Scientists have developed a new portable environmental DNA test that can detect one of the most elusive and rare turtle species in the world. Scientists only know of two Swinhoe’s softshell turtle (Rafetus swinhoei) left in the world—one in a zoo in China and another in a lake in Vietnam. The male in captivity is a century old, while the sex of the other is unknown. In order to breed these turtles in captivity and potentially save the species, scientists need to find them—if they exist, that is. As described in a study published recently in Environmental DNA, researchers successfully detected the species in the wild, and are now using this portable eDNA test to search for additional individuals.
The Wildlife Society’s flagship leadership training program, the Leadership Institute, is now accepting applications for its class of 2025. The deadline to submit applications is Friday, March 14, by 11:59 p.m. ET.
Leadership Institute participants will develop essential leadership skills and expand their capacity in current and future roles in the wildlife profession. Participants will enhance their skills to lead both as an individual and as part of a team. They will also have opportunities to build community and identify meaningful support systems, as well as to learn more about TWS and leadership within the conservation field.
Leadership Institute participants work on a variety of distance-learning and hands-on projects, which include analyzing leadership themes and concepts, engaging in mentoring opportunities and developing a greater understanding of how to apply their personal leadership skills to their vision for the conservation field.
The six-month program begins in May and concludes in October at The Wildlife Society’s Annual Conference in Edmonton, Alberta. Participants will receive complimentary registration and a travel grant to attend the conference (attendance for the entire conference is required). Participants can expect to dedicate approximately two to four hours a week from May to October to the program to complete reading material, participate in calls and webinars and work on individual and group assignments.
The Leadership Institute is for early-career professionals who are two to three years in the profession. Participants must be employed in the wildlife profession, whether that is seasonal, part-time or full-time, or they can be between professional positions. Strong applicants with one to five years of professional experience will be considered but should explain in their application why they are a strong candidate even if they are outside of the two to three year range. This program is not appropriate for full-time undergraduate or graduate students. Membership in TWS is not required to participate in the Leadership Institute. The Leadership Institute Committee will review all applications. The committee strives to create pathways to help enhance the diversity, capacity and efficacy of current and future leaders of TWS and the wildlife profession.
A lack of natural water sources as a result of climate change may be driving an endangered subspecies of white-tailed deer found only in the Florida Keys toward domestication.
If wildlife managers don’t stop residents from providing water to deer—and if they fail to expand artificial water sources—the Key deer (Odocoileus virginianus clavium) could become extirpated from their only natural habitat in the Florida Keys.
“It’s important to characterize the true state of affairs as far as the state of domestication,” said Jan Svejkovsky, president of the Ocean Imaging Corporation, a consulting business that conducts various types of environmental projects.
Credit: Valerie Preziosi
Key deer, the smallest deer species native to North America, primarily feed on red mangroves that grow in the Keys. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service considers the ungulates endangered due to the loss of habitat from development, domestication from humans feeding them, and changes to the fire regime in the area.
Svejkovsky has been interested in conserving these deer since just after Hurricane Irma struck southern Florida in September 2017. He and his wife, Valerie Preziosi, started a nonprofit called Save Our Key Deer, Inc., after hearing that wildlife rehabilitation centers in the area didn’t focus on this species.
Credit: Valerie Preziosi
How do Key deer find water?
In examining the ecology of the species, Svejkovsky and other volunteers with the foundation quickly realized that one of the main obstacles for recovery may be the availability of natural drinking water.
Decades earlier, a graduate student had mapped 294 watering holes in the Keys. But a closer examination revealed that many of these either dried up for most of the year, like the one pictured above, or became too salty to drink from. Further, hurricanes like Irma can lead to storm surge and sea level rise that can increase the salinity of freshwater sources.
In a study published in the Journal for Nature Conservation, Svejkovsky and his colleagues took a closer look at these water sources to determine how deer were subsisting in the Keys.
Credit: Valerie Preziosi
The team began their research by testing and monitoring about 80 drinking holes from those originally mapped in the 1990s and found that many of them dried up for at least part of the year. Only a fraction of them served as year-round water sources, which came from either rainwater or underground freshwater lenses. The latter occurs when rainwater seeps through porous rock and forms a convex-shaped layer of fresh groundwater that floats above the denser saltwater below.
Credit: Valerie Preziosi
The holes filled with rainwater in particular—like the one pictured above—often dry up or become more saline in the less rainy seasons.
Overall, the team’s surveys revealed that large parts of Key deer habitat lacked natural drinking water sources. But since there were still deer in many of these areas, the researchers wondered how they were surviving.
Do people feed Key deer?
Residents in the Keys sometimes illegally feed deer. In fact, in some areas, the deer have become so domesticated that they allow people to touch them or hand-feed them. In one case, a Florida man faced charges for luring deer into his house with food, according to a local news broadcast.
Credit: Valerie Preziosi
In other cases, deer have become urbanized but not quite domesticated, where they’re invited into someone’s home. They may live largely off of food and water resources that humans provide.
“Due to the scarcity of the water resources, it’s silly to pretend that these are wild animals that do their own thing in the wild,” Svejkovsky said.
In fact, deer may be subsisting solely on natural freshwater sources only on a few smaller islands where there aren’t many people.
Credit: Valerie Preziosi
Svejkovsky fears that climate change and the resulting sea level rise and storm surges, which can make freshwater sources saltier, will only make matters worse. As a result, instead of residents providing freshwater directly to deer, he thinks a program that was started in the mid-2000s and subsequently abandoned should be readopted.
Back then, wildlife authorities enhanced some natural ponds in the Keys by digging out accumulated mud, sand and debris and expanding them. “That, in itself, could probably take care of some of these areas that experience a complete lack of drinking water in some seasons,” Svejkovsky said.
If not, he fears that subspecies may become extirpated from some of the Keys and totally domesticated in others.
This photo essay is part of an occasional series from The Wildlife Society featuring photos and video images of wildlife taken with camera traps and other equipment. Check out other entries in the series here. If you’re working on an interesting camera trap research project or one that has a series of good photos you’d like to share, email Josh at jlearn@wildlife.org.
The same socioeconomic pressures that shape human communities can trickle down to urban wildlife, outweighing natural influences. Although human presence is correlated with lower survivorship in other species, coyote (Canis latrans) lifespans were longer in areas with greater human population. Additionally, coyotes in lower-income neighborhoods were 1.5 times more likely to reach two years of age than coyotes in high-income neighborhoods. Researchers speculate that more densely populated areas provide ample resources like food and shelter to Chicago’s coyotes, both of which are crucial for the animals to weather the city’s harsh winters. Higher-income neighborhoods, where urban parks and golf courses are common features, may have a greater density of coyotes—but also greater competition, lowering overall survivorship. “It could speak to how adaptable they are that they might prefer natural habitat, but at least in terms of survival, they can do just as well in more urbanized areas,” said Emily Zepeda, the study’s first author and a postdoctoral researcher at The Ohio State University’s School of the Environment and Natural Resources.
Analysis of citizen science bird reports reveals that biologists who look at the big picture may miss the trees by focusing too much on the forest.
To conserve birds throughout North America in the face of climate and land use change, researchers need to know where they occur. Scientists commonly do this using species distribution models. By working at high resolution, bird researchers may find hidden hot spots of diversity that they might have missed otherwise.
“The species ranges really shrunk a lot when the models used coarse information about habitat features like land cover type and climate, just because they were missing all of these small habitat patches,” said Jeremy Cohen, a research scientist at Yale University. “When you add them all up, you can actually end up missing a quarter of the distribution.”
Modeling relationships between a species and its habitat on a fine scale—like a square kilometer—is often quite taxing on computer processing, with over 25 million square kilometers of land in North America. As a result, researchers often fit distribution models on a much coarser scale. Cohen and his colleagues wondered if researchers summarizing habitats at coarse scales may be leaving out important information.
Cohen led a study published in Global Ecology and Biogeography using citizen science data from eBird, a platform run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology where users submit bird sightings, to determine how coarser scale distribution models might be biasing our picture of North American bird biodiversity.
The team used machine learning—a form of AI—to look at how species occurrence and absence related to habitat features such as climate, elevation and land cover type summarized at grid cells of 1, 3, 5, 10 and 50 kilometers. They repeated this for 572 bird species native to the U.S. and Canada. Then, they checked how well the models predicted biodiversity by generating a list of over 300 well-surveyed, evenly spaced sites in North America and comparing the presence or absence of species at these sites versus what their model suggested using different resolutions.
“Basically, we’re asking, ‘How well does the total number of species predicted by the models match up against the actual species recorded?’” he said. “What percent of the species that were estimated to be there were actually there?”
Indigo buntings occur across contiguous eastern U.S. forests and are less likely to have small habitat patches missed by coarse-grain models. Credit: Jeremy Cohen
The team found that the coarser resolution models missed a lot of species that showed up at finer scale models that paid more attention to smaller habitat patches. For example, sedge wrens (Cistothorus stellaris), which breed in the central U.S. and Canadian grasslands, had smaller range size predictions when researchers used coarse-grain models because their habitat is patchy. Lesser goldfinches (Spinus psaltria), which live in woody and scrubby patches surrounded by deserts, also had much smaller ranges predicted when coarse-grain models were used.
The researchers also looked at seasonal biases by repeating the study with summer and winter distributions of species. “We did that because in the summer, birds are really picky about the habitat that they choose for breeding, but they are less picky in winter,” Cohen said. When comparing models across seasons, they found that the coarse-scale models were especially likely to miss species in the warmer months.
Finally, Cohen and his colleagues found that when looking at individual species, coarse-scale models did a poor job detecting species that had small ranges or were specialized to specific types of habitat, again missing important habitat patches. These species also happen to have the greatest conservation concern in North America.
Taken together, these small patches made a difference—you might miss up to a quarter of a species’ range by sticking to these coarse-scale methods, Cohen said. “By relying on coarse-scale models, managers could be missing a number of species that need to be considered for conservation in a given region,” he said.
Cohen said this research was borne from the 30 by 30 initiative to conserve 30% of land and water by 2030 in North America. “We’ve developed these really high-resolution maps that are really fine-grain, so you can see at local scales where biodiversity is high and then figure out which land is the most suitable for conservation,” he said.
Olivia Milloway has joined The Wildlife Society’s communications team as a staff writer.
In Milloway’s new role, she will write articles for www.wildlife.org and The Wildlife Professional. She will focus on sharing TWS Sections, Chapters and member news as well as the Society’s policy work.
Milloway spent the past few years working at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama City, where she was both a Fulbright Student Grantee studying the invasive Atlantic needlefish in the Panama Canal and a science writer.
Before living in Panama, she lived and worked at Schoodic Institute at Acadia National Park, where she created and produced season one of Acadia’s official narrative science podcast, Sea to Trees. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Environmental Science and Biology from Emory University, where she co-founded Emory’s student chapter of the Wildlife Disease Association. For her honors thesis, she studied chytrid fungus in invasive American bullfrogs in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Originally from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Milloway is currently based in Brooklyn, New York. She is enjoying getting to know the urban wildlife in parks around her neighborhood.
A final Bureau of Land Management plan for utility-scale solar development will designate almost 32 million acres of public lands across 11 western states as priority areas for utility-scale solar development while excluding some areas critical to wildlife
Updates to the 2012 Western Solar Plan were initiated in response to Executive Order 14008 (“Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad) and the Energy Act of 2020, which emphasized the need for enhanced renewable energy infrastructure to combat the global climate crisis. Originally limited to BLM lands in six states—Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah—the final plan includes additional lands in Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington and Wyoming.
The process of soliciting public input on the plan began with a scoping period in late 2022. TWS collaborated with other organizations to produce detailed recommendations for the eventual updates to the plan, emphasizing the need to site projects in a way that limits their impacts on fish, wildlife and their habitats. When the BLM released the draft plan for public comment in early 2025, TWS collaborated with several chapters, sections and working groups to produce comments highlighting our members’ expertise and urging the BLM to consider the needs of wildlife in the final plan.
The final plan makes more than 31 million acres of public lands across the 11 states included in the planning area available for application for solar development, although the agency estimates only 700,000 of those acres are likely to be developed by 2045.
TWS and other organizations recommended a more conservative alternative during the review of the draft plan, which would have made approximately 8 million acres available for development while still meeting clean energy demands. The final plan prioritizes project applications within 15 miles of existing or proposed transmission lines and at a greater distance on previously disturbed lands. It also excludes development in areas where there is a high likelihood of conflict with resources like sensitive wildlife and critical wildlife habitats.
TWS CEO Ed Arnett will join 14 other members and 11 alternate members to form a committee that will vote on decisions concerning the implementation of the agency’s Public Lands Rule.
The Public Lands Rule—also known as the Conservation and Landscape Health Rule—makes public land conservation a top priority for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). The rule, which the BLM has enacted since June 2024, puts conservation on equal footing with other types of land usage, like livestock grazing, oil and gas drilling, mining on BLM lands and recreation.
Participants of the National Advisory Committee for Implementation of the BLM Public Lands Rule will offer feedback and recommendations for the Secretary of the Interior and the BLM director about the execution of the Public Lands Rule as well as public outreach and engagement associated with it.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland selected Arnett as part of the committee to represent the science community. Other members will represent Tribal governments, the public at large, nongovernmental organizations, energy or mineral development, federal grazing permit holders and commercial recreation activities. “Committee members are citizens from diverse backgrounds who share an interest in public lands,” the BLM said in a press release.
According to the BLM, the rule will help the agency protect the most intact and functional landscapes, restore degraded habitat, and use science, data and Indigenous knowledge as the foundation for management decisions.
The committee members will serve two-year terms. Its inaugural meeting will occur virtually on Feb. 19, 2025.
Whether the Public Lands Rule—and the committee—continues after President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration is uncertain. Trump plans to add more oil and gas leasing and mining activity on federal lands during his term and could potentially abandon the rule.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service rejected petitions to delist grizzly bears in Wyoming and Montana. The two states had proposed that grizzly bears (Ursus arctos horribilis) be considered a distinct population segment in places where population numbers were relatively stable. But after a federal judge ordered the Service to come to a listing decision for the bears before the upcoming presidential inauguration, the agency upheld the species’ threatened status and declined to consider bears in Montana and Wyoming as a distinct population segment from other surrounding states. “After a thorough review of the best scientific and commercial data available, the Service found grizzly bear populations in those two ecosystems do not, on their own, represent valid DPSs,” the Service announced in a press release.
The recent natural disasters have not spared the National Wildlife Refuge System (NWRS). From hurricanes like Helene and Milton to severe winter storms in California and Nevada, the NWRS has accrued hundreds of millions of dollars in damages to both built infrastructure and wildlife habitat in recent years. Thirty-seven separate disasters have impacted approximately 90 refuges in 2023 and 2024 alone.
In December 2024, TWS joined with the National Wildlife Refuge System and other organizations to urge leaders in Congress to address damages to the NWRS resulting from natural disasters by appropriating funds for end-of-year disaster relief. The request included $565.7 million for the NWRS to cover damages and an additional $289.9 million to invest in proactive management toward nature-based solutions (e.g. management of coastal marshes to create storm surge buffers during hurricanes).
The Continuing Resolution passed on Dec. 21, 2024, included supplemental disaster relief funding for a number of U.S. federal programs. Congress appropriated $500 million for the NWRS, falling just short of the request that TWS supported. Notably, Congress did not appropriate funds for resiliency efforts and nature-based solutions.
The NWRS will use the $500 million for activities including debris removal, habitat rehabilitation, invasive species management and repairs to facilities, roads and bridges. The NWRS will need continued support via congressional funding to address disaster impacts and other management necessities in the future.
For more on the costs of recent natural disasters across the NWRS, see this fact sheet.
