Ecological Intelligence
Ecological evidence.
Independent perspective.
Explore Wild Lands ↗
Ecology, evidence and perspective.
Today’s evidence repeatedly separates headline state variables—richness, productivity, structure and temperature—from composition, resilience, process and implementation capacity.
Interviews across nine projects show that permitting, utilities, site constraints and long-term stewardship funding can be as decisive as ecological design.
A validated urban microclimate model found albedo-only cooling worsened daytime comfort through radiant heat, while adding vegetation produced much larger comfort gains.
Tree-classification experiments found generative images useful as supplements to small training sets, while replacing real images reduced performance.
A preprint using 8,940 hours of audio found BirdNET+ could detect threatened birds missed by conventional surveys, but only with substantial expert validation.
A 1981–2024 analysis argues that commonly used Penman-type drought metrics can substantially overstate the rate at which drought is worsening.
A new review identifies 123 studies since 2005 but finds research heavily concentrated in northern Australia while major range-wide knowledge gaps persist.
Fine-scale topography can improve access to cooler microsites, yet more than 30% of a modeled alpine landscape remained disconnected under strong warming.
A 34-country study links proximity to fires with voting, local-government contact and community action rather than stronger environmental concern.
Metagenomes from 15-metre cores show active, frozen-fringe and frozen layers responding differently to degradation.
Historical ecology of the Swan Islands links deforestation, invasive species, exploitation and storms to long-term terrestrial and reef change.
Hamericho Mountain Forest supported distinct butterfly assemblages across forest, shrubland and grassland, with important design limits.
A survey in Madhupur Sal Forest found ecological and management knowledge concentrated among older Indigenous respondents.
Nearly 88% of China’s forest area lies within one kilometre of an edge, with anthropogenic edges producing stronger effects on productivity and stability.
More than 13,000 plots show increasing dominance of arbuscular-mycorrhizal trees, with potential consequences for soil nitrogen retention.
A 20-year resurvey found a 28% rise in local bird richness driven mainly by forest species and generalists.
Models informed by more than 20,000 monitoring sites project continued average declines through 2050 even under scenarios incorporating major European conservation policies.
A new scientific comment argues that evidence does not support treating cattle as a conservation ally or fire substitute in native Cerrado savannas.
Global remote sensing shows rising atmospheric aridity can increase or maintain productivity even as resilience erodes, especially in structurally simplified forests.
A synthesis across 4,748 sites finds formerly common species declining more strongly than rare species in terrestrial and marine assemblages, exposing a blind spot in aggregate richness metrics.
Across 1,039 cities, both the amount and quality of green space were associated with lower bird heat exposure, while higher-quality green space also tracked greater bird diversity.
Across 32 Connecticut ponds, urbanicity shifted amphibian and macroinvertebrate community composition but provided little evidence of a simple richness decline.
BirdLife’s 2026 flagship assessment focuses on migratory species and the connected flyways that expose them to threats across breeding, non-breeding and stopover areas.
An assessment of 85 saline lakes finds threatened terrestrial species, high ecosystem-level diversity and important services that conventional freshwater metrics can overlook.