Leanna DeJong

And they’re off!! 800 seed bombs loaded up with native seeds coming to an abandoned lot near you 😘

Also important to note: these letters weren't just to friends/family, these people were esteemed colleagues:

-Fox, biologist
-Hooker, botanist
-Huxley, anthropologist
-Lyell, geologist
-Lubbock, polymath

Writing these things to the kind of people who'll one day have their own Wiki pages

🧵

Virtual fencing has enormous conservation potential by substituting for barbed wire to control livestock and free wildlife movements, but also:

⏱️ Help implement rotational grazing
🏞️ Exclude cattle from sensitive areas
🐺 Reduce conflict w/carnivores
🌾 Reduce invasives/fuels

Time to scale! 1/🧵

What's Killing These Oak Trees in the Midwest? Conservationists Believe Drifting Herbicides Are to Blame When Illinois landowners noticed tree deaths and diseases on their properties ramp up in 2017, they suspected industrial agriculture. A survey found herbicides in 90 percent of tree tissues

Paging @andrewlhipp.bsky.social >>>

What's Killing These Oak Trees in the Midwest? Conservationists Believe Drifting Herbicides Are to Blame share.google/5Wk2rDSo0uJP...

Linking Community‐Climate Disequilibrium to Ecosystem Function When turnover in species composition lags behind the pace of climate change, community-climate disequilibrium increases. We, for the first time, explicitly link this disequilibrium to ecosystem funct...

Species shift their ranges in response to climate change, but many can't keep up. The resulting "community-climate disequilibrium" can impair ecosystem function and cause counterintuitive dynamics, like short-term gain but long-term loss onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Ice luminaries on Lake Nokomis, which is on a flight path from MSP airport. #ICEout

The nature extinction crisis is mirrored by one in our own bodies. Both have huge implications for health Modern life is waging a war against ecosystems around us and inside us. Keeping our own microbes healthy is another reason to demand action to preserve the natural world

The nature extinction crisis is mirrored by one in our own bodies. Both have huge implications for health

Evidence-based urban greening: a missing piece in biodiversity conservation With calls for increased greenery in cities to safeguard biodiversity and its associated benefits to humans, urban vegetation must be managed carefully and efficiently. It is time to change paths from current spurious attempts to manufacture resilience and instead usher in evidence-based urban greening to secure ecosystems for the future.

Online now: Evidence-based urban greening: a missing piece in biodiversity conservation

Realizing multispecies justice through a capability approach to promote nature-based solutions - npj Urban Sustainability npj Urban Sustainability - Realizing multispecies justice through a capability approach to promote nature-based solutions

🌱🌱🌱 New Publication 🌱🌱🌱

I'm proud to be a co-author on a paper exploring how multispecies justice can be meaningfully integrated into nature-based solutions in cities.

www.nature.com/articles/s42...

All that glitters – Review of solar facility impacts on fauna Utility-scale solar facilities (‘solar farms’/‘solar parks’) represent vast altered landscapes – currently covering ∼0.025 % of the earth's land surfa…

All that glitters – Review of solar facility impacts on fauna

Exclusive: NSF faces radical shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions Changes seen as a response to presidential directives on what research to fund

Exclusive: National Science Foundation staff were told today that the agency’s 37 divisions—across all eight directorates—are being abolished and the number of programs within those divisions will be drastically reduced.

Illustration of blue-green infrastructure to enhance urban biodiversity.

April issue: Review led by Ingo Kowarik that summarises the benefits of urban biodiversity for people and nature, and explores how sustainable, biodiverse urban areas can be developed. 🧪🌎
Web link: go.nature.com/4l4wcQs
Readcube: rdcu.be/eh0wE

Our new study (Chaplin-Kramer et al., 2025) found wildlife play critical roles in nature’s benefits to people. Wildlife’s contributions to people (WCP) support nature’s contributions to people (NCP) through actions like predation, herbivory, scavenging, and ecosystem engineering. Wild animals directly and indirectly support services such as habitat creation, climate regulation, pollination, food production, and cultural identity. Graphic designed by Sylvia Heredia.

Our new study* finds wildlife support 2/3 of nature's contributions to people, from hunting and fishing to art and music to birds eating crop pests. #Biodiversity & #conservation must include animals!

Read more: wecanfixit.substack.com/p/localize

* @beckyck.bsky.social, @natrevbiodiv.bsky.social

Reassessing niche partitioning in MacArthur’s warblers: foraging behaviour, morphology and diet differentiation in a phylogenetic context | Biology Letters Owing in large part to Robert MacArthur’s classic research, wood warblers in the family Parulidae are textbook exemplars of species competition and niche partitioning. Conventional wisdom suggests tha...

A lot of blood sweat and tears put into this one: we revisit Robert MacArthur's classic warbler study—with @eliotmiller.bsky.social and colleagues—using, among other techniques, fecal metabarcoding.
🧪🦉
📸 Ronnie d'Entremont
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
@psubiodept.bsky.social

Rescinding the Definition of “Harm” Under the Endangered Species Act The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) (collectively referred to as the Services or we) are proposing to rescind the regulatory definition of "harm" ...

Please comment during the 30 day public comment period for Trumps proposal to chang the definition of 'harm' in the endangered species act to no longer protect habitat, which means no functional protection at all. How would you survive with a home or food? www.federalregister.gov/documents/20...

‘De-extinction’ of dire wolves promotes false hope: technology can’t undo extinction Claims of ‘bringing back’ any species take away focus from proven solutions that can actually fix the extinction crisis.

‘De-extinction’ of dire wolves promotes false hope: technology can’t undo extinction
theconversation.com/de-extinctio...

Promoting urban biodiversity for the benefit of people and nature - Nature Reviews Biodiversity Urban biodiversity underpins ecosystem services in cities, but faces multiple pressures from human activities, declining engagement of urban residents with nature, and inadequate governance systems. T...

New Review out this week:
Promoting urban biodiversity for the benefit of people and nature
go.nature.com/4l4wcQs 🌎🧪

Happy to report that less than 24 hours after Sarah put one of these near my house all of the seed packets were taken (now replenished!). And while sitting outside for 20 min drinking my morning coffee at least 5 people stopped to look at it and talk about how cool it is!

Long-term management is required for the recovery of pollination networks and function in restored grasslands 🌱🌏

Grassland management, including mowing, should be maintained for a certain period that exceeds at least 75 years 📈🧪

🔗 doi.org/10.1111/1365...

Forests, carbon, and climate change: Why our obsession with monetizing forest carbon may be counter productive Storing carbon in forest ecosystems is commonly promoted as a nature-based solution to climate change in which increases in forest carbon storage are …

Important new paper out in FEM out about the limitations of carbon offsets as nature-based solutions

🌎🧪

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Invisible losses: thousands of plant species are missing from places they could thrive – and humans are the reason Many native plants are missing from habitats where they should thrive – even in wilder areas. Why? Human actions such as logging, poaching and setting fires.

Pollution, climate change, unsustainable resource use, and land conversion are driving the biodiversity crisis—even in areas with little human impact. Remote ecosystems have just 33% of viable plant species, showing how far-reaching our effects on the biosphere are, says @julianschrader.bsky.social

The 2025 U.S. #StateOfTheBirds report was released today. The report finds that birds continue to decline unabated across most habitats—habitats that are also vital to human well-being.
Read the report & take action! www.stateofthebirds.org/2025/
#bringbirdsback

Rapid butterfly declines across the United States during the 21st century Numerous declines have been documented across insect groups, and the potential consequences of insect losses are dire. Butterflies are the most surveyed insect taxa, yet analyses have been limited in ...

Our paper is out, and it is distressing.

Rapid butterfly declines across the United States during the 21st century | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

A vintage photo from the National Archives shows smog hanging over the New York skyline

A vintage photo from the National Archives shows damaged oil drums piled high at an Exxon refinery.

A vintage photo from the National Archives shows cars driving down a road as smoke spews from factories in the distance and air pollution hangs over everything.

A vintage photo from the National Archives shows smog in Los Angeles taken from a high vantage point.

Just thinking about what the US looked like before the EPA existed

High prevalence of veterinary drugs in bird's nests The environmental impact of insecticides used as ectoparasitic treatments for companion animals is not well understood, since they are not subject to …

New paper by @davegoulson.bsky.social & team

For those with pets that use pesticides every month to ensure that there ‘aren’t no fleas’, take a pause. We are doing a lot of harm to our garden communities..

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

In Research, Ignoring Female Birds Harms Scientific Understanding A new study shows that ecological research often ignores or excludes data on female birds and behavior, resulting in erroneous assumptions on conservation.

The first paper of your PhD is always so exciting! 🤩 An all-#Galbatross effort, "A focus on females can improve science and conservation!" See press release (www.audubon.org/news/researc...) and the study here: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...! #FemaleBirds #FemaleBirdDay

Biodiversity is not a luxury: Unpacking wealth and power to accommodate the complexity of urban biodiversity A positive correlation between wealth and biodiversity within cities is a commonly documented phenomenon in urban ecology that has come to be labeled as the “luxury effect.” We contend that both this...

1. Thrilled to share a new paper from my group out this week in Ecosphere where we critique the much researched “luxury effect” in urban ecology and offer a power-based socioecological framework to complicate our understanding of how wealth may or may not influence biodiversity. #oa
🧵:

Variation in flower morphology associated with higher bee diversity in urban green spaces Urbanization is a leading threat to biodiversity, but scientifically informed management of urban ecosystems can mitigate negative impacts. For wild bees, which are declining worldwide, careful consi...

We find that alongside floral abundance (plant those nectar-producing flowers, and lots of them!), diversity in floral morphology (specifically, corolla length) is further associated with a significant increase in wild bee diversity. esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...