Dr. Zhongqi Chen has dedicated his career to understanding how fish handle environmental stress. Now, as a Research Scientist at Woodwell Climate Research Center, he is bringing his expertise in fish physiology, stream ecology and data sciences to the Science on the Fly project as the new Science Lead. We sat down with Zhongqi to discuss why a two-degree water temperature shift is a game-changer for wild trout, how local water sampling scales up to global conservation, and why the single bottle of water collected by our community scientist is a critical piece of a much bigger puzzle.
Read more on Science on the Fly.
HOWLAND, Maine — Scientist Kathleen Savage leaned out from the basket of a boom lift, a red safety helmet perched on her head.
She sealed a few needle-covered stalks from an Eastern Hemlock tree inside a clear plastic cylinder and pulled out her phone. On the screen, a meter rose and fell as the level of gases inside the cylinder fluctuated. The question she was asking: What were the microscopic bugs on the stalks and leaves doing in there?
But looked at another way, it could also buy the planet critical time as the world races to address the climate crisis.
“These small, microscopic organisms are everywhere,” she said. “When you translate that to an entire forest, they add up and pack a big punch.”
Savage, a senior research scientist at Woodwell Climate Research Center in Woods Hole, is part of a team of experts trying to better understand which of these microscopic bugs — or, as they’re technically called, microbes — consume potent methane gas, and whether they could eventually be marshaled as a tool to combat climate change. Methane is among the world’s most potent greenhouse gases, accounting for roughly 30 percent of global warming. Once emitted, it only lasts in the atmosphere for a little over a decade, but in that time, it is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
Read more on Boston Globe.
A recent study provides new evidence of increasing life-threatening heat waves, focusing on the accumulation of dangerous heat that is known to cause severe health impacts. Researchers have developed a new metric – the accumulated dangerous heat index (ADHI) – that includes the combined effects of temperature and humidity to identify summer hours that surpass a dangerous threshold. Hourly exceedances are summed over each day, month, and season across the Northern Hemisphere.
Trends in ADHI are attributed to temperature, humidity, or a combination to better understand the cause of increased life-threatening heat conditions regionally. The researchers found areas historically prone to excessive heat have experienced longer-lasting, more intense, and expanded dangerous conditions, with some regions becoming uninhabitable. They found temperature to be the dominant factor driving increased ADHI during the daytime in most regions, while increasing humidity plays a more important role at night.
“We know that extreme heat causes by far the most fatalities of any type of hazardous weather, and it is crucial that we are able to fully assess and understand its risks,” said the lead author, Dr. Jennifer Francis, Senior Scientist at Woodwell Climate Research Center. “Brutal heat waves have already wreaked havoc across the Northern Hemisphere in 2026, even though summer has barely begun. Record-smashing temperatures are blamed for thousands of deaths in Europe, while dangerous heat invaded major eastern cities of the U.S. during celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the nation’s independence.”
“Escalating extreme heat is putting communities, ecosystems, and livelihoods at risk across many areas of the globe,” added co-author Dr. Natasa Skific. “The Accumulated Dangerous Heat Index gives scientists a new and straightforward tool to warn leaders and help them prepare for life-threatening heat events.”
Co-author and MIT Research Scientist Dr. Judah Cohen noted, “As we found in our companion study that focused on severe winter conditions, the warming Arctic also appears to be contributing to the longevity of dangerous heat waves in many areas at lower latitudes.”
The findings in this new study provide further motivation to reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases, and the regional trends will assist decision-makers and planners in preparing for a future with a better understanding of the threats from deadly heat.
Find the full paper here.
In 2023, Canada experienced its worst wildfire season to date. Fires raged across all 13 provinces and territories, breaking national records for burned area and carbon emissions.
Fires have a complex impact on both the global and regional climate. While fires contribute to warming through the release of stored carbon from trees and soil, they also create an unexpected cooling effect. Postfire changes to vegetation composition and coverage have an impact on albedo—the amount of sunlight reflected by a surface. The absence of the tree canopy no longer conceals snow, thus reflecting more incoming solar radiation which can cool the local environment.
“If you have a more reflective surface, like ice or snow in particular, it’s going to reflect more of that sunlight back to space, and so it’s going to have a cooling effect compared to if it wasn’t there,” says Rogers. “Because if it wasn’t there, then the darker land or the ocean would have absorbed more of it and heated.”
These changes in albedo have historically partially offset the warming caused by fire-induced emissions; however, climate change is disrupting this balancing effect.
In a newly published paper, co-authored by Woodwell Climate Senior Scientist Dr. Brendan Rogers, researchers found a 29% decrease of the regional climate-cooling impact of boreal wildfires since the 1960s. This represents one aspect of a critical shift in past ecosystem dynamics—not only is climate change responsible for rising global temperatures, but it is also weakening the natural mechanisms that once regulated this rise.
“The consequences of retreating snow cover become especially clear at the scale of individual fires,” says Max van Gerrevink, lead author of the study and postdoctoral researcher at Wageningen University and Research. “Historically, nearly half of all Canadian wildfires reached a natural climatic break-even point, where snow-driven surface cooling fully offset the warming caused by fire-related emissions. Today, that proportion has fallen dramatically, to only about one in four or five fires.”
The study used remote sensing to map the predicted changes in surface albedo over a 70-year postfire period assuming carbon dioxide emissions maintain current levels until 2050, then decrease, eventually reaching net zero by 2100. For Canada’s boreal forests, this means earlier snow disappearance rates, later snow onset and warming temperatures—all of which impact albedo.
When considered alongside a previous study co-authored by Rogers, the decreasing power of the cooling effect is projected to continue even further.
“Compared to pre-climate change, we’re talking about, over the next several decades… a 50% to 60% reduction due to earlier snowmelt,” says Rogers. “It’s important to be aware of this when you’re thinking about ‘What does this mean for the earth system,’ and ‘How might you manage these fires.’”
The implications of this finding are of growing concern, as warmer and drier weather conditions associated with continued climate change are subjecting Canada’s boreal forests to more severe and longer fire seasons. During the 2023 Canadian fire season, an estimated 647 teragrams of carbon were released—a number comparable to the annual fossil fuel emissions of the largest-emitting nations and only exceeded by India, China and the United States.
With more carbon being released annually from worsening fire seasons and a diminishing climate-cooling effect, Canada’s boreal ecosystems are facing an amplified threat from exacerbated warming. As the study found, the subsequent weakening of the climate-cooling impact implies that contemporary boreal fires are, on average, twice as likely to result in a net climate-warming influence.
“Fires both warm through greenhouse gas emissions and cool through changes to land surface albedo,” says Rogers. “The cooling impact is declining, but the carbon impact is not, and it might even be growing because we’re seeing more permafrost emissions after wildfires.”
Rogers stressed the importance of considering albedo and carbon as two parts of a larger equation rather than two factors that act in opposition. This is due to the fact that albedo’s impact is limited to the geographic area where these fluctuations occur and therefore is not as widespread. Furthermore, he emphasized the need for measures that directly target carbon emissions in order to comprehensively address climate change.
“The reality is the spatial footprint from the albedo changes in Canada have very little impact on us down here in the lower 48 or other parts of the globe,” says Rogers. “And I think that’s important, because the carbon impacts are global and do impact us and everyone else on the planet.”
Grazing lands are everywhere. These lands, used to raise domesticated animals like cows and sheep, span over 12 billion acres, comprising nearly 40% of ice-free land on Earth, and represent the largest category of human land use.
Grazing lands are not just working lands, they are also critical grassland, shrubland, and woodland ecosystems that provide important ecological benefits like carbon storage. Poor management practices like overgrazing have resulted in the degradation of these ecosystems. In the United States, over half of rangelands are considered degraded, resulting in the loss of 50 billion tons of carbon that would otherwise be stored in soils. Grassland species are in decline, and the productivity of these lands has dropped, with economic consequences for ranchers.
What is regenerative grazing?
Regenerative grazing is the practice of moving livestock between pastures to allow more time for vegetation to rest and re-grow, and it is often touted as an antidote to degradation. The technique is intended to emulate the movements of wild grazers like bison and elk and can maximize grass growth and help incorporate more plant biomass into the soil, two factors that are key to increasing soil carbon. Regenerative practices can also improve the quality and diversity of food for grazing animals.
Because of its potential, regenerative grazing practices have generated much buzz, particularly in the world of carbon credits. Current proposed grassland management projects on the Verra Registry —the world’s largest public database on carbon credits — estimate that in total they will remove as much as 40 million tons of CO2 per year. Despite these claims, there have been few conclusive scientific studies to verify. Accurate soil carbon estimates are crucial to right-size expectations for producers, policymakers, and financial markets supporting regenerative grazing practices as a potential climate solution, yet this lack of conclusive evidence leads to the need for more rigorous analysis.
Why is it so hard to study rangeland carbon?
An ideal study of the carbon storage potential of regenerative practices requires before and after measurements on comparable fields using both conventional and regenerative techniques. This is hard to do for a couple of reasons.
First, rangelands are complex systems with many different factors, including soil type, vegetation and land use history, playing into how much carbon gets locked away in soils. Second, the grazing practice changes are individually tailored to work with each ranchers’ operation, adding complexity. Third, expected changes in soil carbon are small relative to the large and variable background carbon stocks in rangelands, often leaving scientists looking for a needle in a haystack.
A review assessing the quality of existing evidence, led by Woodwell Climate researchers, found 70 papers that attempted to answer this question. Of those 70 papers, only 10 were found to make scientifically robust comparisons of soil carbon between conventionally and regeneratively managed sites. These 10 studies showed an average result of no change in carbon. Most of these 10 studies used small experimental plots that allow researchers to control for confounding effects, but can simplify the system past the point of recognition for a rancher. Two studies even used lawn mowers instead of grazing animals, raising questions about the applicability of these findings to real, working ranches.
A large subset of the 70 studies compared soil carbon levels at ranches already under regenerative management with nearby conventionally grazed ranches. These studies suggest that on average regenerative grazing can sequester 0.7 tons of CO2 per acre per year more than conventional grazing. However, this approach makes the assumption that the present-day soil carbon level on a conventionally grazed site is equivalent to the baseline level of the regenerative site prior to change. This assumption requires careful pairing of vegetation, soil type, climate and land-use history that was not documented in most of the studies.
The variable quality of existing studies leaves us no closer to understanding the benefits of regenerative grazing, and scientific study is still needed.
Woodwell’s rangeland carbon projects are working to fill the data gap
The flurry of attention on regenerative management practices means funding and executing long-term studies that can generate high-quality data is an urgent priority. Projects on the Verra Registry are claiming to sequester more than twice as much carbon as the Woodwell analysis was able to estimate based on existing data. Left unverified, this could result in greenwashing ranching operations and carbon credit programs.
Woodwell researchers are actively exploring ways to fill this knowledge gap. Soil spectroscopy, a method that measures the interaction between light beams and soil particles to determine their chemical composition, offers a lower cost option for analyzing a large amount of soil samples to determine carbon content. Easier and cheaper soil analysis options will facilitate future research into the benefits of various land management practices, with applications for farms, ranches and other landscapes.
Woodwell scientists have also developed RangeSTAR, a system for tracking changes in plant productivity and soil carbon at a land management scale with a high level of detail. RangeSTAR combines computer simulations with remote-sensing data and field measurements of rangeland-health indicators. As the project progresses, researchers hope to get a clearer picture of the role rangelands can play in combating the climate crisis.
In a new joint “Feeding Resilience” report, the Center for Climate and Security, an institute of the Council on Strategic Risks, along with the Woodwell Climate Research Center, shows that climate change is sharply increasing the risk of crop failures in global breadbaskets, which would pose serious threats to Europe, the NATO alliance, and global stability, at a moment of multiple geopolitical shocks. In India and Europe, for example, climate change in the next decade and a half is set to increase the chance of key crops failing by between two- and six-fold. This rising risk comes as the world is already facing severe food shocks due to the wars in Iran and Ukraine, and is entering into a potentially unprecedented El Niño season. The report offers a range of policy recommendations to address this major risk.
The report, Global Breadbaskets: Food System Resilience as a Strategic Imperative, draws on a range of global crop models to assess the growing risk of climate-driven agricultural failures in ”key producers of wheat, maize, and rice” like Europe and India, and examines the cascading geopolitical consequences of a world in which multiple breadbaskets fail at once.
The lead author on the report, Tom Ellison, Deputy Director of the Center for Climate and Security, stated: “We have plenty of examples of how crop failures can contribute to political instability, from the French Revolution to the Arab Spring. In today’s environment, global breadbasket failures could strain NATO priorities, prompt unrest in key countries, and upend trade relationships. Amid climate change, geopolitical uncertainty, food shocks from the war in Iran, and Russian hybrid warfare, investing in a resilient food system isn’t in competition with security–it’s a key part of it.”
Co-author of the report, Noah Fritzhand, Research Fellow at the Center for Climate and Security, added: “With the implementation of NATO’s updated baseline resilience requirements come July and adoption of the EU’s new integrated framework for climate resilience later in 2026, member countries have an opportunity to prioritize investments in resilient food systems, at home and abroad, that can both limit exposure to climate risks and meet Europe’s strategic goals.”
Dr. Alexandra Naegele, co-author of the report and Research Scientist at Woodwell Climate Research Center, noted: “Climate change doesn’t just threaten crop yields and grain quality—it destabilizes entire food systems, from labor and livestock to food storage and transport. These impacts are colliding with a powerful El Niño taking shape, which is expected to weaken the monsoon, trigger heatwaves, and reduce rainfall across India. Quantifying these climate-driven risks is an essential step toward building resilient food systems and safeguarding global food security.”
Co-author of the report, Monica Caparas, Research Scientist at Woodwell Climate Research Center, concluded: “The consequences of a breadbasket failure extend far beyond the region where it occurs. As globally important food-producing regions face growing risks of climate-driven disruption, the effects can ripple through livelihoods, supply chains, food assistance systems, and geopolitical relationships. Understanding and preparing for breadbasket failures is both a national security priority and a humanitarian imperative—one that can help protect lives, reduce instability, and strengthen food resilience before a regional shock becomes a wider crisis.”
Last week, the climate science and policy community was saddened by the passing of Rafe Pomerance, a longtime leader and advocate in the fight against climate change.
Pomerance was one of the first people to sound the alarm over climate change on Capitol Hill. He played a pivotal role in the climate movement, connecting scientists with policymakers and the media.
One of those scientists was Dr. George Woodwell—Pomerance and Woodwell shared a partnership rooted in the belief that science needed a strong voice in Washington. Together, they helped bridge the gap between scientific understanding and public action, advancing some of the first congressional conversations on climate, and helping lay the foundation for today’s climate movement.
At the Woodwell Climate Research Center, Pomerance served as Distinguished Senior Arctic Policy Fellow, as well as Chairman of Arctic 21—a network of organizations that focused on communicating the consequences of climate change on the Arctic to policy makers and the public.
Author Nathaniel Rich wrote a 2018 article and 2019 book both titled Losing Earth, which tells the story of a handful of scientists, politicians, and strategists who were among the first to try to convince the world to act on climate change and the fossil fuel industry’s fight to stop them. Woodwell Climate interviewed Pomerance about the article, which featured both him and George Woodwell as leaders in raising awareness of the climate threat.
When asked how he felt about his work on climate progress, Pomerance responded, “I knew very early that this would become a dominating issue on the planet. We started out and nobody knew anything about it and now everyone does. Was it worth it? Absolutely.”
Pomerance’s legacy lives on not only through the policies and progress he influenced, but through the generations of scientists, advocates, and leaders he inspired along the way. Dr. Max Holmes, Woodwell Climate President and CEO, counted Rafe as a “colleague, an inspiration, and a friend — someone who will be dearly missed but always remembered,” a sentiment echoed by Woodwell staff and people around the world.
Rest in peace, dear Rafe.
