This Year in Conservation Science: Whales, Birds, and Killer Roads
We asked conservation researchers around the world to send us their favorite papers of 2025. They address the planet’s most pressing problems — and important solutions.
The post This Year in Conservation Science: Whales, Birds, and Killer Roads appeared first on The Revelator.
The road to hell is paved with … more roads.
That seems to be the message of one of this year’s most striking conservation papers. The research, published this April in the journal Current Biology, linked the “explosive growth” of secondary roads — those that branch off what the papers call “first-cut roads” — to tropical deforestation around the world.
These aren’t the typical suburban Streets, Drives, and Courts that spring up around developments. They’re “illicit, unplanned, often illegal roads,” says the paper’s senior author, William Laurance, distinguished research professor at James Cook University. The research was led by ecologist Jayden Engert.
“The numbers are almost crazy,” says Laurance. “For example, we found an enormous proliferation of secondary roads in the Congo Basin, Amazon, and New Guinea — especially in the Amazon,” where every mile of official roads generated around 50 miles of unofficial roads. “These secondary roads are opening tropical forest frontiers like a flayed fish, exposing them to illegal land-grabbers, loggers, poachers, miners, and illegal drug producers whose activities are driving rampant forest loss.”
Sadly, Laurance says, these secondary roads don’t exist on official maps and they’re hard for governments to control. But research like this helps to document them — and that’s the first step to addressing the problem.
That can also be said of the other new papers and reports sent to us this month by conservation experts around the world who sent us their best or favorite research from 2025.
Forests Connect Us
Other research also called out the importance of forests — this time connecting the dots between places like New York City’s Central Park and other North American forests, especially rapidly disappearing landscapes in Central America.
“It’s easy to think of migratory birds as ‘ours,’ tied to a particular state or region, but their survival depends just as much on distant habitats far from home,” says the study’s lead author, Anna Lello-Smith of the World Conservation Society. “Using millions of bird observations from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s eBird platform, our study shows that eastern North America’s forest birds rely on Central America’s last large tropical forests — the Five Great Forests — to survive migration and the winter. Because billions of migratory birds funnel into the narrow land bridge of Central America, these forests hold staggering concentrations of warblers, thrushes, and hawks — in some cases nearly half their global populations — yet several are rapidly disappearing due to illegal ranching and fires.”
The study identified what it called “sister landscapes” — sites across the U.S. and Canada that are linked to the Five Great Forests by shared bird species. Lello-Smith says this offers “a roadmap for connecting bird lovers and communities across the hemisphere to help protect and restore the tropical forests that keep our birds in the sky.”
Three From the Ocean
Shifting from the skies to the seas, frequent Revelator contributor and shark scientist David Shiffman shared new research by Mark E. Bond and other experts about how the world has improved conservation and management of sharks and related species.
“The ocean science and conservation community has invested a lot of time, energy, and resources into protecting sharks via the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species,” says Shiffman, who was not involved in this research. “We’ve seen promising signs that this approach is working for years, but Bond et al. is the first global-scale analysis of the impacts of CITES protections on shark management regulations around the world. They found that several countries who previously had no shark conservation or management regulations of any kind made their first regulations — a huge step. They also found improvements in regulations of more than half of shark fishing and exporting nations, including many that are substantive and important. There is no silver bullet to complex conservation challenges, but these results are clear that for many shark species in many countries, CITES helps.”
All ocean species face an ongoing and growing threat from human activities, though. That’s why a dozen conservation experts — including Callum M. Roberts, Sylvia Earle, and Stuart Pimm — recently penned a commentary in Nature calling for an end to extraction in the high seas in perpetuity. Such a move, the authors argued, would protect species and the planet from increased fishing, deep-sea mining, and other threats. Pimm called it his “most important contribution” of the past year.
On a more specific ocean note, one recent paper looked at critically endangered Rice’s whales, who scientists identified less than five years ago. Unfortunately the news coverage of that discovery failed to shift the needle on the forces endangering the whales.
“My co-author and I took a communication and media studies approach to research Rice’s whale conservation and management and intentionally included insights that anyone with an interest in conservation can use,” says Marcus B. Reamer, a lecturer at the Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science. “We highlight the essential role of communication and media in conservation and offer actionable strategies for navigating media systems and communicating effectively in challenging political and ecological environments, providing a roadmap for individuals and organizations working on conservation challenges across ecosystems and geographies. It’s a unique direction for marine mammal conservation research — and timely given ongoing efforts to weaken environmental laws and ramp up oil and gas production in the Gulf of Mexico.”
Indigenous Science
Two researchers called out the importance of traditional Indigenous knowledge and related systems.
First, Liber Ero Postdoctoral Fellow Sara E. Cannon sent a paper about “a respectful and transparent way to uphold ancestral Indigenous Pacific salmon stream caretaking knowledge, longstanding Indigenous rights and relationships to land and waters, and our joint responsibilities to care for these watersheds.”
“This paper is an essential read for conservation practitioners and researchers across Canada,” says Cannon, who was not involved in the research. “It recenters Indigenous laws, governance systems, and ancestral caretaking knowledge as foundational to restoring Pacific salmon and their watersheds. By documenting Indigenous-led restoration initiatives across British Columbia, it offers tangible, place-based examples of how ethical collaboration and Indigenous leadership can guide more just and sustainable approaches to salmon recovery. It invites readers to rethink restoration not only as ecological repair, but as the renewal of relationships, rights, and responsibilities between people and salmon.”
Aerin Jacob, director of science and research at the Nature Conservancy of Canada, included a paper she coauthored about navigating the divide between science and policy.
“Environmental decision-makers often rely on natural science or familiar expert networks while feeling uncertain about how to meaningfully include Indigenous knowledge, social science, or local experience,” Jacob says. “This can lead to decisions that are less effective and less supported. Our study examines what Canadian science–policy professionals consider ‘good evidence,’ why some evidence gets used or overlooked, and how to build more balanced, credible decision-making. I like this paper because it’s frank about challenges while also focusing on solutions.”
And as a reminder that important science can come in many forms, Jacob also sent a report (funded in part by her organization) entitled “A Guide to Choosing and Using Community-Based Data Management Systems for Indigenous Land-Based Programs.”
“Around the world, Indigenous guardians collect vital information about nature and people — including photos, maps, datasets, stories, and more,” Jacob says. “It’s crucial to keep that information organized, secure, and aligned with community values. I’m a big fan of this new work from northern Canada for two reasons. First, it supports guardians and other land-based program staff to decide what matters most to them and how they want to proceed. Second, it helps external parties to be better partners in the technical and governance aspects of data, software, funding, infrastructure, staffing, and more.”
Quick Hits
Chris Shepherd, another frequent Revelator contributor and source, sent an interesting (and worrying) paper about Canada’s role in the trade of live monitor lizards.
“Very little is known about the reptile trade in Canada, or about Canada’s role in the international wildlife trade at all,” he says. “Here we focused on the trade in monitor lizards in Canada and found Canada to be a major player. This issue is largely unknown in Canada, and we are only just starting to scratch the surface.”
Dominick A. DellaSala, senior conservation scientist associate at the Conservation Biology Institute and another Revelator contributor, sent a new paper he coauthored that suggested a conservation opportunity in the Montana’s Yaak River Watershed. The paper “provides new protected area assessments for the Northern Rockies and identifies proposed climate refugia based on climate modeling and GAP analyses methods,” he says.
Has the world failed the Sumatran rhino? K Yoganand of the Malaysian organization Bringing Back Our Rare Animals sent a coauthored paper published in the journal Pachyderm detailing the status, history, and fraught future of this critically endangered species. “We present a sobering case study of how decades of missteps, indecision, and cognitive biases have driven the Sumatran rhinoceros to the brink of extinction,” Yoganand writes. “For anyone committed to preventing future extinctions, the paper offers both a cautionary tale and a roadmap for how conservation must adapt to avoid repeating these failures.”
Finally citizen scientist Paula Borchardt wrote to remind us that everyday citizens play an important, ongoing role in collecting data about the natural world.
“I’m an artist, journalist, naturalist, and citizen scientist who publishes a weekly blog sharing my art and stories about natural history, mostly about my Tucson, Arizona, backyard and the environment here in the Sonoran Desert.” She pointed out one recent entry, “describing my husband’s and my project to grow saguaros from seed, to help an effort by several Tucson-based organizations to support saguaros and combat their declining numbers.” The striking headline: “We have 1,518 saguaros on our patio.”
That’s it for this year’s “This Year in Conservation Science.” But the new year is around the corner, and with it come 12 more months of new, exciting, important research about endangered species, habitats, environmental justice, climate change, and related topics. Keep reading The Revelator for coverage of that new science, and stay in touch if you publish research you think our readers would enjoy or could use in their own efforts to preserve life on Earth.
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