“According to ABC Birds, the greater roadrunner has already extended its range eastward as far as Arkansas and Louisiana over the last century. The National Audubon Society predicts that the species will further expand its northern range by 27 percent with 3 degrees of warming, a threshold that some scientists expect us to cross as early as 2070. This would mean more roadrunner sightings in places like Houston, northern Nevada, and up Colorado’s front range nearly as far north as Denver.

Meanwhile, in places like New Mexico, where the roadrunner reigns as the state bird, it seems to be benefitting from even drier conditions, which are expected to increase with climate change. According to Jon Hayes, director of Audubon Southwest, roadrunner populations spiked in the state in the 2010s, which he says is likely correlated to drought conditions experienced across much of the Southwest in that timeframe.”

From National Geographic.

“Beginning in the last decade of the 18th century, firewood output increased from about 18% of GDP to just under 30% of GDP in the 1830s. The value of firewood fell to less than 5% of GDP by the 1880s. Prior estimates of firewood output in the 19th century significantly underestimated its value.”

From National Bureau of Economic Research.

“Lifting up the hood of a Beewise hive feels more like you’re getting ready to examine the engine of a car than visit with a few thousand pollinators.

The unit — dubbed a BeeHome — is an industrial upgrade from the standard wooden beehives, all clad in white metal and solar panels. Inside sits a high-tech scanner and robotic arm powered by artificial intelligence. Roughly 300,000 of these units are in use across the US, scattered across fields of almond, canola, pistachios and other crops that require pollination to grow.

It’s not exactly the romantic vision of a beehive or beekeeper lodged in the cultural consciousness, but then that’s not what matters; keeping bees alive does. And Beewise’s units do that dramatically better than the standard hive…

Ellis likened the hives to a Ritz-Carlton for pollinators. The five-star stay appears to suit bees well: Beewise says its units — which it leases to provide pollination services at what it says are market rates — have seen colony losses of around 8%. That’s a major drop compared to the average annual loss rate of more than 40%, according to Apiary Inspectors of America.”

From Bloomberg.

“Conservationists in Argentina’s Patagonia region have helped save the country’s most threatened amphibian, the El Rincon stream frog, a species whose entire existence centers on a single warm stream in the Somuncurá Plateau. To restore the frog population, researchers removed invasive trout from the stream, bred hundreds of frogs in captivity and released them in the wild, and worked with ranchers to keep cattle out of the frogs’ habitat…

So far, the effort coordinated by several NGOs with ranchers and local communities has boosted the frog population by about 15% to date from an initial count of just over 4,500 adult individuals in 2018.”

From Mongabay.