Science-Driven Stewardship of America's Natural World
Old growth is celebrated as a biodiversity stronghold and carbon vault, but the term remains scientifically slippery and politically charged. As federal protections move from announcement to implementation in 2026, the stakes of defining—and mapping—old growth have never been higher.
Nov 12, 2026
From prairie rebuilds to post-fire reseeding, restoration projects are increasingly limited by a shortage of locally adapted native seed. The gap is not just logistical—it is genetic, economic, and political, and closing it will require treating seed as public infrastructure.
Nov 12, 2026
White-tailed deer are a conservation success story, but in many regions their abundance has far outstripped historical norms. The science shows mounting costs for forest understories, songbirds, and even carbon storage—and argues that inaction is its own management choice.
Nov 12, 2026
From Downeast Maine to the Texas Gulf, saltwater intrusion is converting upland woodlands into marsh and open water. These seven ghost forests show how a slow-motion ecological transition is outpacing the policies meant to track and manage it.
Nov 08, 2026
Lichens are among the most sensitive instruments we have for detecting nitrogen and sulfur pollution and climate stress. Yet state forest plans and air-quality programs still treat them as a niche curiosity rather than a routine diagnostic tool.
Nov 08, 2026
Charcoal and other pyrogenic carbon can persist in forest soils for centuries, shaping water movement, nutrient cycling, and carbon accounting long after the flames are out. As wildfire and prescribed fire policies evolve in 2026, this hidden legacy deserves a central place in the debate.
Nov 08, 2026
Vernal pools—those shallow, seasonally flooded depressions scattered across America's forests and farmland margins—are disappearing faster than conservation policy can track. The amphibians that depend on them are collapsing in kind, and scientists argue that both losses represent an early warning signal about hydrological instability that demands urgent policy attention.
Sep 20, 2026
Decades of soil carbon measurement have systematically overlooked one of the most consequential biological forces operating beneath our feet. New mycorrhizal research is revealing that the carbon stored and cycled by fungal networks dwarfs previous estimates—and that carbon credit frameworks built on flawed accounting may be doing more harm than good.
Sep 20, 2026
Bark beetle outbreaks have consumed tens of millions of acres of western American forest over the past two decades, prompting urgent calls for aggressive management intervention. But a growing body of ecological research suggests that framing beetles as enemies of forest health may fundamentally misread their ecological function—and that suppression strategies could be undermining the very resilience they claim to protect.
Sep 20, 2026
Anthropogenic noise from highways, industrial operations, and urban sprawl is fundamentally altering the acoustic environments that wildlife depend on for survival. Emerging research in acoustic ecology reveals that sound pollution disrupts breeding signals, predator-prey dynamics, and even plant reproduction across forests, grasslands, and wetlands. Scientists are now pressing for noise-based conservation frameworks that treat acoustic habitat as a measurable, protectable resource.
Sep 16, 2026
Native earthworm communities are among the most consequential and least recognized architects of forest soil structure, carbon storage, and nutrient dynamics in North American ecosystems. But a wave of invasive earthworm species—including the now-notorious jumping worms—is rapidly displacing these native communities and restructuring forest soils in ways that threaten long-term ecosystem resilience. Scientists are beginning to map the damage and identify management pathways, but policy framework
Sep 16, 2026
Across savannas, grasslands, and native shrub communities from the Mid-Atlantic to the Pacific Coast, non-native woody species are displacing the plant assemblages that define these ecosystems and support their associated wildlife. The ecological consequences extend far beyond aesthetics, altering fire regimes, soil chemistry, and the habitat structure that native fauna require. A growing body of restoration science is demonstrating that recovery is achievable—but only through interventions that
Sep 16, 2026
The replacement of natural stream crossings with culverts has been framed almost exclusively as a fish migration problem—one amenable to engineering fixes and incremental upgrades. That framing, however well-intentioned, systematically underestimates the hydraulic, thermal, and sediment transport consequences of culvert installation, and helps explain why restoration investments focused solely on fish passage are failing to reverse watershed degradation. The problem is not a culvert. The problem
Sep 01, 2026
Prairie dogs, ground squirrels, and their burrowing kin have spent millennia reshaping the physical architecture of grassland soils—enhancing water infiltration, nutrient cycling, and ecosystem productivity in ways that surface-level ecology long failed to measure. Decades of eradication programs have quietly dismantled this underground infrastructure, leaving degraded soils and depleted watersheds in their wake. Emerging research is now quantifying what was lost, and the findings carry urgent i
Sep 01, 2026
The steady disappearance of insect-eating birds from North American forests is typically framed as a biodiversity story—a troubling but distant loss of species richness. What that framing obscures is a more immediate and mechanistically specific crisis: the unraveling of trophic relationships that regulate herbivory, redistribute nutrients, and ultimately shape the carbon-storing capacity of forest soils. New synthesis research is making the case that bird conservation is, at its core, a forest
Sep 01, 2026
America's 4-plus million miles of roadsides represent one of the largest undermanaged land networks in the country—a linear mosaic of edge habitat that, with targeted intervention, could serve as meaningful connective tissue for species navigating an increasingly fragmented landscape. Yet a combination of maintenance inertia, liability frameworks, and institutional conservatism has kept most of this land in a state of ecological underperformance. A growing number of states and municipalities are
Aug 27, 2026
Emerging research is revealing that native ant colonies are among the most consequential yet least recognized engineers of terrestrial soil systems, fundamentally altering porosity, water dynamics, and microbial communities at scales that measurably affect carbon cycling. Despite mounting evidence of their ecological significance, ants remain conspicuously absent from soil health policy frameworks and land management guidelines. Scientists are now asking whether this oversight is costing us a cr
Aug 27, 2026
Across North America, the biological calendars that govern when plants flower, insects emerge, and migratory species arrive are shifting at unequal rates under climate pressure—creating dangerous temporal gaps in relationships that evolved over millennia. Scientists call this phenomenon phenological mismatch, and its consequences for biodiversity, food web stability, and forest regeneration are becoming measurable and alarming. Without deliberate management intervention, these desynchronized sys
Aug 27, 2026
Termites occupy a singular position in the American cultural imagination—synonymous with destruction, liability, and unwanted expense. Yet a growing body of ecological research is dismantling that narrow characterization, revealing native termite species as sophisticated engineers of soil structure, nutrient flow, and carbon dynamics across southern forests, arid grasslands, and subtropical savannas. The policy implications are significant and largely unaddressed.
Jul 17, 2026
Beneath every forest, grassland, and wetland in America lies a microbial civilization of staggering complexity—one that governs nutrient cycling, carbon storage, and plant health in ways science is only beginning to decode. Industrial land management practices are quietly dismantling these invisible networks, often before researchers can even characterize them. A growing body of research now demands that soil microbial ecology be placed at the center of how the United States designs, funds, and
Jul 17, 2026