Polaris Project alumni and early career scientists, Aquanette Sanders and Edauri Navarro-Peréz were awarded the 2022 John Schade Memorial scholarship. The fund, established to honor Dr. Schade’s unwavering dedication to mentoring young scientists, recognizes two students per year who are pursuing higher education and reflect Dr. Schade’s values of mentoring, education, leadership, equity in the sciences, and advancing Arctic and environmental science to mitigate climate change.
“The purpose of the fund is to support the next generation of scientists who are making a lifelong career and personal commitment to activities that reflect and demonstrate Dr. Schade’s values,” said Dr. Nigel Golden, a postdoctoral researcher at Woodwell and coordinator of the fund. “We were profoundly impressed with this round of applications. All of the applicants for the scholarship were exceptional early-career scientists who are doing timely and important research, and whose career trajectories have been impacted by their mentorship through Dr. Schade, or through their mentors who worked with him. For Aqua and Edauri, what really helped to set them apart was a demonstrable commitment to creating spaces to ensure the success of scientists from a diversity of backgrounds.”
Aquanette Sanders
Aquanette Sanders is a Masters student at the University of Texas, Austin, pursuing a degree in Marine Science. However, as a Polaris participant, Sanders’ research focused on the soil. She studied greenhouse gas fluxes from thermokarst features— depressions and bumps in the tundra landscape formed by permafrost thaw. Sanders studied how emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide differed between these features and undisturbed areas of tundra.
Sanders’ career so far has taken her from an undergraduate research program with Maryland Sea Grant, to a SEA Education cruise to the Sargasso sea, to the Simpson Lagoon on Alaska’s North Slope, where she is currently researching groundwater nutrient flows as they change with thawing permafrost. For Sanders, the experience with Polaris affirmed her interest in climate change and Arctic science.
“The Polaris Project was my gateway into Arctic science,” says Sanders. “Seeing the effects of permafrost thaw first-hand, with the large amount of thermokarst features in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, confirmed that my research interest in greenhouse gasses and nutrient cycles— a topic that still has so many rising questions that need to be answered.”
Sanders says she is always looking for her next step forward in research. She plans to pursue a dual doctorate in veterinary medicine and research after completing her masters degree. She wants to combine her background in chemistry and biology to understand how changes in nutrients will affect aquatic animals at the top of the food web.
“My research is motivated purely by the eagerness to learn more. As I find new results, I ask more questions that eventually lead to more experiments or hypotheses. This keeps me excited and ready for present and future research,” says Sanders.
Edauri Navarro-Pérez
Edauri Navarro-Pérez is Ph.D. candidate at Arizona State University, with a background in soil, root ecology, and drylands restoration. As a Polaris student, Navarro-Pérez investigated whether there were differences between emissions coming from burned and unburned areas of the tundra. Her work contributed to a body of research examining how fires are affecting chemical processes in tundra soils— specifically respiration, which emits carbon and nitrogen. For her, Polaris was an opportunity to gain experience with field methods.
“Polaris contributed a lot to my knowledge in terms of how soil science is done in the field, as well as the process of the scientific method— from developing my own question to seeing the results of my work,” Navarro-Pérez said.
From Polaris, to working as an undergraduate lab technician, to conducting research in Belize and Costa Rica, Navarro-Pérez is led by her curiosity. She is especially interested in the way soil connects to our daily lives, and how understanding the interactions between plant roots and the soil in which they’re growing can lead to a deeper understanding of climate change.
“Understanding how restoration projects can affect plant development and how plants can affect soils in the longer run, through decomposition and soil respiration, can be pertinent to environmental planning for climatic issues,” said Navarro-Pérez.
Navarro-Pérez said she feels grateful that an environmental scholarship supporting Latina and Latino students enabled her to earn her undergraduate degree. She now hopes that her future career will involve research, mentoring, and teaching, as well as exploring her research topics through art and literature which provides a different frame for examining the world around us.
Both recipients will receive funding to continue their education and pursuit of science, mentorship, and equity, encouraging a new generation of Arctic scientists working to change the world.
As the planet warms, drought is an increasing threat in many regions. Research led by Woodwell Research Assistant Isabelle Runde, modeled the frequency of drought across the globe, analyzing drought changes in forest, food, and energy systems as temperatures surpass 2, 3, and 4 degrees Celsius.
Models show that unlike in a stable climate, unreliable water resources and increasing temperatures make drought more likely in many places. For every increase of 0.5 degrees C, an additional 619 million people could become exposed to extreme drought 1 in every 4 years. This is in addition to the 1.7 billion people (nearly a quarter of today’s global population) who are already exposed to these conditions in a world that has warmed by a little more than 1 degree C.
2 Degrees of Warming Risks Damaging our Best Forest Carbon Sinks
Tropical forests are one of the planet’s key natural climate solutions— able to prevent 1 degree of warming through both carbon sequestration and regional cooling effects. Deforestation, fragmentation and degradation from things like fire, and disease threaten to turn these forests from a vital sink to a source of emissions.
In recent years, the Amazon has been a net carbon source due to increased extreme drought and deforestation, leaving the Congo rainforest as the world’s last remaining stable tropical forest carbon sink.
As warming surpasses 2 degrees, the annual likelihood of drought in the Congo rainforest begins increasing faster than in the Amazon. Drought can make a forest more susceptible to further degradation, such as fire or disease, and reduces carbon sink capacity by stressing or killing trees and placing the ecosystem under stress.
Productivity is Threatened in the Breadbaskets of Mediterranean, Mexico, China
Global crop production is highly concentrated in key breadbasket regions— nearly 72% of the world’s maize, wheat, rice, and soy are produced in just 5 countries. Extreme drought can reduce the productivity levels of these staple crops, among others, potentially triggering widespread food insecurity, hunger and economic disruption.
By 2 degrees of warming, the probability of drought in the breadbasket regions of both China and the United States will be greater than 50% — meaning an extreme drought roughly every other year.
Disruption will be much higher in countries where jobs in agriculture comprise a large segment of the economy. In Mexico, one of the world’s top 10 producers of maize, 12% of the workforce is in agriculture and at 1 degree, the country already has among the greatest areas of cropland exposed to drought. 90% probabilities—indicating near-annual drought—begin to emerge in some parts of the country at 2 degrees of warming.This kind of recurrent extreme drought will stress water resources for agriculture.
The Mediterranean also is a drought hotspot. Drought probability in Mediterranean croplands will increase rapidly between 2 and 3 degrees of warming, rising from just 10% to over 50% of cropland affected by drought in 3 out of 4 years.
Drying Rivers Will Plunge Hydro-dependent Countries into Energy-Shortages
Hydroelectricity supplies a sixth of global energy demand, and is a low-cost, low-emission alternative to fossil fuels. The overwhelming majority of new hydropower plants since 1990 have been constructed in fast-growing, developing nations.
High dependence on hydropower makes countries like Brazil and China vulnerable to energy disruption during periods of drought. Brazil draws nearly two thirds of its energy from hydroelectric resources. During a three year drought between 2012 and 2015 in Brazil, hydroelectric generation declined by 20% each year. If warming exceeds 3 degrees C, more than half of Brazil’s hydroelectric capacity will experience a likelihood of annual drought greater than 50%.
Extreme drought can also be counterproductive to reducing carbon emissions. During years of drought, expensive fossil fuel based energy is often brought in to fill demands. In addition, droughts often coincide with extreme heat events, when electricity demand peaks to run air conditioners. Beyond 3 degrees of warming, more than a third of the planet’s hydroelectric capacity will likely be exposed to extreme drought every other year.
Projections of a Dryer World
Current international climate goals aim to limit warming to between 1.5 and 2 degrees C, but without urgent intervention, we are on track to push past that limit to at least 2.5 degrees C. Projections past 2 degrees of warming show a future where extreme drought is common, exposing already-vulnerable people, places, and economies to greater water shortages, while making it even harder to curb emissions. In order to guard water resources and the systems that depend on them, emissions need to be cut rapidly. And places already feeling the impacts of warming will need to brace to adapt to a hotter, dryer version of the world.
A new alliance for forest protection comes amid trends of mounting deforestation.
This year, at COP27, Brazil, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and Indonesia signed a Forest Nations Alliance, declaring their intent to work together in achieving global deforestation goals. Together, these three countries hold over half of the world’s tropical forests. These forests are vital carbon sinks, the loss of which could result in an additional 1 degree of warming. But across the globe, deforestation has been trending upwards, placing mitigation goals at risk. The question is whether this new alliance can help move the needle in the right direction.
The new alliance comes at a crucial time for forests. In 2021, leaders of more than 100 nations at the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow declared a renewed commitment to halting forest loss and degradation by 2030. The pledge was accompanied by a 12 billion dollar pledge to address wildfires, and support restoration and Indigenous rights. However, analyses one year later declared the pledge “off to a slow start” and gave the world a D- grade on reversing deforestation trends.
In 2021, Brazil saw a 72% increase in the rate of deforestation compared to the prior three years. Much of this was associated with illegal occupation of public lands or unpermitted deforestation on private lands. Early numbers for 2022 show that trend continued with an estimated 10,057 square kilometers of forest lost in the Amazon between January 1 and December 2.
In the DRC, forest loss is driven mostly by low-yield, smallholder, subsistence agriculture. Most of the DRC’s rural population depends on natural resources for their livelihoods and are often forced to clear forests to feed their families.
Indonesia, in contrast, has seen record low deforestation rates in recent years, reducing forest loss for five years in a row. However, experts say a rebound is still possible if government policies don’t reinforce this success.
Despite these differing rates and drivers of deforestation, these influential tropical forest nations have united around a common goal. In effect, the alliance “unionizes” forest countries, making them a more formidable negotiating entity than any single country would be on their own.
“What they’re saying is ‘we’re more powerful together,’” says Woodwell Tropics Program director, Dr. Michael Coe. “Somebody has to be in the driver’s seat making changes and this way they are the ones doing the driving, rather than being driven.”
The agreement states that the nations will be pushing for payments in exchange for their work in reducing deforestation, and they will negotiate for a new “sustainable funding mechanism” to help developing countries preserve biodiversity.
“Negotiating as a block, these three countries are now well positioned to maximize the financing they desperately need to implement sustainable development and conservation objectives while ensuring the flow of capital remains stable over the long term,” says Carbon Program director Dr. Wayne Walker.
Looking ahead to 2023, there is optimism that Brazil will strengthen its forest policies as newly elected president Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva has pledged to end deforestation in the Amazon, stating, “There is no climate security for the world without a protected Amazon.”
If successful in advancing their goals, the alliance could attract other tropical forest nations to lend their support. Though we are currently not on track to halt deforestation by 2030, the creation of this alliance is a step in the right direction.
Millions of acres of rangelands managed by the U. S. Bureau of Land Management are not meeting land health standards, according to a recent report from watchdog organization Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. Range degradation is also happening on U.S. Forest Service and privately held lands. Healthy rangelands are vital to the economic and public health of the communities that depend on them, which includes ranchers, Indigenous nations, and recreationists. Failing rangelands undermine these groups, lead to loss of habitat, and result in landscape degradation, and they also minimize our ability to mitigate climate change through carbon sequestration. Taking policy action to ensure the longevity of rangelands has the potential to increase climate mitigation potential and improve the health of U.S. ecosystems.
What is healthy rangeland?
Covering more than 31 percent of the U.S., rangelands are any wilderness or rural open space grazed by domestic or wild herbivores, including grassland, shrubland, and pasture. Rangelands provide a wide array of ecosystem services, including food for livestock, habitat for wild species, and climate regulation through the uptake of carbon dioxide (CO2) by growing plants and the transfer of this sequestered carbon into the soil (as soil organic carbon). Globally, rangelands store 20 percent of the world’s soil organic carbon and U.S. rangelands may have the capacity to offset 2.5 – 3 percent of U.S. CO2 emissions from fossil fuels, but only if the rangelands are considered in “full health”.
Improving monitoring to foster healthy rangelands
The capacity for rangelands to sequester carbon is increasingly threatened by drought and overgrazing and there is an urgent need for improved land use planning to tackle these issues. However, the lack of an integrated monitoring system makes it difficult to know what changes to land management are needed on the individual ranch scale.
An important first step, then, to fostering healthy rangelands is establishing an open-access region-wide range monitoring platform that ranchers can use to verify and track changes in rangeland ecosystem condition and carbon storage across entire land units. Large-scale monitoring for these indicators will make it clearer where land is being effectively managed, and where it is not.
Dr. Jennifer Watts focuses on how climate change and human disturbance are affecting vegetation, soils, and the carbon cycle. She and her colleagues are currently working to develop a monitoring platform to provide stakeholders access to land health information.
“Having free, easy access to long-term information about lands will empower us to become fully aware of how our land use is impacting the health and future of rangeland ecosystems,” Dr. Watts explains. “This gives us the ability to invest in alternative management approaches that provide a more sustainable future for our lands while protecting our communities and ecosystems in the face of climate change.”
Building a system of rewards and incentives
Reward systems can then be established across different scales to incentivize land use that improves ecosystem services. Monitoring platforms can be used in conjunction with clear land management directives to ensure rangelands are managed in a way conducive to ecosystem health.
Overgrazing is one of the biggest drivers of rangeland carbon loss and land degradation. It not only undermines the carbon storage potential of rangelands but also compromises other ecosystem services and limits future grazing capacity for livestock and wildlife. Consequently, it is in the best interest of everyone–ranchers, conservationists, Indigenous groups, and recreationists–to ensure that grazing on rangelands is managed in a way that increases vegetation cover, diversity, and rooting depth, while minimizing bare ground. Grazing practices can be addressed through process-oriented approaches.
Practicing management intensive grazing could help limit overgrazing. This adaptive technique involves concentrating grazing animals in one place for a very short period of time and then moving them to a different location. This ensures that the ecosystem has a chance to recover and regrow following a concentrated period of grazing. Ranchers will need technical assistance to develop grazing and management plans. Given that this is a practice under the Environmental Qualities Incentive Program (EQIP) it is likely to receive a boost in funding from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Building more programs, at the federal, state, and county level, that reward ranchers for shifting grazing techniques to those that support the sustainability of ecosystem services and provide equipment needed to support fencing and water distribution could be a way to incentivize more effective land management.
Manipulating grazing fees to more accurately represent the costs associated with maintaining the integrity of rangelands is another option for fostering healthier rangelands given the current low fees and stagnant pricing of grazing fees. Furthermore, revenue generated from increasing grazing fees on public lands could be used to support a monitoring system for all U.S. rangelands.
Most stakeholders agree that better rangeland monitoring, soil health, and payment for land improvements are important, but a big question is how to actually pay for these services across multiple levels of governance. Exploring how to leverage different options for funding, then, will be the necessary next step in supporting thriving rangeland ecosystems and reaping the potential climate benefits.
At age 12, Woodwell Assistant Scientist, Dr. Jennifer Watts was accustomed to black dirt—the rich, wet, crumbling, fertile stuff she dug through on her family’s hobby farm in Oregon. But after moving with her parents and siblings to a roughly 224-acre dairy farm in Minnesota, all she saw around her was light brown, dry earth.
“A lot of the farms around us were a mix of dairy farms and really intense cropping rotations of corn and soybean,” Dr. Watts says. “And I started to notice, where there was tillage, how depleted the soil looked.”
In the United States, farmland covers more than 895 million acres (an area larger than the size of India), and it has a proportionately massive footprint on the environment. Intensive agriculture pulls nutrients out of the soil and doesn’t always return them, converting natural grasslands into monocultures and releasing large amounts of stored carbon in the process.
But what Dr. Watts saw throughout a childhood spent tending to her family’s farm, was that changing the way agricultural land is managed can sometimes reverse those impacts. In converting their cropland to pasture, to support an organic, grass-based dairy farm, Dr. Watts and her family stumbled upon the principles of regenerative agriculture. A practice that can produce food in a way that works with the ecosystem, rather than against it, and has implications for climate mitigation as well.
“It became, for me, an unintentional transformative experiment that my family conducted on our farm,” Dr. Watts says. “By the time I graduated high school, our lands were so lush and green. It was a healthy, productive, diverse ecosystem again.”
Going rogue on the range
When Dr. Watts talks about her father’s idea to move to central Minnesota and start a dairy farm, she calls him a “rogue.” Originally from Alaska, he intended to work in fisheries, but had to change course after a cannery accident. Searching for something that would allow him to still spend his days outside, he settled on farming.
From the beginning, the Watts’ farming practices were considered unconventional in their rural Minnesota community. Firstly, they planted wild grasses and legumes like clover and alfalfa. Then, they left it alone. No tilling in the springtime alongside their neighbors; they simply let the plants establish themselves and moved the cattle frequently (with the help of a cow dog named Annie) to avoid overgrazing.
“After the first couple of years, I started noticing we had a lot more biological diversity in our fields, relative to our neighbors. We had a lot more bees buzzing, and butterflies, and we were popular with the deer and ducks,” Dr. Watts says. A few more years, and the soil started becoming dark and earthy-smelling again, like the soil she remembered from Oregon.
What was happening on their “rogue” dairy farm, was a gradual, partial reclamation of a lost grassland ecosystem— one that used to stretch across the midwest United States and was tended by native grazing species like bison or elk. Grazing plays a major role in cycling nutrients back into the soil, building up important elements like carbon and nitrogen. The near extinction of bison and the proliferation of monoculture cropping have broken this cycle—but cows have the potential to fill the gap left by ancient grazers, re-starting that process. Simple adjustments to management techniques, like lengthening time between grazing a pasture, can give the land time to recover.
Storing carbon in the soil
This also has implications for how we combat climate change—a term Dr. Watts wasn’t familiar with until later in high school, when family trips back to Alaska revealed the glaciers she loved to visit were shrinking.
“Seeing the glaciers was our favorite thing to do with my grandma, but they were beginning to disappear. And one year, suddenly, I noticed these informational panels along the walk exiting the National Park talking about this thing called climate change,” says Dr. Watts.
Dr. Watts was also seeing another pattern emerge on the farms in her midwest community. Water was becoming a little scarcer. Many of the farms around her family’s had begun investing in irrigation—something that was previously unnecessary, and remained so for the Watts’ farm. Their rich, black soil held onto the water for longer.
As she grew up and (with the help of a pre-Google web search over dial-up internet) charted a course for her career as an ecologist, Dr. Watts began to study the science underlying these patterns she was noticing, and connected them to climate change.
Growing plants draw carbon from the atmosphere. When plants die and decay, some of that carbon is released to the air to be drawn back down again by a new season of growth, while some is stored away as organic matter in the soil. Over centuries, this process forms a stable sink of carbon on the land. Regenerative grazing—the way the Watts family did it—stimulates more plant growth to keep this cycle turning, while overgrazing or removing grazers entirely can halt the process, allowing for erosion, less healthy root systems, and the degradation of the carbon sink. In the U.S., rangelands have historically contributed more to the depletion of soil carbon, but Dr. Watts’ research with Woodwell has demonstrated that, with proper management, rangelands and other agricultural lands have the potential to contribute positively to the climate equation again.
Seeing patterns from a new perspective
For the past two summers, Dr. Watts, alongside the Woodwell Rangelands team and collaborators, has driven across the western U.S. to collect biomass and soil samples and measure carbon flux from working ranches and federal grazing leases in Montana, Colorado, and Utah. These measurements will help calibrate a new satellite remote sensing-informed model that can track how much carbon is being stored on grazing lands. The model will be hosted on the Rangeland Carbon Management Tool(RCMT) platform—a new web application she and researchers at both Woodwell and Colorado State University are developing to give land managers access to carbon and other ecosystem data for their lands.
The idea is that, with a tool like this in hand, ranchers can account for carbon dioxide flowing into and out of the rangeland ecosystem, and track how this changes over time in response to land management adjustments. It will also show changes in correlating ecosystem metrics like plant diversity and productivity, as well as soil moisture—two things that are crucial to maintaining a healthy and economically viable range. With this information, Dr. Watts and colleagues hope to encourage a regional shift in ranch management strategies that protect and rebuild stores of soil carbon, while providing ranchers with essential co-benefits.
Dr. Watts has been working with Jim Howell, owner of sustainable land management company Grasslands LLC, to connect with individual ranchers and discuss how a tool like this could help their operations. Though ranchers can be a tradition-bound group, Dr. Watts says seeing data that confirms their anecdotal experiences of hotter winters, drier summers, longer droughts, and other climate-related changes has opened them up to making changes.
“There are so many times when we just see the ‘aha moment’ in the manager or the land owner’s face, because they’re suddenly able to see these patterns from a very different perspective,” says Dr. Watts. “Most people, we have strong memories, we know that something’s different, but to be able to show that through data and not only memories—it’s so powerful.”
Building climate solutions on the ground
In addition to ecosystem co-benefits, storing carbon on rangelands could have direct economic benefits for ranchers as well. The RCMT will provide baseline data that could be used to verify credits within a voluntary soil carbon market. Rangelands historically haven’t been included in carbon markets because of gaps in monitoring data that the RCMT will help fill. The data could also be useful for local or state governments setting up payments for ecosystem services schemes in their region that would provide money directly to ranchers in exchange for storing carbon on their lands.
Of course, cattle aren’t without their complications, and ranching practices are just one element of a global meat and dairy industry that contributes to 15 percent of global emissions. But Dr. Watts’ roots as a dairy farmer make her enthusiastic about the possibilities this solution holds to both mitigate emissions and keep an important American livelihood resilient as climate conditions change.
“It’s just one aspect in this really complicated global system,” says Dr. Watts. “But if we manage our ecosystems better, building more intact environments where we can, this can sequester more carbon while restoring ecosystem health and productivity. It’s not the solution, but it is a solution that can benefit our planet while supporting rural communities.”
“Talk to Jim. Jim knows everything.”
That’s what everyone told Woodwell Assistant Scientist, Dr. Jennifer Watts, when she started writing up a research plan to study soil carbon on U.S. rangelands. “And indeed, he does,” Dr. Watts says. “He knows everything about the region, about grazing management, species management, anything having to do with land management on these ranches.”
With his felt Stetson, dusty jeans, and perennial tan, ranch manager Jim Howell looks a bit like the kind of cowboy Hollywood might dream up. And in a way he is—despite looking at home on the range, Howell grew up in Southern California. But he spent his summers out in Colorado’s Cimarron mountains, working on his grandfather’s cattle ranch.
Those summers were Howell’s introduction to the idea that the way livestock are managed can change their impact on the land—a thread that would pull him through a college degree in animal production, towards a career “knowing everything” about holistic ranch management. He was first clued into this concept while walking the fence line separating his family’s property from a patch of public land being used to graze sheep.
“I noticed there were lots of very healthy, perennial, bunch grasses on the sheep side, while our side of the fence had degraded to mostly silver sagebrush, Kentucky bluegrass, and dandelions,” says Howell. “And I just didn’t understand why the differences were so stark.”
Howell’s cattle were stocked continuously on the land, low in number but able to graze year round, while the sheep grazing permit required rotation. There might be a great flock of sheep up there one day and nothing but grass for the remainder of the year. That difference, it turned out, dramatically altered the kinds of plants that could flourish on the land.
“I became aware then that the way that we’d been managing our cows in our country up there was leading to its slow, long-term, ecological degradation. And I didn’t know what to do about it,” says Howell.
The grazer makes the range
There have always been animals grazing the American West—before colonizers, even before native peoples. On the Great Plains there were bison; in the mountains and high altitude deserts of Southwestern Colorado, it was bighorn sheep and pronghorn antelope, as well as elk and mule deer. All three are rare sights now, with populations decimated by overhunting and habitat degradation.
Now, if you see any animal grazing on these ranges, it’ll probably be cattle.
Despite displacing native species, cows can still fill a natural niche in the rangeland ecosystem. Antelope, bison, sheep, and cows all belong to a group of animals called ruminants—animals that can digest grass. Many grasslands have co-evolved with ruminant species; their roaming feasts influence plant growth the same way pruning might affect the shape of a tree. Occasional shearing by a hungry cow stimulates new grass growth. It also creates a more competitive environment that supports a diverse array of plant species.
Grazing also plays a part in cycling nutrients and storing carbon in the soil. In a frequently dry climate like this one, digestion breaks down plant matter much faster than it would decay in the environment. Manure fertilizes new plant growth and returns carbon to the soil. Let this process continue unencumbered for a couple hundred thousand years, and you can build up a valuable carbon sink. And as long as the number of cattle isn’t rising, the oft-cited methane emissions from cow burps are minimal and cycled back down into the plants that grow up after grazing.
Since settlers arrived, however, the land has been put through centuries of abuse. Public lands were, for a long time, left open to unregulated grazing. Many rangelands have been over-stocked and grazed too frequently in order to make a profit and meet growing global beef demand. Land has been ecologically degraded, valuable topsoil was lost, and carbon stores declined as a result.
Let the cow do the work
It would be easy to blame cows for this. But really, they’re not behaving much differently than pronghorn or bison would. They eat what’s in front of them. And they eat the tastier plants first. Howell likens it to a salad bar.
“If you go into a salad bar and there’s some lettuce that has been sitting there for three months, and some of it that’s just been replaced that morning, you take the new stuff. So that’s exactly what the cow does,” Howell says. “If she’s not made to move anywhere new, she’s just going to keep coming back and grazing the regrowth of the good stuff as long as it’s there.”
Pretty soon, perennial grass species, important for their deep roots that help prevent erosion and store carbon and water longer, are grazed into nothing. All that’s left are the sagebrush, dandelions, and other less desirable plants that Howell noticed dotting his family ranch.
“So the whole thing is about how the cows are managed, it’s not the cow itself that is a problem,” says Howell.
But if bad management can degrade the land, then good management should be able to restore it. While studying animal science in college, Howell encountered the concepts of “holistic management”, a term that began to decode this relationship between management practices and the health of the land. Controversial at its introduction a half century ago, holistic ranching has been gaining traction, and Howell and his ranch management company, Grasslands LLC, have helped urge its uptake.
The core principle is to make management decisions that restore lands and keep cattle in balance with the rest of the ecosystem—helping them fill the niche of the ancient grazers. This comes with a host of co-benefits, including water retention and higher plant productivity, that actually end up improving economic profitability for ranches in the long run. Simple adjustments, like lengthening the time between grazing a pasture again and wintering cows on native ranges instead of hay, can turn cattle from an ecosystem destroyer to an ecosystem helper.
“The trick is to let the cows do all the hard work,” says Howell.
Carbon modeling: The rancher’s secret weapon
Dr. Watts and Woodwell Senior Scientist Dr. Jonathan Sanderman, along with Dr. Megan Machmuller of Colorado State University, are interested in quantifying those co-benefits. Especially carbon storage.
“In the western US on our rangelands, just like in our croplands, we can change how we manage in a way that potentially could become a natural climate solution,” says Dr. Watts. “One where we’re bringing in more carbon than we’re emitting and we’re creating ecosystems that not only are beneficial for carbon sequestration, but also have more biodiversity, offer more habitat for wildlife, and more water conservation.”
In order to prove that value however, scientists need a baseline understanding of how much carbon is currently stored across both traditionally-and holistically-managed rangelands. It’s hard to get an estimate for such a large area (roughly 30% of the U.S. is covered with rangelands), so they are using a remote sensing model, which they verify with strategic on-the-ground sampling.
Howell’s work also created the perfect conditions for the research team to study the long term carbon benefits of altered ranching practices, which is a tricky thing to test empirically. Ranchers must constantly adjust their management techniques to stay profitable.
“In a classical research setting, you try to control all the variables but one, but in real life that’s not what happens,” says Howell. “Nothing is controlled. Day to day, you have to adapt to constantly changing conditions.”
But the ranches Howell’s company works with make those day-to-day decisions based on the principles of holistic management, so tracking carbon on those ranches over time offers the opportunity to generate baseline data on how they differ from more traditionally managed ones.
Howell also brought the expertise of a life spent on the range. He can identify just about any plant growing in the pasture, tell you which are native, which are invasive, and which used to be the preferred food of prehistoric ground sloths. His eye is trained to see diversity even in martian-esque deserts and read the history of the land in the structure of the soil. In May of 2022, Howell guided Drs. Sanderman, Watts, and Machmuller and their teams on a sample collection trip through Southwest Colorado and Utah. The researchers took soil cores, plant samples, moisture and temperature readings, and analyzed carbon fluxing in and out of the pasture.
The ultimate goal is to create a rangeland carbon management tool that will make the soil carbon data model accessible directly to ranch managers. Dr. Watts hopes having that data in hand will enable more ranchers to make management decisions with climate in mind. Dr. Sanderman also notes that it could be useful in eventually helping ranchers get paid for sustainable practices.
“Rangelands haven’t been included in voluntary carbon credit markets like cropping systems have,” says Dr. Sanderman. “Monitoring is a big problem because there’s so much land—How do you keep track of all that? That’s what our tool will be able to offer.”
Growing a resilient ranch
There are limits to what grazing can accomplish, though. The lands out west aren’t suitable for large-scale cropping, being too dry or too mountainous, which makes them perfect for cattle. But when the animals take up space on land that would otherwise be used to produce crops—or worse, penned into feedlots—their benefits are compromised. Howell also notes that some grazing lands are already as saturated with carbon as they can be. And there remains the fact that ranching will get more complicated as the climate changes.
At the Valdez ranch in Delta, Colorado, Dr. Sanderman and research assistant Colleen Smith unfold a collapsible table in a field of cracking mud, dotted with the brittle stick skeletons of dead grass. Nearby, Dr. Machmuller is assisting Howell in extracting a long metal cylinder from the ground. It was plunged into the soil by a hydraulic corer attached to a pickup truck that’s idling in the field. Howell and Dr. Machmuller lay it out horizontally on the table and slide out the soil core—a 50 centimeter long history of the land beneath their feet.
Howell breaks open a section of the core with his fingers, revealing clusters of white crystals. This is a pasture that has been abused; over-irrigation by previous owners brought salts to the surface. Now nothing will grow here and wind gusts threaten to blow away loose topsoil. It’s a sacrifice zone. The current owners are considering installing solar panels instead.
Water is a big issue for ranchers and it’s threatening to get bigger. The region is constantly dipping in and out of severe drought, and in a place that depends heavily on winter snows for its groundwater and rivers, a warmer, drier climate is a threat.
Agriculture will depend more on irrigation as the climate warms and precipitation patterns change. But this empty pasture is proof that it’s not always a viable solution, and will become less so as climate change advances.
It enforces the urgency of the work Howell and team are doing. The faster we can draw carbon out of the atmosphere, the more successful these ranches are likely to be in the long term. The better managed the ranch, the more resilient it will be in the face of tough conditions.
In the end, Dr. Watts says, the outcome rests in the hands of ranch managers—people like Howell.
“Land managers are the ones that ultimately are going to make or break this country.”
They keep us cool, we cut them down
Standing forests are our best natural climate solution. So why aren’t we treating them that way?
In terms of climate mitigation, forests are like green gold—working overtime to cool the planet, while also supporting a wealth of biodiversity. But we have not been saving them as one would a precious asset. Despite pledges to end deforestation, old growth forests are being cut down at alarming rates. And planting new trees is widely prioritized and incentivized over protecting existing forests. Across the board, standing forests are vastly undervalued. This has to change if we are to stand a chance of limiting warming to internationally agreed targets.
Forests are global air conditioners
According to a recent study from scientists at Woodwell and the University of Virginia, tropical forests alone are holding back approximately 1 degree Celsius of warming. About 75% of that cooling effect is due to carbon sequestration. Forests grow, trees lock away carbon in their trunks and roots and shunt it into the soil. The other 25% comes from the innate properties of forests that work to cool vast regions of the globe.
Through photosynthesis, plants release water vapor into the air in a process called evapotranspiration. The vapor contributes to cooling near the ground, as well as cloud formation higher in the atmosphere that reduces incoming solar radiation. The shape of the tree canopy also contributes. So-called canopy “roughness” disrupts air flow above the forest. The more uneven the canopy, the more turbulent the air, which disperses heat away from the surface. In the tropics, evapotranspiration and canopy roughness are high, which means that surface temperatures remain relatively low, with the heat dispersed throughout the deep atmosphere.
Forests also naturally produce molecules called biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOC), which can either contribute to cooling by encouraging the formation of clouds, or to warming by creating ozone and methane. In the tropics, the net effect of these chemicals is cooling.
The cumulative result of these properties is that when forests are removed, the land around them begins to heat up even faster, which can increase the frequency of extreme heat and drought events. Without forests, some regions will become a lot less resilient to sudden shocks. And the release of carbon contributes to global warming which further exacerbates hot, dry conditions.
“Forests act like air conditioners,” says Woodwell Assistant Scientist, Dr. Ludmila Rattis, who studies the impacts of deforestation on agriculture in Brazil. “Deforesting in the face of climate change is like getting rid of your air conditioners before an upcoming heatwave.”
Not all forests are created equally
Protecting forests, and maintaining the cooling services they provide, is vital to limiting warming. But, with forests covering 30% of the Earth’s land, prioritizing protection is a massive task. And when it comes to carbon storage, not all forests are equally valuable. Older, healthier forests tend to have a more secure hold on their carbon.
“Mature forests have higher biodiversity and create their own microclimate,” says Woodwell Associate Scientist, Brendan Rogers. “They’re more resistant to drought and other types of disturbance. And because of that, they tend to be more stable in the face of environmental perturbations over time.”
New research from Woodwell and Griffith University has developed a method of identifying high-value forests using satellite imagery. Estimating the metric of “forest stability” through satellite data on the light reflected by vegetation and a water stress index of the tree canopy, researchers were able to determine gradients of stability within forest patches in the Amazon and boreal forests.
Using a gradient of forest stability allows for a better prioritization of forest protection strategies based on their carbon value.
“The first priority is to protect stable forests from further human disturbance,” says paper co-author Dr. Brendan Mackey. “The second priority is to identify forest areas where restoration efforts will be most cost effective.”
Guarding the forests that guard our future
But if the state of existing forests is any indication, forest protection continues to be deprioritized. Many wildfires are left to burn unless they threaten human settlements. Governments continue to incentivize deforestation for development or agricultural expansion. Indigenous and local communities are not compensated for their work stewarding their territories and keeping forests safe. And the warmer the planet gets, the more susceptible even protected forests become to drought, fire, and disease.
Research has shown that stewarding standing primary forests, and reviving degraded ones, represents the greatest opportunity for near-term carbon storage and removal. A study of global land-based carbon storage potential found that improved management of existing forests alone could store approximately 215 billion metric tons more than they currently do.
Protecting forests is cost effective, too. For example, in the United States, investing in fire fighting in Alaska’s boreal forests would require just $13 per ton of CO2 emissions avoided. That’s easily on par with other mitigation strategies like onshore wind or solar energy generation.
Effective strategies for protecting forests already exist, they’ve just been suffering from a lack of force—and often funding—behind their implementation. For example, forest carbon markets—where landowners and forest stewards are paid to protect standing forests that are otherwise vulnerable to deforestation—have the potential to keep forests safe while offsetting emissions from other sectors. But nascent carbon markets are inefficient, with weak standards for verifying the quality of credits being sold, and lacking the transparency needed to ensure credits are actually reducing overall emissions, rather than greenwashing carbon-intensive business practices.
Credits are also priced incorrectly for their relative climate value—the market currently values reforestation credits more highly, reducing incentive for landowners to conserve standing, old-growth forests when there is a better livelihood to be made in legally deforesting land for other uses. A truly effective carbon markets system would require large investments in science that can verify credit standards.
Forests are like our global carbon savings accounts—when we cut them down, we’re drawing out money and limiting our ability to collect interest and keep growing our funds. Successful mitigation can’t be accomplished without taking the full value of forests into account and strengthening policies to reflect that. If they aren’t, the planet will pay a far greater price for it as temperatures rise.
“We can’t afford to keep cutting forests. We need to reduce emissions now, and protecting forests is one of our best available solutions. Despite the obstacles, it’s worth the investment,” says Dr. Rogers.