image: A study in Ecology finds that beetles’ burrows can make wood more flammable.
Credit: Shudong Zhang, from Zhang et al., 2025
The Ecological Society of America (ESA) presents a roundup of six research articles recently published across its six esteemed journals. Widely recognized for fostering innovation and advancing ecological knowledge, ESA’s journals consistently feature illuminating and impactful studies. This compilation of papers explores potential limitations of seed mixes for prairie restoration, the response of breeding grouse to wind turbines, the success of panda conservation efforts, how beetles make wood more burnable, the impact of nighttime illumination on animals and why two diving ducks differ in abundance.
From Ecological Applications:
Sowing the seeds of prairie restoration
Author contact: Riley B. Pizza (pizzaril@msu.edu)
Restoring prairie ecosystems entails planting a variety of grasses and wildflowers, but scattering a wide assortment of seeds isn’t always wise, according to a new study. Most restoration projects aim for a diverse mixture of plants, but face challenges like hungry mice that gobble up seeds or so-called “edge effects” — the tendency of weedy unwanted plants to move in from the site’s borders. Under real-world conditions, is it better to reach for a seed mix with many species or a mix sourced from many places (which means the plants vary in their genetic makeup, possibly giving them a boost)? To find out, the research team planted different seed mixes across a dozen Michigan fields and tracked the sown seeds’ fate. They found that edge effects and herbivores like mice and deer reduced the number of desirable prairie species — but mainly in study plots sown with fewer species to begin with. Surprisingly, study plots with seeds from many places were harder hit by herbivores than plots with single-origin seeds, suggesting that the particular make-up of the seed mix mattered more than the seeds’ origins per se. The findings highlight how the optimal seed mix will depend on a site’s conditions, and argue against a one-size-fits-all approach to prairie restoration.
Read the article: Relative effects of seed mix design, consumer pressure, and edge proximity on community structure in restored prairies
From Ecosphere:
Grousing about wind energy
Author contact: Carly S. Kelly (ckelly@west-inc.com)
An increasingly common sight across the U.S. Great Plains, wind turbines provide low-carbon power but risk displacing grassland wildlife. To understand wind energy’s impacts, a research team studying the plains sharp-tailed grouse (the most widespread subspecies of sharp-tailed grouse, a chickenlike gamebird) tracked over 100 females and their nests across northeastern South Dakota. They found that while the female grouse didn’t seem to mind wind turbines and related infrastructure when choosing locations for their nests, they avoided areas of dense wind infrastructure during the rest of the breeding season. Although turbines had no effect on the birds’ reproductive success or survival, the authors propose that locating wind energy installations a few kilometers from grouse breeding habitat may nonetheless minimize potential negative impacts.
Read the article: Resource selection and survival of plains sharp-tailed grouse at a wind energy facility
From Ecology:
Giant pandas prospering in protected areas
Author contact: Zejun Zhang (zhangzj@ioz.ac.cn)
Long a poster child of global conservation, giant pandas in the wild are showing signs of improving their lot, at least within protected areas. Using survey data reaching back to the 1980’s, a new study shows that throughout China’s Sichuan Province pandas are starting to occupy new areas, and are now less likely to disappear locally than they once were. But the good news comes with a catch: populations outside of protected areas, in poor-quality habitat or at low numbers remain at high risk. This study underscores the importance of protected lands for giant pandas, and provides additional insight into the factors that determine species recovery and expansion — or extinction.
Read the article: Ecological and anthropogenic drivers of local extinction and colonization of giant pandas over the past 30 years
Beetles increase carbon released by wildfires
Author contact: Shudong Zhang (zhangshudong1120@163.com)
Take a walk through the woods and you might notice that many of the rotting logs, fallen branches and other “tree debris” littering the forest floor are riddled with small holes. Excavated by wood-boring beetles, these tunnels create conditions that scientists say could make deadwood more flammable — and wildfires bigger. Burn experiments revealed that wood altered by beetle activity was not only more combustible, but it also burned longer, most likely because tunnels expose more wood surface area and promote oxygen flow. In turn, the longer the wood smolders, the more carbon is released, suggesting that fire-related carbon emissions may be markedly higher in beetle-infested forests. The results point to the urgent need to improve understanding of interactions between fire and wood-boring insects and how they affect carbon dynamics in the world’s forests.
Read the article: Do wood-boring beetles influence the flammability of deadwood?
From Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment:
Seeing the light about the dark of night
Author contact: Brett M. Seymoure (brett.seymoure@gmail.com)
Streetlights, buildings, cars and other human light sources are making nighttime less dark, posing a growing threat to species dependent on low-light conditions — and a nightmare for conservation. Increasing light pollution interferes with natural nighttime cues that animals rely on for navigation, mating and numerous other biological processes critical for survival and reproduction. Using a world atlas of artificial night sky brightness and a thorough search of the scientific literature, a new study set out to document how widespread artificial light’s impacts are, across organisms and the globe. During the new moon (the darkest phase of the lunar cycle), the researchers estimated that artificial light emitted by humans doubled normal nighttime brightness over nearly a quarter of the Earth’s total land surface, and as much as three-quarters of the world’s protected areas. The findings shine a spotlight on the need for strategies to fight light pollution and preserve the natural rhythms of an increasingly illuminated world.
Read the article: Global artificial light masks biologically important light cycles of animals
From Ecological Monographs:
What’s driving the divergence in diving duck populations?
Author contact: Daniel Gibson (gibso678@umn.edu)
A new study illustrates how even slight differences in environmental factors, life cycle traits and interactions with other organisms (including humans) can drive very similar species down wildly different paths. Using monitoring and hunting data spanning more than six decades, researchers estimated that breeding pairs of redhead ducks, a diving duck found in the pothole wetlands of central North America, have increased greatly over the past 60 years, while breeding pairs of canvasbacks, a closely related species that shares the redhead’s food and habitat needs, have fallen sharply. Despite their similarity, canvasbacks appear to be far more vulnerable than redheads to changes in their shared wetland habitats. Additionally, they are unable to bounce back in the same way that redheads do following the removal of females by human hunters. Such differences complicate waterfowl conservation and highlight the surprising challenges that can emerge when managing ecologically similar species.
Read the article: Explaining the divergence of population trajectories for two interacting waterfowl species
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The Ecological Society of America, founded in 1915, is the world’s largest community of professional ecologists and a trusted source of ecological knowledge, committed to advancing the understanding of life on Earth. The 8,000 member Society publishes six journals and a membership bulletin and broadly shares ecological information through policy, media outreach and education initiatives. The Society’s Annual Meeting attracts 4,000 attendees and features the most recent advances in ecological science. Visit the ESA website at https://www.esa.org
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