad Johnson, Randy Jones, Koalani Kaulukukui, Jay Lanier, Dawn Levey, Catherine Novelli, Miguel Ordeñana, Mamie Parker, Sara Parker Pauley, Stevie Parsons, Sally Ranney, Bob Rees, Emily Schrader, Patty Schwalenberg, Rob Speidel, Rachel Sprague, Elizabeth Swisher, Benjamin Tuggle, Jeremy Vesbach, Beth Viola EXECUTIVE TEAM Collin O’Mara, President & Chief Executive Officer Mustafa Santiago Ali, Executive Vice President Beth Breaux, Senior Vice President for Philanthropy Ben Kota, Chief Operating Officer Sandra Miao, Associate Vice President for Membership Programs Diane Pataki, Vice President for Science & Chief Scientist Ismael Savadogo, Chief Financial Officer Dirk Sellers, Chief Development Officer MAGAZINE TEAM Jennifer Wehunt, Editorial Director Haley Mustone, Managing Editor Laura Tangley, Senior Editor Delaney McPherson, Assistant Editor Julianne H. Smith, Senior Production Manager Maxwell Bagley, Production Assistant David Whitmore, Design Director (RiverRun Creative) Eugenia Chang, Photo Editor

NWF REGIONAL CENTERS Headquarters: Reston, VA Field Offices: Denver, CO; Atlanta, GA; New Orleans, LA; Annapolis, MD; Ann Arbor, MI; Austin, TX; Missoula, MT; Montpelier, VT; Seattle, WA; Washington, D.C. Membership Services: 1-800822-9919. Membership: National Wildlife is one of the benefits of a membership in the National Wildlife Federation. Minimum contribution for a membership is $15 per year.

Of this amount, $5 is designated for a one-year subscription to National Wildlife. The balance of the contribution is tax deductible to the extent permitted by law.

For inquiries, write to NWF, 11100 Wildlife Center Drive, Reston, VA 20190-5362 or visit nwf.org.

Contact Us: For general magazine inquiries, write to National Wildlife, 11100 Wildlife Center Drive, Reston, VA 20190-5362, or email info@nwf .org. For changes of address, please send both old and new addresses.

(Not responsible for unsolicited submissions and materials.)

National Wildlife (ISSN 0028-0402) is published quarterly by the National Wildlife Federation, a nonprofit corporation, 11100 Wildlife Center Drive, Reston, VA 20190-5362. Periodical postage paid at Herndon, VA, and additional mailing offices. Prepress and printing by Quad, Sussex, Wl. U.S. Postmaster: Send address changes to National Wildlife, P.O. Box 1583, Merrifield, VA 22116-1583.

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NWF.ORG/NW 5

PRESIDENT’S VIEW COLLIN O’MARA

President & CEO of the National Wildlife Federation

Supporting the Places That Support Us

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merica’s wild, natural places have long been sites of refuge for both people and wildlife, and perhaps nowhere is this more true than the havens that make up our National Wildlife Refuge System.

At Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge, near me in Delaware, I’ve seen elusive least bitterns and tricolored herons, as well as American avocets, black-necked stilts and red knots. It’s a place for feeling connected, making memories and finding calm.

President Theodore Roosevelt established the first wildlife refuge in 1903 to protect nesting brown pelicans in Florida. Since then, the system has grown Canada geese migrate through the Bombay Hook refuge. into the largest network of lands and waters in the world dedicated to wildlife conservation. Today it includes more been among the least-funded federal public lands in the than 850 million land and marine acres, providing vital United States, and decades of congressional underfunding habitat for more than 220 species of mammals; 700 species has left the system in crisis. While more and more people of birds; and 1,250 species of fish, reptiles and amphibians. enjoy refuges each year, staff positions have been slashed Every U.S. state and territory by more than 30 percent in the last 15 years, THE NATIONAL WILDLIFE is home to at least one wildlife and a budget cut of an additional 22 percent REFUGE SYSTEM: refuge. Many are within driving was proposed in early 2025. Many refuges ■ provides vital habitat for more distance of large cities, providing have no on-site staff at all, and several states than 2,000 wildlife species opportunities for hunting, fishing, have no refuge law enforcement officers, ■ welcomes more than 67 million wildlife watching, hiking, kayakleaving visitor centers closed, maintenance visitors annually ing and communing with nature. delayed, public safety in jeopardy and criti■ generates more than $3 billion More than 67 million people visit cal conservation work at risk. in economic activity wildlife refuges annually, genWe know nature has the power to unite ■ supports more than 41,000 erating $3.2 billion in economic us. We must come together to ensure our jobs nationwide activity and supporting more than national wildlife refuges have the resources 41,000 jobs across the country. they need to thrive. By protecting these Despite all refuges do for wildlife and people, these wild places and the wildlife that depend on them, we’re treasured places are in trouble. Wildlife refuges long have protecting our own health, our economy and our future. ■ LEND A HAND See which refuges most need your support at nwf.org/10refuges. Email Collin O’Mara at president@nwf.org.

6 NATIONAL WILDLIFE . FALL 2025

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PEER REVIEW

Email us at nweditor@nwf.org or find us on Instagram or Facebook: @nationalwildlifemagazine.

HUMAN IMPACTS

STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT AND CIRCULATION

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NATIONAL WILDLIFE FEDER ATION | NWF.ORG | SUMMER 2025

Wıldlıfe ®

ANIMALS THAT CALL EACH OTHER BY NAME

THE TRUTH ABOUT ‘CLIMATE HAVENS’ ADVENTURES IN SKY ISLAND HOPPING

The summer issue featured an article on the overfishing of queen conch (“The Gastropod Gastronomes Love to Death”) and a photo of a huge pile of disLONG LIVE THE QUEEN carded, lifeless shells. This reminded me of the devastating mountain of buffalo skulls in a photo from the 1890s. The two images, taken about 130 years apart, tell me we humans still fail to recognize our negative effect on the Earth and all the creatures and plants we share this planet with.

Jon Seegmiller | Salt Lake City, Utah BROWN PELICANS IN PERIL

Will efforts to sustain the enchanting and in-demand queen conch emerge victorious?

Collin O’Mara’s “Keeping Public Lands in Public Hands” (Summer 2025) was excellent. One federal agency not mentioned was the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which manages about 12 million acres nationwide for wildlife habitat, recreation, environmental missions and fish projects, and hosts 260 million visitors per year.

Phil Hixson | Dallas, Oregon KATE GONZALES lives in Sacramento, California. On “What

Makes a Fire Good?” (p. 40), she says: “I grew up in the region, working for my small-town paper, so bringing this story to a national platform” has been rewarding. “I’d thought of prescribed burns as institutional. But seeing how much collaborative work goes into this feels really good.” See more at kategonzaleswrites.com.

SHANE GROSS, a marine conservation photojournalist based in

British Columbia, Canada, first heard about plainfin midshipman (“Faces Only a Father Could Love,” p. 34) while talking to a scientist from Vancouver Island. “He said he lived near a beach where midshipman breed and could hear them at night. I was like, ‘What?!’

I decided I wanted to learn more.” See his work at shanegross.com.

DELANEY MCPHERSON, National Wildlife’s assistant editor, was the ideal reporter for “Plan of Action,” on the next round of U.S. state and territory wildlife action plans. “For someone who loves trivia, this was a great story,” she says. “I got to talk to the people who are doing the work. I learned some sturgeon don’t start spawning until 20 years old, but then they can live to be 100.” Read more on p. 22.

DAVID WHITMORE , design director of National Wildlife since 2018,

aims to make every story unique. On his map approach to “Plan of Action” (p. 22), he says: “It’s a reductive version of the U.S., where each state is an equal size square, presenting the perfect grid. And it’s user interactive, inviting readers to turn the page and find their state, their critter.” Find him on Instagram: @riverrun_creative.

FROM TOP: COURTESY OF KATE GONZALES; KAYLA DALLA ROSA; KYLIE MCPHERSON; COURTESY OF DAVID WHITMORE

1. Publication title: National Wildlife® magazine 2. Publication no.: USPS 374-580 3. Filing date: August 15, 2025 4. Issue frequency: Quarterly 5. No. of issues published annually: 4 6. Annual subscription: $15.00 7. Address of known office of publication: 11100 Wildlife Center, Drive, Reston, VA 20190-5362 8. Address of the headquarters or general business offices of the publisher: 11100 Wildlife Center, Drive, Reston, VA 20190-5362 9. Names and addresses of publisher, editor and managing editor: publisher, Dirk Sellers, Reston, VA; editor, Jennifer Wehunt, Reston, VA; managing editor, Haley Mustone, Reston, VA 10. Owner: National Wildlife Federation, Reston, VA Names and addresses of stockholders: None.

NWF is a private, nonprofit organization 501(c)(3).

11. Known bondholders, mortgagees and other security holders owning or holding 1% or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages or other securities: None 12. Tax status unchanged during preceding 12 months.

13. Publication title: National Wildlife 14. Issue date for circulation data below: August 1, 2025 15. Extent and nature of circulation: Average no. of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: A. Total no. of copies (net press run): 358,243 B. Paid circulation: (1.) Mailed outside-county paid subscriptions: 352,770. (2.) Mailed in-county paid subscriptions: -0-. (3.) Sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors and counter sales (not mailed): -0-. (4.) Paid distribution by other classes of mail through USPS: -0-.

C. Total paid and/or requested circulation: 352,770 D. Free distribution (by mail and outside the mail): (1.) Free or nominal rate outside-county: -0-.

(2.) Free or nominal rate in-county: -0-. (3.) Free or nominal rate mailed at other classes through the USPS: -0-. (4.) Free or nominal rate distribution outside the mail: 2,631.

E. Total free distribution: 2,631 F. Total distribution: 355,401 G. Copies not distributed: -0H. Total: 355,401 I. Percent paid/and or requested circulation: 99.26% Actual no. of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: A. Total no. of copies (net press run): 343,821 B. Paid circulation: (1.) Mailed outside-county paid subscriptions: 338,708. (2). Mailed in-county paid subscriptions: -0-. (3.) Sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors and counter sales (not mailed): -0-. (4.) Paid distribution by other classes of mail through USPS: -0-.

C. Total paid and/or requested circulation: 338,708 D. Free distribution (by mail & outside the mail): (1.)

Free or nominal rate outside-county: -0-. (2.) Free or nominal rate in-county: -0-. (3.) Free or nominal rate mailed at other classes through the USPS: -0-. (4.) Free or nominal rate distribution outside the mail: 1,756.

E. Total free distribution: 1,756 F. Total distribution: 340,464 G. Copies not distributed: -0H. Total: 340,464 I. Percent paid/and or requested circulation: 99.48% I certify that all information furnished on this form is true and complete. I understand that anyone who furnishes false or misleading information on this form or who omits material or information requested on the form may be subject to criminal sanctions (including fines and imprisonment) and/or civil sanctions (including civil penalties). –Dirk Sellers, Chief Development Officer, National Wildlife Federation

NWF.ORG/NW 7

scope

Read the complete digital edition at

nwf.org/nw

BY L AU R A TANG LE Y

MONARCHS DELAY FALL MIGRATION

A

s the global climate heats up, some species are shifting the timing of seasonal events to keep pace—with animals breeding or migrating sooner and plants leafing out or flowering earlier. Because species do not shift in tandem, potential mismatches between interdependent species are a concern. To find out if such phenological shifts are occurring among monarch butterflies (above) or their milkweed host plants at Iowa’s 8 NATIONAL WILDLIFE . FALL 2025

Camp Dodge military installation, biologists analyzed observations of monarch arrival and departure dates collected between 2003 and 2019.

They also reviewed long-term data on the bloom time of the region’s common milkweed plants. In the Journal of Animal Ecology, they report that while the timing of milkweed flowering and monarch arrival in spring had not changed—keeping the species in sync—milkweeds were blooming later

and monarchs staying longer at the end of the season, delaying their fall migration to Mexico by an average of nine days. The study’s lead author, Montana State University ecologist Diane Debinski, says this longer breeding season “could have benefits, and it could also have costs” to declining monarchs. Costs might include exposure to late-season predators and parasites or monarch eggs laid too late to complete development.

JAIME ROJO

microscope RECORD -BREAKING COR AL BLEACHING

In a spring 2025 status update, federal marine scientists report that the world’s corals are losing their color (left)—and thus their vital symbiotic algae—at an unprecedented scale, with 84 percent of reefs across 83 countries impacted to date.

RAFTING IGUANAS

F

our iguana species endemic to the Fiji Islands (including the Fiji crested iguana, right) have long been an enigma. The only native iguanas outside the Americas, how did the reptiles get to this remote South Pacific archipelago? One popular theory held that Fiji iguanas are descendants of an extinct iguanid lineage once widespread in the Pacific. But a new genetic analysis by biologists at the University of California, Berkeley, and University of San Francisco (USF) shows that the

reptiles are closely related to North America’s desert iguanas. Publishing their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists say the two lineages likely separated 34 million years ago. Their results also suggest that ancestors of Fiji iguanas rafted 5,000 miles across the Pacific from western North America—the longest presumed transoceanic dispersal of any land animal. “Iguanas and desert iguanas, in particular, are resistant to starvation and dehydration. … [I]f any group of vertebrate could make a [5,000-mile]

journey across the Pacific on a mass of vegetation, this would be the one,” says lead author and USF herpetologist Simon Scarpetta.

HOW BATS CONQUER A ‘COCKTAIL PARTY NIGHTMARE’

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n many bat species (such as Mexican free-tailed bats, left), thousands to hundreds of thousands of individuals emerge from daytime roosts simultaneously each night, creating what scientists have dubbed a “cocktail party nightmare” of clashing echolocation calls. To shed light on how the animals deal with this sensory challenge, scientists from Tel Aviv University and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior attached tiny trackers and microphones to greater mouse-tailed bats emerging from a cave in Israel. Computer modeling of their data, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveals that an emerging bat quickly increases its distance from the center of the group and adjusts echolocation calls to be more sensitive to nearby objects. “Imagine you’re a bat flying through a cluttered space,” says co-author Omer Mazar of Tel Aviv University. “The most important object you need to know about is the bat directly in front.” ■

TOP: DAVID FLEETHAM (NATURE PICTURE LIBRARY); MIDDLE: NICHOLAS HESS; BOTTOM: KARINE AIGNER

NWF.ORG/NW 9

next generation

MEET THE RECIPIENTS OF NWF’S 2025 NATIONAL CONSERVATION ACHIEVEMENT YOUNG LEADER AWARDS. FIND MORE AWARD NEWS ON PAGE 54.

FO R TH E B I R DS: S K Y LE R N IX

S

kyler Nix became interested in conservation as a 13-year-old volunteer at the Houston Zoo. By age 18, he had gone from zoo interpreter and camp counselor to lead naturalist on the zoo’s inaugural Teen Leadership Council. After he began studying ecology and conservation at Texas A&M University, the zoo’s conservation director referred him to an internship with Texas Conservation Alliance (TCA), a National Wildlife Federation affiliate, in 2022.

“TCA was a big leader in the statewide Lights Out campaign, targeting how light pollution affects migrating birds,” Nix, now 21, says. “On college campuses, there’s lots of glass, lights and immersive landscaping, making it a very deadly place for birds.”

Through his internship, Nix launched Lights Out, College Station!, an initiative raising awareness and tracking which campus buildings were seeing frequent bird strikes.

During the next three years, he coordinated volunteer efforts documenting more than 500 bird casualties on campus. This spring, these efforts culminated in the university president committing to incorporating bird-friendly design into all future building plans.

Nix has also spent the past two summers participating in the Yale Conservation Scholars–Early Leadership Initiative. He plans to graduate in December and hopes eventually to work toward a master’s degree.

10 NATIONAL WILDLIFE . FALL 2025

LOVE O F TH E L AN D: I SO B E L LI N G E N FE LTE R

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sobel Lingenfelter’s passion for conservation comes from her childhood, growing up in Salt Lake City, surrounded by nature.

“You can just walk outside and look at the Wasatch Front and know you are looking at our public lands,” she says of the mountains to the east and north of the city. “It’s an unparalleled kind of access.”

After receiving a degree in urban ecology and planning from The University of Utah, she began working for the land conservation group Utah Diné Bikéyah.

There, she supported the grassroots campaign to designate Bears Ears National Monument, organizing volunteers and press conferences.

When Lingenfelter, now 31, moved east in 2017 for her master’s degree in city and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania, she found herself watching old western movies to combat her homesickness. Once she completed her master’s, she moved back home to Utah and, in 2020, became the first full-time staff member of Utah Wildlife Federation, an NWF affi liate. As facilitator of the Utah Wildlife Connectivity Working Group, she helped secure $22 million from the state legislature to build wildlife crossings and to help prevent wildlife-vehicle collisions.

“People usually think of nature as something that exists ‘out there,’ but we live in and build our communities in nature,” Lingenfelter says. “There’s nowhere else to live and to be.” ■ –Delaney McPherson LEFT: COURTESY OF SKYLER NIX; RIGHT: COURTESY OF ISOBEL LINGENFELTER

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C A S E S T U DY

Blood, Sweat and Budget Cuts A head-start program for Texas horned lizards fights to see another day

BY H E I D E B R A N D E S

weight. Red’s sibling, Blue, succumbed to an impaction in his gut just weeks earlier, making Red the sole survivor of this year’s horned lizard head-start program.

What’s more, Red might be one of the final releases. Federal funding cuts have left the future of the initiative in doubt.

T

he cracked red earth of Tinker Air Force Base bakes under the relentless Oklahoma sun on what will be the hottest day of 2025 so far. Heat shimmers rise from patches of native grasses that have managed to survive, lending to an atmosphere of hope and uncertainty on this May morning.

Blake Bauer kneels in the dust, carefully opening a small Tupperware container. Red, a 2-inch Texas horned lizard identified by a dot painted on his back and a miniature diode tracker attached to his spiny frame, blinks against the sudden brightness.

“This is the perfect habitat for him,” Bauer whispers.

Red will have native bunchgrasses for cover, loose soil for burrowing and, hopefully, plenty of acrobat ants to eat. After some hesitation, Red scurries a few inches, his camouflage blending with the rusty soil. For Bauer, lead animal caretaker for reptiles and amphibians at the Oklahoma City Zoo, this bittersweet release carries extra

12 NATIONAL WILDLIFE . FALL 2025

A head start on survival With their crown of horns and flattened, toadlike bodies, Texas horned lizards are icons of the Southwest, especially notable for their startling defense mechanism: When threatened by predators, they shoot blood from ducts in their eyes.

“They typically do it if a canine is nearby, like a coyote or a dog,” Bauer says. “They’ve never done it at us.”

Nicknamed “horny toads” and “horned frogs” (see “Back to School,” page 57), these lizards once roamed throughout Texas, across 80 percent of Oklahoma counties and as far north as Colorado. Due to factors including habitat loss, pesticides, the introduction of invasive species such as red fire ants that prey on horned lizard eggs and the collection of wild lizards as pets, they’re now classified as a species of greatest concern in Oklahoma and as threatened in Texas.

“You talk to some of the older people that grew up here, you mention horned lizards, and they go: ‘Oh, I used to see those all over when I was a kid. What happened to those?’” Bauer says.

Since 2008, the Oklahoma City Zoo has helped track and monitor lizards at Tinker in the longest continuous study of a Texas horned lizard population. In 2019, they added the ambitious head-start program.

“The idea was that the population at Tinker waxes and wanes. There seems to be more habitat available that FROM TOP: OKC ZOO; DUSTIN G. (OKC ZOO)

would support a larger population than it does,” says Rebecca Snyder, senior director of conservation, education and science at the zoo. “Texas horned lizards are especially vulnerable when they’re eggs. Animals dig up the nests and eat the eggs or the tiny hatchlings.”

The head-start program—of which Red is lizard number 1,179—collects eggs and hatchlings from Tinker, raises them at the Zoo’s Lizard Lab until they grow past the vulnerable age of 1 or 2 and then releases them back at the base to bolster the wild population.

Results have been promising. Data show about 50 percent of the head-started lizards survive until the subsequent season. The program has yielded three peerreviewed studies, including one that compared gut microbiomes between lizards in the lab and wild lizards living at the air force base. “Within a few months after release, their microbiomes became more similar to the wild lizards,” Snyder says. “That’s an indicator that they were adapting well.”

When funding dries up In April, the program received the news that federal funding for Tinker’s role in lizard monitoring had been eliminated—a plight increasingly common in conservation circles. Without money to pay for tracking equipment or grad student researchers from The University of Oklahoma, the suspension came at a particularly difficult time, with only Red and Blue then awaiting release.

“Some years, we might find 20 babies or so, and then there are other years where we don’t find any,” Bauer says. “If conditions aren’t right, reptiles will say, ‘OK, this year is not a good year to breed.’”

Despite the setback, the Oklahoma City Zoo isn’t giving up. They’ve partnered with a local brewery, COOP Ale Works, that’s contributing 2 percent of sales from its Horny Toad Blonde Ale toward conservation efforts. And later this year, the

zoo will establish a captive breeding program modeled after successful efforts at the Fort Worth and Dallas zoos.

Tinker is just one of the possible release sites for future captive-bred lizards. “They think an influx of new genes could be good for that population,” Snyder says.

The importance of saving the Texas horned lizard extends beyond the species itself.

“A lot of other lizards, when humans encroach on their territory, they can live alongside humans in our backyards,” Bauer says. “These guys, everything has to be perfect. They need to have the right food sources, the right kind of habitat, otherwise they just disappear.”

He continues: “They’re really an indicator species of how the habitats are doing. If they’re not able to thrive in an area, that means something’s wrong with that habitat.

If something’s wrong with them, that means things could go wrong with other plants and animals.”

Snyder agrees. “When you have a common species, something that’s so plentiful that people remember it was everywhere, and then it disappears, that is really worrisome,” she says. “That’s happening with a lot of species.” n Heide Brandes is an award-winning journalist in Oklahoma.

Oklahoma City Zoo team members inspect horned lizards at Tinker Air Force Base (left, both photos). The zoo had to scale down its transmitters, as Oklahoma lizards run a few inches smaller than those in Texas.

KARINE AIGNER (MYN/NATURE PICTURE LIBRARY)

NWF.ORG/NW 13

COMMON GROUND

Why We Need Peatlands These unheralded wetlands are a powerful ally in the fight against climate change

BY L A N C E FR A ZE R

A

t first glance, northern Canada’s vast Hudson Bay Lowlands may appear to be a wasteland, stretching flat and unbroken to the horizon in all directions. Yet this roughly 124,000-squaremile wetland brims with an astounding diversity of wildlife—from polar bears, wolverines and caribou to hundreds of species of migratory birds, including red knots, Hudsonian godwits and other shorebirds that breed or fuel up here before traveling thousands of miles to South America for the winter. Indigenous Peoples have called these same pond-studded lowlands home for millennia.

The Hudson Bay Lowlands are vital for another reason.

Blanketed by soggy peat soils, they make up “the largest peat complex in North America and the second largest in the world,” says Adam Kirkwood, a research associate for Wildlife Conservation Society Canada. Age-old ecosystems that cover millions of square miles from the Arctic to the tropics, peatlands play a key role in mitigating climate change. Thanks to the wetlands’ constantly saturated conditions, dead leaves, roots, stems and other plant materials decompose very slowly—over hundreds to thousands of

14 NATIONAL WILDLIFE . FALL 2025

Canada’s Hudson Bay Lowlands (above) are North America’s largest peatland. These ecosystems’ deep organic soils (right) can store vast amounts of carbon for thousands of years.

years—and accumulate as deep, organic soil that traps carbon in the ground rather than releasing it to the atmosphere as planet-warming carbon dioxide.

In a peatland, Kirkwood explains, a lot of vegetation may grow, “but as it dies, it doesn’t decompose quickly.

This peat can go back 10,000 years, which means the sequestration of massive amounts of carbon that just sits there.” Canada’s peatlands alone store an estimated 150 billion metric tons of carbon in their soil, he adds, equivalent to 11 years of global industrial emissions.

Known as bogs, fens, swamps or other names depending on their type, peatlands cover just 3 percent of Earth’s surface. Yet together they contain 550 billion metric tons of carbon—more than the amount stored in all global forests combined, including the tropical rain forests that often are touted as our most promising nature-based solution to climate change.

LORNA HARRIS

Despite their importance, peatlands remain littleknown ecosystems whose value often goes unrecognized.

According to a global analysis published in the journal Conservation Letters in February 2025, just 17 percent of the world’s peatlands fall within protected areas—considerably less than other “high-value ecosystems” such as mangroves (42 percent) and tropical forests (38 percent).

“Our research reveals that these vital ecosystems don’t have anywhere near the level of protection they need,” says Kemen Austin of The Nature Conservancy, lead author of the study.

The study also concludes that nearly a quarter of all peatlands are impacted by human encroachment: drained, burned or otherwise degraded for commercial agriculture, forestry, road building, mining and other development. In addition, peat is extracted for its use as a fuel and as a soil amendment in both horticulture and agriculture. In Canada, Kirkwood says valuable peatlands in the Hudson Bay Lowlands are threatened by a large controversial mining project. The region is rich in nickel, chromite, palladium, platinum and other metals important in digital technology and renewable energy development.

If these peatlands are disturbed, he says, they could release more than 2 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide.

According to the Conservation Letters study, up to 2.5 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases already are emitted worldwide each year by damaging or destroying peatlands. Kirkwood, Austin and other peatlands scientists stress that it’s critical to prevent further transformation of carbon-storing peatlands into carbon sources by protecting and, whenever possible, restoring them.

Some peatlands can be brought back to life. As an example, consider Dutch Slough, a tidal marsh in the heart of California’s Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta, “one of the world’s most human-modified areas; nothing is not changed by humans,” says Jason Riggio, a University of California, Davis, assistant project scientist who studies the delta’s wildlife.

Once a vast freshwater marsh dominated by a kind of bulrush called tule that thrived in rich peat soils, the marsh was drained for commercial agriculture and other development beginning in the late 1800s. To provide water to Southern California, levees were conHANNAH PIECUCH (©WOODS HOLE OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTITUTION)

structed to funnel southward new sources of freshwater that otherwise would flow in from the rivers at high tide.

By the 1930s, just 5 percent of Dutch Slough’s original 350,000 acres of marshland remained.

Then in 2003, the California Department of Water Resources purchased a 1,187-acre parcel of the marsh that had been slated for construction of about 5,000 new houses. Fifteen years later, workers began grading a portion of the land—smoothing out the steep hills and deep gullies that were byproducts of draining and development. Once grading was complete the following year, department staff, in collaboration with the nonprofit River Partners, planted 25,000 tule plugs and 50,000 shrubs and trees to restore native marsh vegetation. After a year and a half of plant growth, the team breached the levee in several locations, allowing freshwater to begin flowing in and out with daily tides, as it had historically.

Already, restored parcels of the wetland are providing habitat for native species, including Chinook salmon, steelhead, western pond turtles and least bitterns. And although the enormous amount of carbon that has been lost from the destroyed delta cannot be recovered for hundreds to thousands of years, restored marsh areas are capturing and storing carbon in their peat soils today.

“We’ve found that the land can be restored,” says Riggio. “It doesn’t matter how degraded or modified it is. There are areas like Dutch Slough that were modified and used for more than 100 years, and now, after just two to three years of work, they’re returning to what they were.”

If more of the world’s peatlands can be restored—or protected, if they remain intact—“they will continue to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it as organic carbon in the soil,” says Meredith Cornett, who manages a new peatland protection and restoration project for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.

“Peatlands can be a powerful climate ally, provided we can protect them,” she says. “To swerve from peatlands as a carbon sink to a [carbon] source would be a dire moment for people, nature and the world we all live in.” n Lance Frazer is a California-based writer who focuses on science, nature and the environment.

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G A R D E N FO R W I L D L I F E

Please Don’t Call Them Pests Some of our most feared backyard wildlife are key to healthy garden habitats

BY K ATH Y J E S S E

D

avid Mizejewski calls them “the unlovables”: snakes, bats, spiders and other creatures that make many of us shudder. But Mizejewski, naturalist for the National Wildlife Federation, says all these animals play key roles in backyard ecosystems. “If you see them in your yard, you’re doing it right.”

Some unlovables specialize in eating rats and mice. Others perform environmental cleanup by scavenging on dead animals. Many—even the hated yellow jacket—serve as pollinators for plants, including the plants we like to eat. And beneficial predators such as spiders are themselves important nesting-season food for

to see in your home or garden. Like spiders, they’re also food for more-popular wildlife such as foxes, barred owls and red-shouldered hawks.

“Almost all snake species are 100 percent harmless to people,” Mizejewski says. “They will never chase you or try to eat you, including venomous species.

They will do everything in their power to get away from you.”

To attract snakes to your backyard habitat, he recommends building brush and rock piles toward the edges of the property. To keep the reptiles from getting into your house, seal off crevices in your attic and basement with caulk. Keep screens in windows and keep dense vegetation, along with brush and rock piles, away from the home’s foundation.

If a nonvenomous snake does find its way into your house, the nonprofit Humane World for Animals suggests you open a nearby door and gently coax the animal toward the door with a broom. If that doesn’t work, slowly place a bucket over the snake and put a weight on top.

Then call a professional wildlife removal specialist. For venomous species, call a professional immediately.

Bats. Many people find bats to be creepy, too, but Mizejewski says the animals are “super cool.” Not only do some species, including the little brown bat, feed on agricultural pests such as the corn earworm, they provide a “massive ecological service” by eating a prodigious number of biting mosquitoes. According to the nonprofit Bat Conservation International, a single little brown bat can consume 600 or more mosquitoes in an hour.

“Without bats, we’d be in real trouble,” Mizejewski says.

It’s true that bats can carry rabies, as can many mammals.

“But it’s a myth they chase people,” he says. “They won’t get tangled in your hair.” And while vampire bats exist, they don’t live in this country and rarely feed on humans.

To keep bats out of your attic—which certainly can happen, especially during the reproductive season—close

.

songbirds. “If you want birds, you want spiders,” Mizejewski says. Here are a few other backyard animals you may want to welcome to your garden after all.

Snakes. A common cultural prejudice tells us “the only good snake is a dead snake,” Mizejewski says.

“Frankly, that’s an ignorant thing to say.” Snakes that might find their way into your yard, including rat snakes, will prey on rats, moles, voles and mice you’d prefer not

.

16 NATIONAL WILDLIFE . FALL 2025

TOP: KARSTEN EGGERT (ALAMY); BOTTOM: DOUG WECHSLER (MINDEN PICTURES)

off access points with caulk, sealant or mesh. Then, invite these beneficial critters into your yard by mounting a bat box at least 12 feet off the ground and near a water source. A multichambered bat box encourages roosting of maternal colonies: groups of pregnant females that gather together to give birth and raise their pups until the youngsters are strong enough to fly.

The best bat houses mimic the spaces between tree trunks and bark, creating tight spaces, a rough inside texture to get a good foothold and caulking for warmth.

For tips on building and installing a bat house on your property, see nwf.org/bathousetipsheet.

Wasps. Like their cousins the bees, wasps are important pollinators, visiting more than 960 plant species, including 164 that depend on them to reproduce. They also help defend these plants from the hungry hordes.

Whether predatory or parasitic, wasps target a wide range of plant-devouring insects and other arthropods, including aphids, whiteflies, cabbage loopers and brown marmorated stink bugs.

Unlike much-beloved bees, however, wasps are widely loathed and feared, because some may sting aggressively if provoked. But aggressive wasps represent only a handful of social species—such as paper wasps, hornets and yellow jackets—that defend communal nests, says Karen Goodell, professor of evolution, ecology and organismal

.

biology at The Ohio State University at Newark. The majority of wasp species are solitary.

If you get too close to a social wasp colony, the insects indeed may attack. Still, it’s not always necessary to take action, Goodell says. “If they’re by the front door, you may want to destroy them. But if they’re at the back of your property, you might want to just let them be.”

To prevent unwanted wasp encounters, author and biologist Heather Holm suggests surveying your yard in spring when colonies are small. Intervene—by closing a hole that ground-nesting yellow jackets are starting to use, for example—if a nest is in an area you cannot avoid.

Because yellow jackets become more aggressive in fall, when their food sources become scarce, keep them at bay by covering sugary drinks when eating outside and securing the lids on garbage cans.

Holm, Goodell and Mizejewski agree that the best way to attract wasps and other unheralded beneficial species is to plant a native landscape. (For tips, see nativeplantfinder .nwf.org.) Bat houses and brush and rock piles do indeed provide places for animals to live and raise their young.

A water source also is important. But a healthy backyard habitat, like any ecosystem, is a food web, Mizejewski says, “and native plants are the foundation of all food webs.” n Kathy Jesse is a writer based in Bethesda, Maryland.

Snakes (common garter snake, right) and wasps (great golden digger wasp, left) eat potential garden ravagers such as slugs and plant-munching insects. Bats also feed on herbivores as well as enormous numbers of biting mosquitoes.

You can attract bats by buying or building a bat box (above left).

MARK LEHIGH (ALAMY)

NWF.ORG/NW 17

C O M M U N A L H A B I TAT

G

oogle’s DolphinGemma aims to interpret wild dolphins’ vocalizations. Microsoft’s Project Guacamaya seeks to monitor deforestation and preserve biodiversity in the Amazon rainforest. Across the globe, scientists are collaborating with technology companies to deploy artificial intelligence that studies wildlife and the environment, among multifold other applications across all kinds of industries.

But as the use of AI proliferates, environmental policy analysts, academic researchers and others are raising concerns about the impacts the data centers powering the technology are having on communities, ecosystems and the climate. Among those concerns are the immense energy and water resources the centers require and the air, light, noise and other pollution they generate. Recent reporting and research have pointed out some of the dangers, from diminished water supplies in regions already facing shortages to potential health risks from air pollutants.

his co-authors wrote in a report released in January 2025 by the Frontier Group, Environment America Research & Policy Center and the U.S. PIRG Education Fund. The report cited one estimate showing that a single data center could guzzle up to 5 million gallons of water per day— roughly equivalent to the daily use of a town with 50,000 residents, according to an analysis by The Washington Post.

A December 2024 preprint of a study from researchers at the University of California, Riverside, and California Institute of Technology outlined the toll of AI-related air pollution. “AI contributes substantially to air quality degradation and public health costs through the emission of various criteria air pollutants,” the authors wrote.

Other forms of pollution, such as light and noise, also could be problematic. Neil Carter, an associate professor at the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability, has studied the links between sensory pollution and conservation. While he hasn’t researched

Powering Up As AI’s reach grows, the need for data centers multiplies.

So could the environmental impacts.

BY AM B I K A K A N DASAM Y

By 2030, data centers’ global electricity use is estimated to more than double to 945 terawatt-hours, a little more than Japan’s total electricity consumption in 2024, according to a report published in April by the International Energy Agency. The report points to AI as a key driver behind the anticipated increase and projects that the United States will use the largest share. As of now, the United States is home to the greatest number of data centers in the world, according to Cloudscene, a telecommunications company.

“The surge in data centers, and their projected increase in electricity demand, are already contributing to slowing down the transition to clean energy, in particular in states where they have high concentrations of data centers,” says Quentin Good, policy analyst at the Frontier Group, a research and policy organization. Virginia currently hosts the most data center facilities in the United States.

Data centers’ energy demands have driven some utilities to delay shuttering fossil fuel power plants and have prompted proposals to revive retired plants, Good and 18 NATIONAL WILDLIFE . FALL 2025

AI data centers’ impact on wildlife specifically, he says AI data centers potentially could be “sensory danger zones.”

“Sensory danger zones are basically where we have reason to believe that the amount of light and the amount of noise is exceeding thresholds by which you can imagine there being a fitness consequence for species,” Carter says. “And they may not be able to carry out the necessary functions that they normally would.” Research by Carter and his colleagues has explored how light pollution, for example, could disrupt the dynamics between predator and prey species, such as cougars and mule deer. Their research also has looked into how anthropogenic sounds could affect reproduction in birds including the northern cardinal, oak titmouse and barn swallow.

To address some of these issues, experts recommend adopting sustainable strategies when building and operating AI data centers and when using AI. The decisions “we make today will be having an impact on the public health for many years to come, due to the long life span for data center

projects,” says Shaolei Ren, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Riverside, and an author of the air pollution study.

Ren calls for “health-informed AI” that factors in health costs—not only carbon emissions—when deciding where a data center should be located. For example, the human health impacts of situating a data center in densely populated New York City would be much higher than an uninhabited desert, even if carbon emissions are comparable, according to Ren. Any location, however, could pose problems for wildlife and the local ecosystem.

Some experts are seeking to lower data centers’ overall water and energy use. “I like to think of a data center almost like how you would think about your house,” says Vijay Gadepally of his work at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center. One strategy for reducing energy consumption is to upgrade older hardware to newer, more energy-efficient platforms, he says. Another is to work with lower precision computing—using 4 or 8 bits instead of 16 or 32 bits—which can have huge energy advantages, according to Gadepally. He and his colleagues also have ILLUSTRATION BY IBRAHIM RAYINTAKATH

implemented “power capping,” or setting limits on the power of the hardware so it uses less energy over time.

“Now, to be clear, an academic supercomputer is a little bit different in terms of the way people interact with it than a commercial system,” he says. “But we were able to show, for example, that you can reduce, on a consistent basis, almost 15 percent energy consumption and run our processors even cooler.”

In order to implement and evaluate solutions, it’s necessary to get accurate data on how much energy the AI data centers—and the tech companies using them— are consuming. That information can be hard to come by. As co-founder of the nonprofit Climate Change AI, Priya Donti works on the responsible use of AI. While some data center operators might collect information on the energy usage of specific AI models, those data aren’t always publicly auditable, according to Donti.

“The bigger thing is we need transparency,” she says.

“But we also need action.” n Ambika Kandasamy is a freelance journalist.

NWF.ORG/NW 19

Great Divide PH OTO BY RO B G . G R E E N

Working as a backcountry guide in Guatemala, photographer Rob Green saw many human impacts on the environment firsthand. The experience led him to pursue a master’s degree in natural resource conflict resolution at the University of Montana. When the COVID-19 pandemic limited travel, he focused his lens on interactions close to home. “So many issues are universal,” he says. “Habitat fragmentation, biodiversity loss.

These things are everywhere.”

From July to November 2023, Green set up a camera trap near U.S. Highway 89 in Livingston, Montana, leading into Yellowstone National Park, where wildlife-vehicle collisions are common. He got this shot of an elk calf on the very last day before he removed the camera.

“The young calf looking confused is a sadly accurate metaphor,” Green says. “In these places their ancestors have known for millennia, the landscape is changing faster than they’re able to naturally adapt.”

The group Yellowstone Safe Passages estimates there are more than 160 wildlife-vehicle collisions annually on the 54-mile stretch of Highway 89 between the towns of Livingston and Gardiner. Based on the time of day and where the trap was installed, Green suspects the elk were on their way to cross the highway, although their fate is unknown. See more of his photos at robggreen.com. n –Delaney McPherson

20 NATIONAL WILDLIFE . FALL 2025

nature’s witness

NWF.ORG/NW 21

STATE WILDLIFE ACTION PLANS PROVIDE BLUEPRINTS FOR SAVING THOUSANDS OF WILDLIFE SPECIES. AS A MAJOR DEADLINE APPROACHES, REVISIT PAST WINS AND FIND OUT WHAT’S NEXT.

COAST TO COAST Each U.S. state, territory and the District of Columbia identifies wildlife requiring proactive intervention, resulting in a list of more than 12,000 species, including those seen here. Turn the page for a key.

PLAN OF ACTION

BY D E L A N E Y M C PH E R SO N

O

ne of the first species listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act of 1973, the Kirtland’s warbler was down to 167 breeding pairs by 1974. Found only in parts of Michigan, Wisconsin and Canada, the warbler was in dire straits.

In 2005, the inaugural Michigan Wildlife Action Plan listed the Kirtland’s warbler as a Species of Greatest Conservation Need, and in 2008, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources began using State Wildlife Grants to support the bird’s recovery: replacing trees too old to shelter bird nests, planting new pines and monitoring native cowbird populations to ensure they didn’t outcompete the warblers. The grants also helped fund regular censuses monitoring warbler populations and tracking the species’ progress.

“One thing that’s really cool about the wildlife action plan is that we essentially met all of the goals listed for Kirtland’s warbler for the decade,” says Erin Victory, a wildlife biologist with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. “[The action plan] provides the mechanism

for collaboration and funding, which has been critical to support this whole operation.”

The warbler was delisted in 2019, and by 2021 it had rebounded to roughly 2,245 breeding pairs—a testimony to the meaningful change state wildlife action plans and the associated funding can produce. And yet these tools are at risk.

Committing to conservation U.S. Congress created State Wildlife Grants in 2000—and expanded the program to include Tribal Wildlife Grants the following year—to direct federal funds toward crucial state wildlife conservation efforts. Those moves represented the culmination of decades of collaborative efforts by groups including the National Wildlife Federation to secure dedicated federal funding for wildlife. To determine how that money, typically $70 to $90 million a year, will be allocated, Congress mandated in 2000 that every U.S. state, territory and the District of Columbia draft and submit a state wildlife action plan by fall 2005.

“[WARBLERS PREFER] JACK PINE BETWEEN THE AGES OF 5 AND 20. ONCE THEY GET TO THAT AGE, THE BRANCHES GET TOO HIGH.” –ERIN VICTORY

PICKY NESTERS Kirtland’s warblers (left, held by a scientist) only nest on the ground beneath the cover of low branches of the jack pine tree. If a tree is too old and the boughs too high, it’s a no-go.

24 NATIONAL WILDLIFE . FALL 2025

KARINE AIGNER (NATURE PICTURE LIBRARY)

“Before [the plans’] creation, people were doing a lot of good work, but it was ad hoc and depended on what we knew at the time on what species might be in trouble,” says Naomi Edelson. Now senior director of wildlife partnerships for NWF, Edelson led the Teaming with Wildlife coalition that helped secure funding and supported the first generation of action plans for the Association of Fish & Wildlife Agencies, a national nonprofit.

State wildlife agencies draft the plans, often in partnership with scientists and other conservation experts, and include feedback from the public. The plans pinpoint which wildlife species in each state or territory require proactive intervention—known as Species of Greatest Conservation Need—and identify the species’ habitats; key threats they face; intended conservation actions; strategies for monitoring the species, as well as for reviewing and updating those approaches; and opportunities for public input. The plans must be revised at least every 10 years, with the first revision having taken place in 2015, and the next iteration from more than 40 states and territories due October 1 of this year. (A handful submitted early.)

“In some states, over 10,000 hours go into these plans,” says Mark Humpert, director of conservation initiatives for the Association of Fish & Wildlife agencies, citing the need for accurate species and habitat data and ample time for public input. “States with a lot of people or large geographies take a lot of time to do the outreach. ... [The plans have] only gotten better as the science has gotten better.”

Once a state submits its plan, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service either will request additional information or approve it—a process that generally takes six months to a year. In turn, all requests for grant funding must align with a project outlined in the state’s action plan and must involve a Species of Greatest Conservation Need.

The goal is not only to help recover wildlife already listed under the Endangered Species Act but to take proactive steps before other species’ population sizes and habitats severely decline. To date, the action plans have identified more than 12,000 Species of Greatest Conservation Need—from pygmy rabbits in the western United States to red-cockaded woodpeckers in the Southeast, regal fritillary butterflies in the Midwest and Micronesian geckos in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands—as well as a multitude of strategies to support them.

Crossing state lines The plans also allow states to identify areas where they might work together to benefit wildlife. In the Northwest alone, Idaho, Montana, Washington and Wyoming all list the North American wolverine as a Species of Greatest

This map represents a sampling of the thousands of species listed in wildlife action plans. While not pictured on the map, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands also identify and submit Species of Greatest Conservation Need.

WHO’S IN YOUR STATE?

AK

ME

WI

VT

WA

ID

MT

ND

MN

IL

MI

OR

NV

WY

SD

IA

IN

OH

CA

UT

CO

NE

MO

KY

AZ

NM

KS

AR

OK

LA

HI

TX

NY

MA

PA

NJ

CT

WV

VA

MD

DE

TN

NC

SC

DC

MS

AL

GA

NH

FL

Alabama (AL) Marsh rabbit Alaska (AK) Little brown bat Arizona (AZ) Chiricahua leopard frog Arkansas (AR) Red-cockaded woodpecker California (CA) American pika Colorado (CO) Lesser prairie-chicken Connecticut (CT) Tricolored bat Delaware (DE) Red-headed woodpecker District of Columbia (DC) Northern river otter Florida (FL) West Indian manatee Georgia (GA) Gopher tortoise Hawai‘i (HI) Kiwikiu or Maui parrotbill Idaho (ID) Pinyon jay Illinois (IL) Jefferson salamander Indiana (IN) Clubshell Iowa (IA) Regal fritillary Kansas (KS) Arkansas darter Kentucky (KY) Pink mucket Louisiana (LA) Louisiana black bear Maine (ME) Yellow-banded bumble bee Maryland (MD) Eastern tiger salamander Massachusetts (MA) Brook floater Michigan (MI) Kirtland’s warbler Minnesota (MN) Leonard’s skipper Mississippi (MS) Frecklebelly madtom Missouri (MO) Peregrine falcon Montana (MT) Wolverine Nebraska (NE) Trumpeter swan Nevada (NV) California spotted owl New Hampshire (NH) Blanding’s turtle New Jersey (NJ) Bobcat New Mexico (NM) Peñasco least chipmunk New York (NY) Eastern massasauga North Carolina (NC) Eastern hellbender North Dakota (ND) American marten Ohio (OH) Cerulean warbler Oklahoma (OK) Ozark emerald Oregon (OR) Western pond turtle Pennsylvania (PA) Golden-winged warbler Rhode Island (RI) Jonah crab South Carolina (SC) Gopher frog South Dakota (SD) Greater sage-grouse Tennessee (TN) Northern saw-whet owl Texas (TX) Bull shark Utah (UT) Boreal toad Vermont (VT) Spiny softshell turtle Virginia (VA) Longear sunfish Washington (WA) Fisher West Virginia (WV) Two-spotted skipper Wisconsin (WI) Rusty patched bumble bee Wyoming (WY) White-tailed prairie dog. Credits on next spread.

NWF.ORG/NW 25

RI

“WHAT MAKES [WOLVERINES] SUSCEPTIBLE TO EXPLOITATION IS THEY OCCUR IN LOW DENSITIES. IN IDAHO, THERE IS ROOM FOR 120 ANIMALS.” –CORY MOSBY

COMING HOME Canadian wolverine populations have naturally recolonized parts of Idaho, Washington, Oregon and Montana, supported by the active conservation of prey species and bans on trapping and poisoning.

Conservation Need. Wolverines were extirpated from the Lower 48 in the 1930s due to trapping, loss of prey and secondary poisoning meant for larger animals such as wolves and grizzly bears. Although wolverines have returned to parts of the northwestern United States from Canada since then, the populations are not genetically distinct and getting accurate data on the elusive species still proves difficult.

“Thinking about this species on a state-by-state level is not applicable, because it’s so low density and wide ranging,” says Cory Mosby, coordinator of the Idaho Department of Fish and Game’s large carnivore program. “You have to think of it as a multistate unit before you have a large enough population to make sense.”

With that approach in mind, the four states’ wildlife agencies joined with partners including the Northern Arapaho Tribe, the Eastern Shoshone Tribe and the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes to form the Western States Wolverine Conservation Project in 2016. Using nearly $200,000 in competitive State Wildlife Grants, in addition to funds from the states and private organizations, the group conducted the first large-scale survey of wolverines in the region, gathering data that ultimately helped inform the decision to list the species as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 2023.

26 NATIONAL WILDLIFE . FALL 2025

NWF affiliate Conservation Northwest helped train volunteers who conducted the survey, leading to a robust carnivore monitoring program in Washington. “We were able to provide support, and many of those volunteers became longtime camera maintenance folks,” says Laurel Baum, the organization’s Central Cascades watershed manager.

Another collaborative effort occurred in the Northeast, where state biologists from Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York and Pennsylvania formed the Northeast Blanding’s Turtle Working Group in 2004.

“Turtles in particular are very susceptible to population reduction because of their life history,” says John Kanter, co-founder of the working group and now a senior wildlife biologist with NWF. “They’re 15 years old before they can reproduce, so they have to survive 15 years—and very few do. They were very high priority among reptiles in the region, so we put the information together from the individual state plans into a regional assessment.”

When all five states identified the Blanding’s turtle as a Species of Greatest Conservation Need in their 2005 action plans, they received and used State Wildlife Grants to fund regional monitoring efforts: assigning priority protection areas and creating signage and artificial nests. The project served as a blueprint for subsequent northeastern working ROB G. GREEN

groups on wood turtles, spotted turtles, bog turtles and eastern box turtles.

While Indigenous groups do not submit their own plans, they independently manage their natural resources and use tools including the Tribal Wildlife Grants program. Many Tribal priorities overlap with those of state partners, and in the end, wildlife benefit, as was the case with the Red Lake Band of Chippewa and lake sturgeon.

The sturgeon had been extirpated in Minnesota’s Red Lakes since the 1950s due to overexploitation and dam construction. But in 2007, the Red Lake Band began using Tribal Wildlife Grants to reintroduce the fish. In the more than 15 years since, the Band has continued to use grant funding to regularly stock the lakes—especially important as the fish don’t begin reproducing until they reach age 20 or so.

“Lake sturgeon don’t spawn every year. There can be two to three years in between,” says Pat Brown, fisheries director with the Red Lake Department of Natural Resources. “We need a wide variety of ages, and that’s where we’re at now.”

Brown estimates the current sturgeon population in the lakes is around 140,000. The Band plans to continue stocking through 2029, at which point the population should be self-sustaining. The sturgeon’s recovery in the Red Lakes has been bolstered by additional stocking and water quality improvement projects in the watershed conducted by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources—which has identified the sturgeon as a Species of Greatest Conservation Need since its 2005 action plan—and the White Earth Band of Chippewa. These combined efforts, along with dam removals, now allow the sturgeon to freely flow from the Red Lake River into the lakes and back again.

The future of the funds To determine how much money a given state will receive each year, Congress uses a formula based on human population and total land area. While state wildlife action plans are drafted every 10 years, Congress appropriates State Wildlife Grants annually. That means projects are continually at risk of defunding—a precarious position in the best of times.

Under the Trump administration, with many budgets getting cut and grants rescinded, that uncertainty is amplified. Earlier this year, the president proposed a budget that would zero out the grant program. Fortunately, strong bipartisan support resulted in the funds being reinstated as of summer 2025, but there is still work to be done to

NWF priority

F U N D I N G T H E WO R K

The Recovering America’s Wildlife Act would provide up to $1.4 billion annually to implement state wildlife action plans and include an historic investment in Tribal fish and wildlife management. NWF currently is working with the bill’s bipartisan sponsors on its introduction to the 119th U.S. Congress. Learn more at nwf.org/RAWA.

ensure the program remains. While some wildlife conservationists are betting that future grants won’t be canceled outright, others say it’s too early to discount the possibility.

“The plans aren’t going away [if the grants are cut], but capacity will be diminished,” Humpert says. “There are grave concerns that if this funding goes away, the programs will be a shell of what they used to be.”

Most action plan projects are not wholly funded by the grants but rather a mix of federal, state and nonprofit dollars. If the grants are terminated, the efforts may continue, but it’s worth noting that many grant-making states and nonprofits, including NWF, receive and redistribute federal support whose outlook is currently under fire.

In a best-case scenario, Congress could fund State and Tribal Wildlife Grants in perpetuity to achieve the plans’ goals. In 2016, the Blue Ribbon Panel on Sustaining America’s Diverse Fish and Wildlife Resources determined it would take $1.3 billion to implement all initiatives in the 2005 wildlife action plans. While a total estimate for the 2025 plans won’t be available for some time, the 2025 plans and all future revisions could be permanently secured if Congress passes the Recovering America’s Wildlife Act, a major NWF initiative. See “NWF priority,” above, for more.

Even without dedicated funding, the plans provide vital information—population sizes, habitat quality, conservation tactics and opportunities for public engagement— necessary to protect and recover the thousands of Species of Greatest Conservation Need already identified.

“We now know so much about what we need to do,” Edelson says. “We have the action. We just need the resources to get it done.” n Read about Delaney McPherson on page 7.

OPENER CREDITS: AL: DONALD M. JONES (MINDEN PICTURES); AK: MCDONALD WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHY INC. (THE IMAGE BANK/GETTY IMAGES); AZ: STEVEBYLAND (ISTOCK/GETTY IMAGES); AR: RENEE BODINE (USFWS); CA: SHATTIL & ROZINSKI (NATURE PICTURE LIBRARY); CO: NATTAPONG ASSALEE (ISTOCK/GETTY IMAGES); CT: PETE PATTAVINA (USFWS); DE: MARVINANN PATTERSON (USFWS); DC: TOM KOERNER (USFWS); FL: BRENT DURAND (MOMENT/GETTY IMAGES); GA: RANDY BROWNING (USFWS); HI: RYAN WAGNER; ID: GLENN BARTLEY (BIA/MINDEN PICTURES); IL: S & D & K MASLOWSKI (IMAGEBROKER/ ALAMY); IN: RYAN HAGERTY (USFWS); IA: JILL HAUKOS (KONZA PRAIRIE BIOLOGICAL STATION); KS: DANIEL FENNEL (USFWS); KY: MONTE MCGREGOR; LA: CLINT TURNAGE (US DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE); ME: THOMAS WOOD; MD: BARRY MANSELL (NATURE PICTURE LIBRARY); MA: RYAN HAGERTY (USFWS); MI: PCHOUI (ISTOCK/GETTY IMAGES); MN: RICK & NORA BOWERS (ALAMY); MS: BRETT ALBANESE (GDNR); MO: JILL BEIM; MT: ROB G. GREEN; NE: STEVE DEGENHARDT (USFWS); NV: RICK KUYPER (USFWS); NH: PATRICK RANDALL; NJ: GRAYSON SMITH (USFWS); NM: JIM STUART (NEW MEXICO DEPARTMENT OF GAME AND FISH); NY: NATHAN RATHBUN (USFWS); NC: ISAAC SZABO (ENGBRETSON UNDERWATER PHOTOGRAPHY); ND: RT IMAGES (SHUTTERSTOCK); OH: PS50ACE (ISTOCK/GETTY IMAGES); OK: DAYBREAK IMAGERY (ALAMY); OR: SEKARB (ISTOCK/GETTY IMAGES); PA: BRIAN E SMALL (NATURE PHOTOGRAPHERS LTD/ALAMY); RI: ANDREW J. MARTINEZ (BLUE PLANET ARCHIVE/ALAMY); SC: JAMES LYON (USFWS); SD: JARED LLOYD (MOMENT/GETTY IMAGES); TN: GERALD CORSI (E+/GETTY IMAGES); TX: HENLEY SPIERS (NATURE PICTURE LIBRARY); UT: ANNA RICHARD (ISTOCK/GETTY IMAGES); VT: QUINN KEON (ALAMY); VA: RYAN HAGERTY (USFWS); WA: LINDA FRESHWATERS ARNDT (ALAMY); WV: ANDY BIRKEY (ALAMY); WI: DAWN MARSH (USFWS); WY: GERALD DEBOER (ISTOCK/GETTY IMAGES)

Sage

Scientists say it’s time to flip the script to prioritize saving what’s left of the sagebrush biome

Wisdom

In the heart of sagebrush country, a horseback rider pauses on a hill in Montana’s Centennial Valley. Across the West, sagebrush ecosystems are shrinking.

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rom atop a rise in southwest Montana, silvercolored sagebrush rolls away in every direction. Pronghorn and elk graze on bunchgrasses, while yarrow and paintbrush peek above the bushes. Cold, clear creeks wind through the steppe, forming the headwaters of the mighty Missouri and Yellowstone rivers.

“Southwest Montana is core sagebrush, the best of the best. It provides key habitat for migratory big game species as well as large carnivores like grizzly bears and gray wolves,” says Simon Buzzard, wildlife connectivity manager for the National Wildlife Federation’s Northern Rockies, Prairies and Pacific regions.

America’s wide-open sagebrush range stretches across 13 states and 382,000 square miles. It’s the largest contiguous open space in the Lower 48 and one of the most intact ecosystems on Earth, on par with the Amazon or the Serengeti. The sagebrush biome provides habitat for more than 350 plant and animal species, including at-risk wildlife such as pygmy rabbits, dunes sagebrush lizards and sage-grouse.

Sagebrush rangelands also support abundant recreational opportunities, such as biking, hiking, birding and hunting, along with rural communities, Indigenous Nations and agricultural landowners who graze livestock.

Despite years of measures to protect this habitat, however, the sagebrush biome is disappearing fast. “We’re los-

ing 760,000 acres of core sagebrush each year,” says Tina Mozelewski, technical program manager at the nonprofit Spatial Informatics Group–Natural Assets Laboratory. “It’s a wake-up call that we need to change what we’re doing.” In 2024, Mozelewski and 70 other experts sounded that call, publishing a suite of sagebrush-related research in a special issue of Rangeland Ecology & Management (REM). Their research shows that to conserve what’s left of the sagebrush ecosystem, “business as usual is not going to cut it,” she says.

Two years earlier, local, state and federal partners had developed a framework, Sagebrush Conservation Design, to better target resources invested in the biome’s conservation.

Based on satellite imagery that tracks vegetation over the past seven decades, the design delineated core and degraded sagebrush zones. Core areas have the highest amount of native shrubs and perennial plants and the least amount of invasive weeds or encroaching trees. “These are the places that have changed the least over time,” says Joe Smith, a rangeland ecologist at the University of Montana and a member of the Natural Resources Conservation Service’s Working Lands for Wildlife team that helped develop the framework.

Yet Mozelewski’s research reveals that between 2000 and 2020, only about 20 percent of all sagebrush conservation funding went to protecting these intact core areas, while 80

percent was spent on restoring degraded areas. She says that if we flipped the funding script—funneling 80 percent into protecting core areas—we’d be five times more effective at conserving the sagebrush biome. Nicknamed “defend the core,” this new approach is starting to catch on around the West.

Defending the core does not mean writing off degraded areas, Mozelewski notes, but changing why and how to invest in those places—building wildfire fuel breaks to protect communities or prioritizing key wildlife migration corridors, for example.

Buzzard agrees. “To conserve remaining big game migrations, we’re going to have to put some effort into degraded areas,” he says. But overall, he favors the focus on core habitat. “The primary reason that initial attempts to conserve and rebound declining sage-grouse were ineffective is because they were too species specific and did not take into account the full scope of habitat health,” he says. “NWF and our partners prioritize working in important, intact landscapes.”

Like Buzzard, others agree with the big-picture strategy but see the need for a nuanced approach at the local level.

For more than 20,000 years, Indigenous Peoples from dozens of groups have inhabited the sagebrush biome. “For us, the sagebrush ecosystem is a source of medicine and food that we still utilize ceremonially,” says Jason Baldes, a mem-

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ber of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe in present-day Wyoming and director of NWF’s Tribal Bison Program. Bison, a keystone species of the sagebrush biome, once numbered 30 to 60 million. But due to the dispossession of Indigenous groups and the federalgovernment-sponsored slaughter of bison in the 19th century, bison are now considered ecologically extinct.

Bringing bison back will require “outof-the-box, landscape-wide conservation approaches,” Baldes says.

Baldes believes that working across jurisdictional boundaries to defend core habitat “is certainly a more wellaligned approach to conservation, one that translates to restoring both bison and sagebrush ecosystems.” Like Buzzard, he adds a caveat: “I think we need to have a mosaic of conservation priorities ... and some degraded areas may be important to bison that are not part of a larger core system.”

Sagebrush invaders Scientists say that nearly 90 percent of core sagebrush loss stems from two threats: invasive annual grasses, including cheatgrass, ventenata and medusahead; and encroaching native conifers such as pinyon pine and western juniper that are expanding their ranges as a result of fire suppression.

Both kinds of intruding vegetation end up replacing native perennial plants, impacting water and nutrient cycling and degrading habitat for sagebrush wildlife.

Invasive annual grasses are especially worrisome because they gobble up sagebrush habitat quickly. They also fuel more frequent fires across the rangelands where sagebrush grows.

Cheatgrass—a species native to Eurasia that was introduced in the 1800s—spreads quickly via seed. It dries out much faster than native plants, sending sagebrush habitat up in flames every few years instead of every several decades, which was the historic fire cycle in sagebrush country.

As more conifers infiltrate the range, those fires rage hotter, leaving more bare ground for invasive grasses to colonize postfire. This vicious cycle can “transform and degrade habitat to the point where it’s hard to get it back,” says Buzzard, with dire consequences both for wildlife and rural communities.

(Read more about fires on page 40.) According to research conducted by Michele Crist, wildland fire science program coordinator for the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), some 2.1 million acres of sagebrush rangelands burn in an average year.

America’s sagebrush biome is vast (above), but little of what remains qualifies as core sagebrush: areas with the highest quantity of native shrubs and perennial plants and the least amount of invasive weeds or encroaching trees. During migration, wildlife such as pronghorn (left) may traverse degraded areas but do best in core habitats.

The good news is that native perennial plants and shrubs are more resistant to wildfires: Less than 2 percent of Crist’s estimated annual fires occur in core sagebrush areas. Because core areas tend to be farther from human development, they are less prone to human-caused ignitions, which account for 90 percent of all fire starts.

Invasive grasses are an extremely challenging threat to tackle, in part because they are fast-moving and widespread. Using a free remote-sensing app called the Rangeland Analysis Platform, Smith has documented an eightfold increase in cheatgrass since 1990 across the Great Basin, a wide swath of land that includes portions of Oregon, Nevada, Idaho, Utah and California. “You can see the cover of invasive grasses double from one year to the next, and there’s no silver bullet to combat them yet,” he says. “We could see the iconic sagebrush ecosystem transformed into a highly flammable landscape within one lifetime.”

Fortunately, new mapping technology like the Rangeland Analysis Platform is helping pinpoint where to target cheatgrass treatments. Once scientists determine the extent of the problem—a single pasture or an entire watershed—the next step is to inventory how bad it is. Are any native plants left? If not, will bare ground need to be replanted once the invasives are gone? Land managers then can decide if and

PREVIOUS SPREAD: LOUISE JOHNS; LEFT: MAX WAUGH; MAP: MAPPING SPECIALISTS, LTD. SOURCE: DOHERTY K. ET AL, 2022, U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY DATA RELEASE, HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.5066/P94Y5CDV.

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where to spray an herbicide. New preemergent herbicides such as Rejuvra are showing promise for halting cheatgrass in its tracks. Like other herbicides, these chemicals could inadvertently harm native plants or animals or accumulate in waterways. Yet because they kill seeds of invasive grasses in the soil’s upper layers, they allow deep-rooted native perennials to come back in spring.

Recipes for success In Wyoming, Sublette County provides hope for winning the battle against cheatgrass. Using preemergent herbicides on more than 97,000 acres since 2015, a team of public and private partners has treated nearly every known cheatgrass infestation in the county. So far, the invasives have not come back.

The county’s success is inspiring more people to defend their own sagebrush rangelands. Over the past two years, 32 NATIONAL WILDLIFE . FALL 2025

the University of Wyoming’s Institute for Managing Annual Grasses Invading Natural Ecosystems (IMAGINE) has hosted virtual and in-person workshops across the West, teaching 850 people how to use mapping tools, herbicides, targeted livestock grazing and other strategies to keep invasives at bay. Claire Visconti, an IMAGINE outreach coordinator and assistant research scientist, says the workshops “take people from ‘defending the core’ to ‘defending your core.’”

Defending sagebrush cores also means keeping them tree-free. The approach to eliminate encroaching conifers can be more clear-cut than eradicating cheatgrass: Just lop them down as they spread into sagebrush habitat, preferably as small saplings before they mature and produce thousands of seeds.

The trick is to manage for tree-free sagebrush landscapes at large scales.

An impressive example is in southern Idaho, where public land managers and private landowners have been removing encroaching junipers from more than 400 square miles of sagebrush habitats since 2004. Smith and his colleagues studied 288 treated sites and found that perennial plants and shrubs recovered following tree removal.

Such projects have boosted populations of sagebrush-loving birds. “It’s pretty clear that sagebrush birds are more abundant and have better reproductive success in areas with less trees,” says Elise Zarri, an ecologist with the University of Montana’s Working Lands for Wildlife research team.

From 2019 to 2022, Zarri tracked the nesting success of eight songbird species in a valley in southwest Montana, a region where tree cover has doubled since 1990. She surveyed sites where the Bureau of Land Management had removed Douglas fir trees to restore sagebrush habitat as well as other sites where no trees had been cut.

Fledgling production for the Brewer’s sparrow—a 5-inch-long bird known for its extended, buzzy songs and a species of conservation concern in several western states— was 119 percent higher in the locations without trees. The birds avoided nesting within 98 feet of a tree, Zarri says.

“They were cramming their territories into tree-free areas.

It made me wonder how much habitat we’ve lost for Brewer’s sparrows and what might happen in the future if trees continue to fill in.”

To find out, she overlaid the territories of 1,161 Brewer’s sparrows with historical aerial imagery and ran simulations to model past and future abundance of the birds in the valley. This part of Montana already has lost onequarter of its Brewer’s sparrow population during the past 70 years, and Zarri’s simulations show that their numbers will decline an additional 60 percent in the next 30 years if no action is taken to remove encroaching trees. If trees are actively managed in the future, she says, an estimated 460 Brewer’s sparrow fledglings will flit around the valley each year, but the number of offspring craters to just 200 fledglings with no tree removal. “If we defend the core, we can stem the loss and hold the line for the animals and people that rely on these habitats,” Zarri says.

Saving signature species Well known for the male’s elaborate courtship dances at communal display grounds during the mating season, the greater sage-grouse is a signature species of sagebrush ecosystems. Greater sage-grouse also “are a very important cultural and iconic species to many Native American Tribes,” Baldes says. Dependent on sagebrush plants for food, cover and roosting, the plump, chicken-sized birds have declined by 80 percent since 1965, largely due to habitat loss, fragmentation and degradation. “We need to consider how development and encroachment are impacting that bird and its habitat and overall biodiversity,” Baldes says.

Because trees can shelter predators, sage-grouse, like Brewer’s sparrows, avoid nesting in landscapes with more than a few trees per acre. In southern Oregon, where partners removed junipers from 54 square miles of public and private lands, the birds’ numbers were 12 percent higher than in neighboring landscapes where trees remained, a 2021 study published in Ecosphere found. “These birds evolved with cover that’s fairly flat and low to the ground, so they aren’t accustomed to tall structures and defending against the predators that come with them, like raptors, weasels or chipmunks,” Zarri says.

According to two studies published in the REM special issue, protecting core sagebrush is synonymous with saving sage-grouse. One study found that while populations of sage-grouse remained stable in core areas biome-wide between 1996 and 2021, they dropped by a staggering 64 percent in degraded rangelands. And on the California– Nevada border, a distinct population of sage-grouse has increased by an estimated 37.4 percent since 2012 in areas where targeted conservation efforts kept core sagebrush ABOVE LEFT: TOBY MAXWELL (USGS); ABOVE RIGHT: DONALD M. JONES (MINDEN PICTURES)

NWF priority

H A B I TAT C O N N E C T I V I T Y

Across the sagebrush range, migratory big-game animals, such as pronghorn and elk, must traverse a maze of potentially harmful fences during their seasonal movements. In southwest Montana, the National Wildlife Federation has helped landowners remove or modify 72 miles of dangerous fencing since 2021. Learn more at nwf.org/fencingforwildlife.

South of Rock Springs, Wyoming, cheatgrass has invaded the spaces surrounding sagebrush (left), displacing native perennials and degrading the habitat. During spring mating season, male greater sage-grouse display in eastern Montana (above).

intact compared to places where no conservation took place. “By protecting these core areas we’re protecting essentially all life stages of sage-grouse,” says Peter Coates, a USGS wildlife biologist and a co-author of both studies.

The best way to maintain these core areas and the wildlife that thrive in them is by working across ownership boundaries and at large scales, as evidenced by success stories in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana, Buzzard says.

“The recipe for success is collaborative, on-the-ground conservation programs and local partnerships,” he adds.

This ensures that private landowners and agencies “are all speaking the same language in terms of priorities on the landscape and how to tackle them.” n Brianna Randall is a science and travel writer based in Missoula, Montana.

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faces onlY a father could love From their physical appearance and common name to their paternal practices and what they might teach us about the food web, plainfin midshipman are anything but plain

Young plainfin midshipman, like these off Canada’s Vancouver Island, remain attached to rocks for up to two months.

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not particularly photogenic variety of toadfish, the plainfin midshipman may be the most fascinating fish you’ve never heard of. There’s its name, for starters. Its singing. Its parenting practices. And then there’s a whole body of research underway that might make this the first—but likely not the last— time you encounter this remarkable creature.

The plainfin midshipman—singular and plural—gets its name from the bioluminescent photophores, or lightemitting organs, on its belly that resemble the buttons on a naval officer’s uniform. Found in deep water off the Pacific coast from Alaska to Baja California, Mexico, the fish migrate to the intertidal zone when it’s time to breed, usually around year 2 of their 3- to 17-year life span. There in the shallows, males “sing” to attract females by rapidly contracting muscles around their swim bladders, producing a hum. After females lay eggs, they disappear back out to sea, with a subset of males staying to care for the young.

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“This period of male care may be one of the longest and most costly of the fish world,” says Sigal Balshine, a behavioral ecologist from Canada’s McMaster University. For several months, these males, known as guarders, eat little and endure long stretches of low oxygen and high temperatures at low tide. While male parental care is more common in fish than in mammals, where females often shoulder sole duty, or birds, where parents share responsibility, “Studying why it’s the male in fishes that typically provides care for the young helps scientists better understand the evolution of parental care more generally across species,” Balshine says.

With other scientists from McMaster, Balshine is also studying how bald eagles and other birds that feed their chicks a diet rich in plainfin midshipman are transferring contaminants, such as mercury, from the ocean’s depths to the terrestrial world. Learning which contaminants and in what amounts will give researchers more insight into how toxicants spread throughout the food web. Expect more to come from this surprising species.

FAMILY DYNAMICS Female plainfin midshipman lay their adhesive eggs on the undersides of rocks in the Pacific Ocean’s intertidal zone—up to 300 eggs per brood. With multiple females depositing eggs in each nest, a single male can fertilize more than 3,000 eggs a year. After eggs hatch, typically about a month later, the young remain attached to the rocks by adhesive discs on their yolk sacs, which feed the fish until they are large enough to break free and begin hunting on their own, usually around 2 months old. Guarder males such as this one (opposite) off Canada’s Vancouver Island can grow up to 15 inches in length. Grad student Ainsley Harrison-Weiss (top left) holds a plainfin midshipman while research assistants Madeleine Thomson and Tom Zhang inspect a nest as part of a study on how females choose mates.

The species, including this 4- to 5-yearold female (middle left), has photophores scattered across its body; those on its belly, resembling buttons, earned the fish its common name. By eating a diet of small, light-emitting crustaceans, many plainfin midshipman are bioluminescent. A nest (bottom left) reveals a combination of eggs, newly hatched juveniles and fish nearly ready to fledge, around 60 days old.

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RESEARCH AND DISCOVERY Plainfin midshipman are spawning new areas of inquiry. In a current study, Balshine and other McMaster scientists hope to learn more about how bald eagles (top left) and other birds of prey that eat plainfin midshipman are disseminating contaminants in the food web. And with scientists based at McMaster and the University of Victoria, Balshine published a 2024 paper in Marine Pollution Bulletin that found noise from motorboats decreases the number of hums the fish make at dawn and dusk. So far scientists don’t know what impacts noises from larger vessels (bottom left, off

Vancouver Island) might have. Balshine also has studied why plainfin midshipman produce two types of males. “We have large singing males called guarders that court females, build nests, provide parental care for young and are basically good dads,” she says (below).

“Then there are also these males, called sneaker males, that swim right into the nest, drop their sperm and swim out to sea. Why has evolution made two types of males in this fish species? That was the burning question I had that I am still trying to figure out.” n Read about Shane Gross on page 7.

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What Makes a Fire Good?

With state law and scientific research lending support for planned burns as a means of mitigating megafires, Indigenous and rural Californians are counting environmental and cultural benefits

Steven Saiz, a member of the Hoopa Valley Tribe, throws flames from his drip torch during a 2023 cultural burn along the Klamath River.

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ust a quarter acre in size,

a thicket of bear clover 60 miles northwest of Yosemite National Park amounts to a small patch of rural land. But it reflects a major shift.

About two dozen people convened in April to set this site ablaze in the Sierra Nevada town of Twain Harte, California—including kids absorbing lessons on fire safety and a man who brought along neighbors eager to learn more about “good fire” after seeing him use it on his own property.

Susie Kocher, forester and natural resources advisor for the University of California Cooperative Extension Central Sierra, helped lead the demonstration in Tuolumne County.

With 25 to 50 of these prescribed burns under her belt, it may have been the smallest burn she has participated in, but “I’m not necessarily always trying to produce a lot of acres,” she says. “I’m trying to produce a lot of informed landowners.”

So-called good fire—the intentional use of fire for beneficial ecological, land-management or cultural outcomes— is gaining momentum, increasingly recognized as a tool to limit destructive wildfires in rural California and in grasslands, shrublands and even some wetlands across the country, from the Great Plains to the Southeast.

“The antidote to trauma is agency,” says Benjamin Cossel, a public affairs officer with Stanislaus National Forest who, in his off-hours, volunteers on the Tuolumne Prescribed Burn Association steering committee, which organized the burn.

“As a citizenry, Californians are pretty damn traumatized.”

In recent years, California has seen a dramatic rise in megafires, or those that reach 100,000 acres or more. Reuters reported that 70 percent of the largest wildfires in state history had occurred since 2020—the year megafires destroyed 2.5 million acres, and 4.3 million acres in the state burned overall. With the spread of invasive species, and climate change causing uneven precipitation and longer periods of heat and drought, more wildfires are burning larger and hotter.

The trend has been lethal—including the 2018 Camp Fire that tore through Paradise and surrounding towns, making it the deadliest fire in state history, with 85 people killed—and is now impacting cities. This year began with fires in and around Los Angeles that grew into some of the state’s most destructive, resulting in 31 deaths and more than 16,000 homes and structures burned. Beyond the tragic loss of life, wildfires cause ecological harm, from altering the flight paths of migratory birds to the degradation and destruction of landscape-scale habitat.

But a growing movement of Indigenous groups, fire professionals, landowners and educators contends that the appli42 NATIONAL WILDLIFE . FALL 2025

cation of good fire helps offset environmental risks—including runaway megafires—and protects human communities.

Together, they have pushed for recent laws in California permitting beneficial burns, facilitating good-fire education and fostering an exchange of trust between Indigenous groups and government agencies that has led to an about-face in state and federal practices. Advocates see the work as meeting the moment in rural California and throughout the United States.

“The Forest Service is just one piece of the puzzle,” Cossel told the Twain Harte crowd. “CAL FIRE (the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection) is one piece of the puzzle. And this,” he said, gesturing to the group of all ages gathered amid the shrub, “is the rest of it.”

A mixed history of support For millennia, Indigenous Peoples used fire to alter the landscape for ceremonial, ecological and utilitarian ends—practices today known as “cultural burns” to differentiate them from “prescribed burns,” or fires without Indigenous ties.

Margo Robbins, an enrolled member of the Yurok Tribe, co-founded what is now the Cultural Fire Management Council (CFMC) after her community prioritized bringing fire back to their forested region of Northern California. Like others, Robbins was motivated by the desire to see her grandchildren carried in traditional Yurok baskets woven from hazel, a native shrub aided by fire. Burning a hazel patch reduces brush, lessening competition for sun, water and nutrients; manages invasive plants; and provides a clearer path come harvest time. Fire also helps produce hazel rods that are straight, strong and flexible for weaving. After educating themselves on relevant laws, the group conducted its first burn in a traditional hazel foraging spot in 2012, helping kick off a resurgence of basket weaving among the Yurok who reside along the Klamath River.

“Since then, my purpose has been greatly expanded,” Robbins says. “As I learned more and more about fire, I came to learn that the health of the land is closely, closely, closely tied with the health of our people.” Today the group coordinates planned burns with regional partners; tracks the effects of good fire on plants, from native grasses and five varieties of California Indian potatoes to invasives like Himalayan blackberry and French broom; and loans equipment, helps prepare land and provides day-of burn support to families who live within Yurok Reservation boundaries, whether they’re Indigenous or not. Last year CFMC supported 10 family burns and held 24 prescribed burns with cultural objectives.

Vikki Preston, a member of the Karuk Tribe, lives upriver from Robbins in the town of Orleans. As a technician with PREVIOUS SPREAD: MADDY RIFKA

A Yurok-conducted fire killed a fir sapling in Northern California (above) that would have competed with beneficial oaks. Margo Robbins (right) presents a cap and basket woven from hazel, a native plant aided by fire.

the Tribe’s Department of Natural Resources, she preserves archaeological artifacts and cultural resources—work that connects to her own basket weaving and fire use.

“You’re burning with cultural values in mind, and those values are not just fire values; they’re ecosystems values, ceremonial values, community values,” Preston says, linking fire to gathering, hunting and sacred ceremonies. Cultural burns often reinforce sovereignty rites and group-specific customs, such as beginning fires with wormwood torches and prayer.

But cultural burning has not seen consistent support in the United States. As a means of stifling Indigenous culture, California’s 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians was among the first state laws to prohibit cultural burning.

In the years that followed, rangers reportedly shot people they found conducting cultural burns. Into this century, authorities smothered cultural and prescribed burns rather than encouraging them. The 1911 Weeks Act effectively outlawed both practices, allowing brush to build up to hazardous levels and dramatically altering the ecology of American forests.

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Whereas “fire suppression” is intended to manage the spread of wildfire, agencies including CAL FIRE and the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) operated from an ethos of “fire exclusion,” says Lenya Quinn-Davidson, director of the Fire Network for University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources. She distinguishes the two as follows: “Fire suppression is an act; fire exclusion is a philosophy.”

“That exclusion of fire across the landscape has created some of the forest health concerns we have here today,” says Joe Tyler, director of CAL FIRE, in an April webinar. Factor in a history of aggressive logging nationwide—the removal of large, fire-tolerant trees, in particular—and settler livestock grazing, and North American forests today are in rough shape. “We recognize we can’t do this alone, and we recognize that we can’t respond our way out of this,” Tyler says.

In 2019, Governor Gavin Newsom issued an apology to all Indigenous People in California for the state’s genocidal origins—an outreach that served as a jumping-off point for State Senate Bill 310, legalizing cultural burns and co-sponsored NWF.ORG/NW 43

by the Karuk Tribe, that went into effect January 1, 2025. In March, Newsom’s California Wildfire & Forest Resilience Task Force issued priorities for the year, including expanding cultural burns and establishing a prescribed fire training center.

In April, Newsom allocated over $170 million for forest and vegetation management and wildfire response and resiliency.

“We’ve worked with state agencies for 8 to 10 years to try to overcome these historical wrongs,” says Bill Tripp, director of natural resources and environmental policy with the Karuk Tribe. He calls the state bill “the first real, solid step towards us ... having Tribal, federal, state, local and even private citizen coordination, which is really exciting.”

As state and regional leaders reckon with increasing megafires, more agencies are turning to the Indigenous lessons of controlled burns. Even Smokey Bear’s former tagline, “Only you can prevent forest fires,” has been adjusted to distance the Forest Service from its past approach. “Smokey Bear’s message … should not be conflated with wildfire management practices both past and present,” the USFS website now reads.

Today CAL FIRE, USFS and the Bureau of Land Management have begun to support planned burns for forest stewardship and cultural purposes. In its first burn 13 years ago, CFMC partnered with CAL FIRE in what is now a common hybrid model: a prescribed fire with cultural objectives.

“Our culture is fire dependent,” Robbins says. “When they come to burn with us, it’s a lot more than just reducing hazardous fuels. It is enabling us to carry on our traditional life ways.”

The ecology of exclusion versus planned burns Those long years of fire exclusion continue to impact California ecologies today. While climate change has led to drier and hotter conditions, putting forests and communities at risk, it’s the overwhelming fuel loads on the ground that put “the bullet in the gun,” says Will Harling, a fisheries biologist and restoration director of the Mid Klamath Watershed Council. In mixed-conifer environments such as Tuolumne County, the proliferation of small, shade-tolerant cedar—once cleared by Indigenous burners and natural ignitions—can be detrimental to larger trees, such as oaks, that serve as important food sources, with repercussions for humans and wildlife alike.

“There are just more trees in the Sierra Nevada than there have been historically for thousands and thousands of years,” Stephanie Pincetl, a professor and founding director of the California Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA, explains in a 2020 video series on wildfires. She goes on to describe the consequences: “You’d get more groundwater recharge if you had less trees. You’d get more streamflow if you had less trees. You’d get less fire if you had less trees.”

McKinney Fire in Klamath National Forest caused a mass kill-off of fish along 50 miles of the Klamath River. On the flip side, flash-flood conditions are less extreme in a system managed with fire, Harling says: “Beneficial fire gave us those Goldilocks conditions where salmon could flourish.”

When wildfires take hold in areas that haven’t seen burns, the smoke can alter the trajectory of migratory birds. A U.S. Geological Survey-led study of tule geese published in 2021 in The Scientific Naturalist found that wildfire smoke concentrations led to geese “either stopping migration or altering direction and/or altitude of flights,” which authors said could play out to damaging effects: “Energy deficits such as we describe, especially when occurring in the context of incomplete knowledge of available food resource locations, can lead to increased mortality or reproductive rates insufficient to maintain goose populations.”

Land-use experts point out that smoke from wildfires is more toxic than that of controlled burns, releasing more health-harming pollutants. “We know fire emits a lot of CO2, so you really don’t want to be encouraging a forest health that will have lots of big fires,” Pincetl says. “Controlled burning is another matter: They’re low brush fires, and they don’t emit as much CO2 as these big conflagrations.” That said,

Robbins (left) leads others in lighting bundles of wormwood—a ceremonial start to a cultural burn near Weitchpec, California. A burn near the town of Orleans (above) reduces potential wildfire fuel on the forest floor.

“That’s one of the really cool interactions I’ve seen with animals and fire—elk moving around in the burned areas afterwards.” –Vikki Preston

Small trees take up water that becomes more precious in drought years, leaving larger trees prone to disease and to the invasive bark beetles that threaten native buckeye and tanoak. Recent research has shown a correlation between beetle infestations and fire severity. A 2023 study published in Fire Ecology found that concurrent drought and bark beetle infestation could affect fuel on the ground and in the canopy, with the “potential to lead to heavy and dry fuel loads that under certain weather conditions may result in more extreme fire behavior and severe effects.” In other words, a lack of prescribed burning leads to bigger wildfires.

An overabundance of smaller trees leaves less water flowing into the Klamath and other regional rivers, in turn threatening the spring and fall runs of native Chinook and coho salmon. Healthy base flows are necessary to sustain juvenile coho, which typically become stressed at river temperatures above 65 degrees F. “Restoring the fire process is crucial for restoring our salmon runs,” Harling says.

The repercussions pile on from there. Heavy rainfall following a wildfire can lead to flash floods, as when the 2022

experts stress that everyone—especially those with health concerns—should limit exposure to any type of fire smoke.

In addition to mitigating megafires and their repercussions, controlled burns can benefit wildlife. Since reimplementing cultural burns, Robbins says there has been a resurgence of black-tailed deer in her town of Weitchpec, allowing more hunts to resume on the Yurok Reservation. A 2022 study from the Karuk-UC Berkeley Collaborative found that prescribed burns employing Indigenous stewardship practices, or Traditional Ecological Knowledge, had a positive impact on elk habitat in the areas examined. Preston says that since the Karuk have increased burns, she and colleagues have seen anecdotal evidence of more elk: hoof prints in ash and surveillance photos of elk resting in burn sites. “That’s one of the really cool interactions I’ve seen with animals and fire—elk moving around in the burned areas afterwards,” she says.

That’s not to suggest controlled burns are without risk.

According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, over 99 percent of prescribed burns conducted by USFS go as planned, but escaped fires have resulted in tragic deaths and

THIS SPREAD, BOTH: KILIII YUYAN

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property damage, as occurred in the Santa Fe National Forest in New Mexico in 2022. Still, there is consensus the benefits outweigh the dangers where prescribed burns are appropriate.

In most cases, that doesn’t include cities. In greater Los Angeles, home to some 18.5 million people compared to Weitchpec’s 112, there are more human demands to balance against ecological threats, explains Howard Penn, executive director of the Planning and Conservation League, a National Wildlife Federation affiliate. In addition to more suburban and exurban sprawl pushing up against the Santa Monica Mountains, the chaparral ecosystem of Southern California differs from the state’s northern forests. Similarly, controlled-burn regulations are more complex with a more concentrated population. CAL FIRE requires burn permits

NWF priority

year-round in 10 counties that make up Southern California, including Los Angeles and San Diego counties.

“Prescribed burns can still be used strategically in those applications in Southern California, but you have much more constraints than you do up here,” says Penn, whose organization is based in Sacramento. While forests tend to burn less frequently under good-fire management, chaparral likely burns more often due to human-caused ignitions and the spread of invasive plants. Most experts say neither controlled burns nor brush clearing would have prevented the Los Angeles fires.

“The air quality concerns get to be really, really big, as well as the risk of real damage to structures and lives if the [prescribed] fire escapes,” says Darrel Jenerette, a biology professor and landscape ecologist at University of California, Riverside. “This is a powerful way of reducing wildfire risks, but the trade-offs are really challenging to overcome.”

R E S TO R I N G R E L AT I O N S H I P S

The National Wildlife Federation is committed to Indigenous stewardship. Learn more about the Tribal and Indigenous Partnerships Engagement Strategy at nwf.org/tipes. NWF also supports place-based conservation through initiatives including the Southeast Forestry Program, restoring fire to iconic longleaf pine forests. Learn more at nwf.org/southeast-forestry.

46 NATIONAL WILDLIFE . FALL 2025

A grassroots solution The state’s rural areas, however, have seen increasing interest in prescribed burns, such as the Twain Harte burn in April and another the same month farther north in Placer County.

“There’s a huge appetite from people to learn how to do prescribed fire, in the Sierra at least,” says Kocher of the Cooperative Extension Central Sierra. “People understand how important it is.” As landowners hear about the benefits of planned burns, there’s also a heightened need for education THIS SPREAD, BOTH: MADDY RIFKA

Wildfires following decades of fire exclusion can leave riparian zones— such as that surrounding Vesa Creek (left), a tributary of the Klamath River, pictured after California’s 2022 McKinney Fire—scorched and bald, which in turn can lead to flash flooding. A Chinook salmon (right) hides amid a curtain of bubbles in Northern California’s North Fork Salmon River.

Above the water’s surface, the burn scar from 2014’s July Complex Fire extends down to the shoreline.

and coordination. That’s where the state’s growing network of prescribed burn associations, or PBAs, comes in. QuinnDavidson of the UC Fire Network helped establish the state’s first PBA in Humboldt County in 2018. Today 27 PBAs cover about half of the state’s counties.

“Landowners are the experts on that piece of land that they own,” Kocher says. “They’re the ones who understand the history of the property, and they have the goals.”

While landowners set their own goals, PBA burns are regulated: They must occur roughly November to April, outside of fire season, and must comply with rules set by CAL FIRE and local air quality emissions districts. Some burns—those low in complexity or, as in Tuolumne County, under 2 acres— may not require a permit, but all burns require a burn plan to demonstrate due diligence, helping protect private burners from fire suppression costs if a prescribed burn does get out of control. Plans describe the area to be burned, noting power lines, road and water access and neighboring properties. A plan also details the removal of built-up litter and foliage that could keep an out-of-control fire raging, and it may establish buffer zones around buildings. A CAL FIRE-certified burn boss must approve the plan and may be on-site during a burn.

And then there’s good judgment. At the Twain Harte burn, Adam Dragland, a member of the Tuolumne County PBA steering committee who works in software and has firefighter training, reminded the group of a tenet of prescribed burning: “To burn or not to burn, that is the question.” Just because a permit has been issued doesn’t mean a burn should

proceed. Landowners should assess day-of conditions, like temperature, wind and relative humidity. If those no longer align with a safe burn, it’s OK to reassess, postpone or cancel.

“What’s so cool about California is the ecosystem shift, which means the prescriptions shift too,” says Cordi Craig, who works for the Placer Resource Conservation District and leads the Placer PBA. A certified burn boss, Craig specializes in the mixed-conifer ecosystems of Placer County.

“People get in their region, and then they become really good at burning within that region,” she says of PBAs prioritizing place-specific ecological and community needs.

But all good fire—whether in the mixed conifers of Northern California or other ecosystems in need of restoration, such as the oak forests of the U.S. Southeast—require sufficient funding and scientific data. The future availability of those resources is currently uncertain, with federal funding cuts slashing staff, personal protection equipment and research, and agency reorganizations jeopardizing federal agencies’ ability to conduct burns or follow through on commitments to Tribal and other regional partners.

“One of my favorite things about the PBA movement is really that local flavor,” Quinn-Davidson says. “It’s so grassroots, which is so important, because prescribed fire and the use of fire, in general, is very versatile. It’s definitely a unifying force. And, gosh, we could use as many of those as we can get in this current day.” n Read about writer Kate Gonzales on page 7.

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Countless plant and animal species are threatened by rising seas. For some, translocation may be the only solution.

MOVING TO HIGHER

GROUND

On Midway Atoll, two adult black-footed albatrosses and a chick are among seabirds threatened by rising seas. A decade ago, scientists began moving some of the birds to a safer location 32 feet above sea level on the island of O‘ahu.

BY K ATA R I N A ZI M M E R

A

t the northern end of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef lies a tiny flat island called Bramble Cay. Barely nine football fields in size and miles away from other land, it’s hard to imagine any animal living here. Yet against all odds, it had been home to a small, ratlike rodent—the Bramble Cay melomys— for thousands of years.

Nobody knows how the melomys got here. Perhaps its ancestors got stuck after wandering over a land bridge connecting the island to Australia during the last ice age or floated down on a raft of vegetation from New Guinea. Somehow, it forged a life on this desolated speck of land, munching on local succulents and hiding out under sea turtle shells.

But its unusual home also made the melomys vulnerable.

While scientists estimated there were 93 of the rodents in 1998, by 2004 they found just 12. At fault, experts suspected, was sea level rise, as warmer global temperatures melt polar glaciers and cause heat-absorbing oceans to expand in volume.

Along with stronger floods and storm surges, rising oceans led to land loss on Bramble Cay as well as inundation by plantkilling seawater, robbing the melomys of food. After scientists failed to find any of the animals during visits in 2011 and 2014, they concluded the species had gone extinct. “I consider it a real loss,” says Tyrone Lavery, a mammalogist at The University of Melbourne. “For me, it was an important part of our natural history.”

For now, the Bramble Cay melomys remains the only known extinction caused by sea level rise. But rising oceans are continuing to destroy precious habitats along coasts and low-lying islands worldwide. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, average global sea levels already have risen some 9 inches since 1880. And even in the hypothetical scenario where humanity stopped emitting planet-warming carbon dioxide soon, we could see an additional rise of 1.6 to 10.5 feet by 2300. Worst-case scenarios could mean between 6.6 and 23 feet, says the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel in Germany.

Fortunately, conservationists have found ways to move some imperiled species out of harm’s way, from translocat-

ing rare tree cacti and threatened seabirds to higher ground to helping entire marshes and their inhabitants shift inland.

Moving any plant or animal to safety is no simple feat and requires deep consideration around their long-term survival as well as the risk of upsetting local ecosystems. Yet translocation offers the best survival chance for many species—and indeed, could well have saved the Bramble Cay melomys from extinction, Lavery says.

50 NATIONAL WILDLIFE . FALL 2025

PREVIOUS SPREAD: ERIC VANDERWERF (PACIFIC RIM CONSERVATION); ABOVE: RICARDO MACIA LALINDE (©GUARDIAN NEWS & MEDIA LTD 2025)

Cacti on the move Humans have been accidentally moving species around for centuries, often introducing them into foreign habitats where they sometimes devour or outcompete native species. Only more recently have conservationists proposed intentionally doing so to rescue species from humancaused threats. “The magnitude of climate change is so great that I don’t see how we don’t move species around to protect them,” says ecologist Mark Schwartz of the University of California, Davis.

Already, conservationists have rescued one genetically unique plant population in Florida: the Key Largo tree cactus, which grows in tall, green, spiny columns sporting distinctive cottonlike hair clumps. While other members of its species live in the Bahamas, Cuba, Haiti and the Turks and Caicos Islands, the only U.S. population was on a small limestone outcrop in the mangrove forests of John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park. “It’s a cool part of our natural history,” says botanist Jennifer Possley of the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, who speculates the cactus arrived in the Keys as a seed pooped out by a bird migrating from the Caribbean.

After surviving an attack that was likely by invasive rats in 2015 and a hurricane battering in 2017, rising seas began

introducing plant-destroying brackish water that eventually surrounded the bases of the cacti. In 2021, scientists decided to salvage the plants that were left, using saws to cut off 22 healthy parts and carrying them out in buckets.

About half the rescued cacti went to the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Coral Gables. The rest went to a nursery within the state park, where young cacti are being raised to be planted in a long-term home at a relatively high-elevation spot in the wild. The cacti now have a good chance to survive. Had they not been rescued, the Key Largo tree cactus would have disappeared from the United States: In 2024, the population at its original site was declared extirpated.

Possley’s team also has translocated three more at-risk plant species—all pine rockland herbs—that inhabited low-lying parts of the Keys, much of which is no higher than 5 feet above sea level. In addition, they’re preserving seeds to sup-

so, and many islands are inhabited by invasive, bird-eating predators. “And it’s possible that some birds may never be willing to go somewhere else,” VanderWerf says.

In 2015, VanderWerf and his colleagues set out to establish a new nesting colony for four seabird species imperiled by rising seas. They selected a site roughly 32 feet above sea level in O‘ahu’s James Campbell National Wildlife Refuge that they had surrounded by a fence to keep out invasive cats, dogs and mongooses.

The challenge with relocating seabirds is that adults habitually nest where they were raised. For example, Laysan albatrosses (designated near threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, or IUCN) must be moved before they turn one month old in order to internalize the location of their new home. So, the scientists took albatross eggs from nests on a military base in Kaua‘i where the birds needed to be moved because they posed an aircraft collision hazard. At

The Bramble Cay melomys (above left) is so far the only species extinction attributed to sea level rise.

To prevent a repeat of its story, botanists rescued a dwindling number of Key Largo tree cacti damaged by storms and rising seas (near right), planting them in safe locations (far right) where their flowers are hand pollinated. The original population has died out.

port future efforts to grow new populations, “because we don’t know … what will need to happen in the future,” she says.

Saving drowning seabirds Compared with plants, moving seabirds is a decidedly trickier business. But on a few low-lying northwestern Hawaiian Islands, ornithologist Eric VanderWerf and his colleagues at the nonprofit Pacific Rim Conservation have reported notable successes. For years, scientists and federal officials had watched increasingly high waves destroy thousands of albatross and petrel nests each year. While adult birds usually fly away, some have such a strong instinct to stay with their eggs or nestlings that they end up drowning alongside them. At the same time, the ocean is swallowing entire nesting grounds. Though many seabirds move to unimpacted areas—often on other islands—it can take them years to do ABOVE, BOTH: SUSAN KOLTERMAN (FTBG)

three weeks of age, the chicks were placed in artificial nests at the O‘ahu site. Every day for five months, VanderWerf and his colleagues used syringes to squirt a nutrient-rich squid and fish smoothie into the birds’ mouths, mimicking the adults’ regurgitation of seafood.

Already, some of the translocated albatrosses have returned to the O‘ahu site to nest after spending their first four to five years at sea. In a practice called social attraction, the team also has drawn in additional nesting adults by setting out plastic bird decoys and playing recordings of albatross courtship calls. For black-footed albatrosses, whose eggs were taken from the wave-pounded edge of Midway Atoll, 40 of 95 birds raised at the site have returned. Though they’ve seen less success with the Tristram’s storm-petrel, Bonin petrel transplants are doing well, with 100 birds having returned to the site.

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VanderWerf is optimistic that they’ve translocated enough seabirds to form a critical insurance population as the birds’ relatives on low-lying islands continue to grapple with sea level rise. “I’m confident we’ve done enough, and the colony will increase and persist,” he says.

Can marshes migrate?

Other species, however, have nowhere safe to go because their entire habitat is at risk. This includes much of the unique fauna that inhabits salt marshes along the U.S. Atlantic coast. For example, a quarter of the world’s saltmarsh sparrows—classified as endangered by IUCN—reside in Maryland, where the effects of sea level rise are exacerbated by topographic flatness and natural land subsidence.

Rather than fraying at the edges, the lower reaches of these marshes are drowning as pools form in their interior.

Upper marshes, which usually see seawater only during extreme tides, are becoming increasingly inundated, a process that wipes out eggs and nestlings of saltmarsh sparrows.

“It’s the principal mechanism by which their populations are declining now,” by around 9 percent a year, totaling an 87 percent loss since 1998, says ornithologist David Curson of Audubon Mid-Atlantic.

52 NATIONAL WILDLIFE . FALL 2025

Efforts are underway to rescue the remaining marsh, by digging small runnels to draw off trapped surface water, for instance, or using sediment from clearing nearby shipping lanes to raise the marshes’ height. Another important strategy is helping marshes move inland to keep up with sea level rise. Marshes naturally colonize areas after saltwater intrusion has killed off patches of forest, but sometimes dying trees give way to deep ponds as their roots shrink and the ground around them collapses. To prevent that scenario at one spot in Maryland’s Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) officials removed about 13.3 acres of submerging and dying forests before the trees died, says FWS wildlife biologist Matt Whitbeck, who reports that marsh grasses have colonized the area since the trees were removed.

Another important task is protecting the land that marshes will need to move inland. One strategy that nonprofits, state agencies and land trusts in Delaware and Maryland are working on is to acquire private land and embed it within protected areas or conservation easements—legal structures that maintain land in a natural-as-possible state.

The goal is “to make sure that the marsh does have a place to go, and the sparrows and the grasses have the ability to ERIC VANDERWERF (PACIFIC RIM CONSERVATION)

follow that landscape,” says Andrew Szwak, Mid-Atlantic program manager for the Land Trust Alliance.

Translocation versus assisted migration The long-term success of many such efforts, however, depends on future sea level rise. As even nearby habitats are swallowed by the sea, conservationists will have to look increasingly further afield to move species, and that can spell problems.

Unlike projects so far to save species from sea level rise—where animals are moved to new locations within a species’ historic range—the conservation strategy known as “assisted migration” translocates species beyond their ranges. Because such moves could harm ecosystems that aren’t adapted to the new species—by upsetting delicate food webs or introducing new diseases and competitors—the approach is controversial. “When you make big leaps, that has a higher probabil-

Biologists collect Bonin petrel chicks (left) on Midway Atoll to rescue them from rising seas.

Translocated to O‘ahu, 100 birds have returned to that island to raise their own chicks. Some species, though, have nowhere safe to move, including Hawaiian monk seals (right) whose island homes are being inundated.

“We don’t have the resources to take that kind of time and care and attention to the thousands of species that probably need moving.”

–Mark Schwartz

ity of having damaging effects to the recipient ecosystem,” Schwartz says. “I think we have to be very deliberative and cautious about assisted migration.”

If we do employ the strategy, he says, we either do so quickly and deal with the risks, or we carefully weigh the risks and benefits, which takes time that many species don’t have. It took 20 years, for example, for conservationists to finally translocate the sihek, a kingfisher that had gone extinct on the island of Guam and was being kept in captivity, to a safer Pacific island. “We don’t have the resources to take that kind of time and care and attention to the thousands of species that probably need moving,” Schwartz says.

Such resources could be even harder to come by in the future. Translocation efforts are typically paid for through federal funding, state governments or nonprofits—but some of those sources, like the U.S. federal conservation DOUG PERRINE

budget, recently got smaller, Schwartz notes. And “as the problem gets larger, financing will get harder,” he adds.

For some species, translocation may not be a viable option at all. On several northwestern Hawaiian Islands, for example, populations of the federally endangered Hawaiian monk seal are threatened by rapidly rising seas. Three islands that were popular seal birth sites already have vanished. While seals so far have been able to move to other islands, what happens if those also disappear? Some have suggested moving the animals to higher-elevation islands like Kaua‘i or O‘ahu, but those already host many monk seals, says marine biologist Jason Baker, a scientific advisor to the Marine Mammal Commission. “There’s no unoccupied habitat that’s available and could sustain a lot more seals,” Baker says. A better solution, he believes, would be trying to save vanishing islands by strategically depositing sand or placing rock or concrete protrusions along shorelines to accumulate and retain sand.

The same is true for the silver rice rat, a native rodent adapted to life in the mangrove-studded islands of the Florida Keys. As sea levels rise, the rats are moving on their own to higher-lying parts of the Keys, but they’ll eventually bump up against roads, holiday homes and other developments, says ecologist Paul Taillie of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The only survival option he sees may be humans eventually retreating from some of these areas.

Indeed, translocation is no panacea for all species threatened by rising seas. But scientists say that efforts so far demonstrate that, in some cases, we can avoid the sad story of the Bramble Cay melomys from repeating itself. While translocation “certainly needs to be used wisely,” VanderWerf says, “this is an important technique that I hope is used more.” n Katarina Zimmer is a Berlin-based science journalist.

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. fıeld work National Wildlife Federation Regions & Affiliates nwf.org/regionalwork

BY DE L AN E Y MC PH E RSON

2025 CONSERVATION ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS

CELEBRATING EXTRAORDINARY WORK

A

t the National Wildlife Federation’s Annual Meeting on June 4 in Minneapolis, NWF staff and affiliates gathered to honor the recipients of the 2025 National Conservation Achievement Awards. l Kent Salazar Director of Conservation Partnerships Award: LEW CARPENTER (top left), director of conservation partnerships for NWF’s Rocky Mountain region, supports five affiliates and convenes them on hunting and angling issues. l Charlie Shaw Conservation Partnership Award, Affiliate: JOHN BRADLEY, the executive director of NWF affiliate North Dakota Wildlife Federation, brings together hunters, anglers, Indigenous groups and other partners to protect the state’s wildlife and landscapes, 54 NATIONAL WILDLIFE . FALL 2025

including the proposed Maah Daah Hey National Monument. l Charlie Shaw Conservation Partnership Award, Staff: As senior director of Tribal partnerships and policy at NWF, GARRIT VOGGESSER (top center, with his wife) works on efforts such as buffalo reintroduction and wildlife corridors. He also played a key role in developing NWF’s Tribal and Indigenous Partnership

Enhancement Strategy, a blueprint for forming authentic relationships with Indigenous communities. l Affiliate of the Year Award: Read more about PLANNING AND CONSERVATION LEAGUE on page 55. l Young Leader Awards: Read more about ISOBEL LINGENFELTER AND SKYLER NIX on page 10. l Conservation Leadership Award: During her 25-year tenure as Outdoor Classroom coordinator at NWF affiliate Alabama Wildlife Federation, APRIL WALTZ (top right) has collaborated with K-12 schools to design, budget for and build wildlife habitats on their campuses. l Volunteer of the Year Award: MARTY KEMPER (inset) is an ecologist and volunteer with Illinois affiliate Prairie Rivers Network. Kemper has worked on herbicide drift for the past eight years, co-authoring three reports on the subject.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: COURTESY OF LEW CARPENTER; COURTESY OF GARRIT VOGGESSER; COURTESY OF APRIL WALTZ; COURTESY OF MARTIN KEMPER

bulletin NATIONAL WILDLIFE PHOTO CONTEST

The winners of the 2025 National Wildlife® Photo Contest will be published in our upcoming winter issue, and the 2026 contest will open for submissions in January. To learn how you can enter your photos, visit nwf.org/photocontest.

AFFILIATE SPOTLIGHT

PLANNING FOR CALIFORNIA’S FUTURE

N

WF named California’s Planning and Conservation League (PCL) its Affi liate of the Year at the National Conservation Achievement Awards in June. Founded in 1965, PCL has helped lead California’s environmental policy and protection of the state’s landscapes, from coast (Montaña de Oro State Park, below) to forest (Humboldt Redwoods State Park, right) to desert, for 60 years.

“Because [the founders] were all attorneys, they really felt that better planning [would address] the root of the problem,” says Howard Penn,

executive director of PCL. “PCL was one of the first statewide environmental organizations busing people up from L.A. to have lobby days at the capitol in Sacramento.”

In 1970, PCL co-founder David Hirsch helped draft California’s premier environmental law, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), which requires land-use projects to include environmental impact assessments and invites the public to weigh in on those projects.

Since then, PCL also has been instrumental in the passage of

FROM TOP: GLENN NELSON; MICHAEL HUTCHINSON (NATURE PICTURE LIBRARY); SEAN CRANE

hundreds of bills addressing critical issues in California, from legislation that raised fines for not adhering to water curtailments to requiring utility companies to use renewable energy for 50 percent of their output by 2030.

“Our main driving principle is [that] how we live and where we live really dictate the outcome of challenges with the environment,” says Penn. “The root of many environmental problems and solving them is simple: where we build, how we build, transportation and land-use planning processes.”

Early each year PCL hosts an assembly where its more than 100 member organizations and the public convene on priorities for the coming year. Members lend PCL staff insight into local issues and in turn provide guidance to smaller organizations. In September, PCL also hosted an anniversary gala to celebrate 60 years of hard work and conservation success.

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MILESTONE ANNIVERSARY

TWO DECADES OF HEALING OUR WATERS

T

he Healing Our Waters–Great Lakes Coalition celebrates two decades of restoring and protecting the Great Lakes this year. Formed in 2005, the coalition—which is co-managed by NWF and the National Parks Conservation Association—advocates for federal funding and policy to safeguard the world’s largest freshwater ecosystem.

“In the early 2000s, activists, academics and philanthropists got together to talk about how to secure federal funding to restore and protect the Great Lakes,” says Laura Rubin, director of Healing Our Waters. “A lot of money was going to

the Chesapeake and Everglades, and the Great Lakes weren’t receiving any significant federal funds. We got feedback that there wasn’t a unified voice out of the region.”

In response, coalition members worked with scientists to develop a report titled Prescription for Great Lakes Ecosystem Protection and Restoration, which described the need for investment and outlined threats to the region—including contaminated sediment and loss of wetlands—as well as methods to combat them.

The federal government heeded the call to action, and in 2009 the Obama administration created the

from our donors | Lisa Somerson of Waxhaw, North Carolina WH Y I G IVE “I care about wildlife because I understand that there would be no humans without wildlife. I realize we are all dependent on each other in order to have a healthy, sustainable life.”

Interested in learning more about the impact you can have on wildlife? Please visit nwf.org/donate.

56 NATIONAL WILDLIFE . FALL 2025

Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, which allocated $475 million that year to the Environmental Protection Agency to address concerns in the report. Since then, the coalition has advocated (including at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., left) for continued annual investment—with a total of $6 billion allocated to date for habitat restoration, nutrient pollution reduction, reintroducing native species (lake sturgeon in Wisconsin, above) and more. The coalition also has been able to secure dedicated funding in the current federal budget, when many conservation programs are being cut.

Now with more than 200 member organizations, the coalition has a wide pool of national knowledge and local expertise to tap.

“Some groups lean more into wildlife and habitat; some lean into water affordability and stormwater issues.

We hold the place where everyone is working for Great Lakes protection,” Rubin says. “For us to have been around as long as we have has required that special sauce.” n

FROM TOP: WISCONSIN DEPARTMENT OF NATURAL RESOURCES; DAVID KEITH PHOTOGRAPHY

Back to School ACROSS 1. Way to be taken?

6. Wow feeling 9. Suffix that, when combined with “adventure,” names a Girl Scout cookie 12. Keith of country music (ironically enough) 13. How to Eat author Lawson 15. Eucalyptus lover 16. Very large saltwater clam, also the mascot of Evergreen State College 17. They’re wide on a zoot suit 19. Word part on an arcade alley 20. “No ___”: yes 22. Smell like a corpse flower 24. Lay an egg 25. Gastropod named for its color and shape, also the mascot of UC Santa Cruz 28. Portrayer of Madeline in “Big Little Lies” 29. Spanish wine region famed for tempranillos 33. Alternative name for a spiky Texas reptile (see p.

12), also the mascot of Texas Christian University 37. Roadie’s load 40. Suffix for astro 41. Jackson 5 member whose given name is Toriano 42. 46-Across, or any other in its taxonomic class 44. Othello’s lieutenant and imagined romantic rival 46. Chicken whose name might miscast its color and gender, also the mascot of the University of Delaware 48. Extemporize 51. Like the giant panda, vis-à-vis China 52. V creators 53. “___-haw!”

54. Champion’s number 55. Palliated

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DOWN 1. Puffin relative 2. Fraternal term of endearment 3. Button material 4. Bottle gourd, by another name 5. Sack opener?

6. You can acquaint yourself with them by asking, “What’s your sine?”

7. Night author Elie 8. Self-regard 9. Whale tail 10. Supposed gastric effect of stress 11. LeBron James, for one 14. NYT staff

49

50

41 44

47

32

36

40 43

31

27 29

38

11

24

23

26

33

10

19

28

42

9 14

22

21

25

37

8

18

17 20

7

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18. Period in the career of Taylor Swift 20. Lager with hipster cred, for short 21. “Call Me Maybe” singer Carly ___ Jepsen 23. Stateless Middle Easterner 26. Gas that glows redorange when electrified 27. December magazine staple 30. Camden Yards squad 31. Write on a receipt, maybe 32. “Long, Long ___”: tune in Suzuki books 34. Enter hurriedly

35. Close reading observation 36. Many “Doctor Who” characters, for short 37. Downton or Northanger 38. Eeyore’s creator 39. Someone not to swear by?

43. Actress Sandra born Alexandra Zuck 45. Thanksgiving herb 47. Aetna offering: abbr.

49. Way to end an advert?

50. Garden plot READY TO CHECK YOUR WORK? SCAN FOR ANSWERS OR VISIT NWF.ORG/ FALL2025 CROSSWORD

NWF.ORG/NW 57

footprint

What Remains ART BY C AN N U PA HAN S K A LUG E R

Cannupa Hanska Luger first installed the life-size ceramic and steel skeleton at the center of “(Be)Longing”—above, an artwork that also includes video—in a New Mexico riverbed for the 2019 exhibition Species in Peril Along the Rio Grande.

He wasn’t only concerned with bison. “There is a direct correlation between the annihilation of buffalo and the subjugation of my population and our near annihilation,” says Luger, who was born on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota; is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold; and is Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota. There were “tens of thousands 58 NATIONAL WILDLIFE . FALL 2025

of years of being in relationship with the landscape” before the forced removal of both buffalo and Indigenous ways of life, which would impact generations to come. Helping the public understand that big picture drives the New Mexicobased artist. “It’s not just a series of songs and dances,” he says of the role of Indigenous culture in today’s world. It’s guidance on how to take care of the world. “We’re willing to share that knowledge if it means we, collectively—human beings, plants, animals, environments—can thrive far into the future.” The artwork, he says, is “simply a conduit.” See more at cannupahanska.com. n –Jennifer Wehunt PHOTO: KATE RUSSELL PHOTOGRAPHY; “(BE)LONGING” IS PART OF THE PERMANENT COLLECTION AT THE HOOD MUSEUM OF ART, DARTMOUTH COLLEGE

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PHENOMENAL PHOTO CONTEST WINNERS BEYOND BIRDS: BIRD FLU’S TOLL ON WILDLIFE EATING INVASIVE SPECIES SCIENTIST SAFETY IN THE FIELD WHAT WHALES LEAVE BEHIND A white-footed mouse forages for alfalfa seed in subzero North Dakota.

TANGULA UNRUH