Is there enough water? How bearish and bullish outlooks are linked to decision maker perspectives on environmental flows.

Policies that mandate environmental flows (e-flows) can be powerful tools for freshwater conservation, but implementation of these policies faces many hurdles. To better understand these challenges, we explored two key questions: (1) What additional data are needed to implement e-flows? and (2) What are the major socio-political barriers to implementing e-flows? We surveyed water and natural resource decision makers in the semi-arid Red River basin, Texas-Oklahoma, USA, and used social network analysis to analyze their communication patterns. Most respondents agreed that e-flows can provide important benefits and identified the same data needs.

Hotspots of species loss do not vary across future climate scenarios in a drought-prone river basin.

Climate change is expected to alter the distributions of species around the world, but estimates of species' outcomes vary widely among competing climate scenarios. Where should conservation resources be directed to maximize expected conservation benefits given future climate uncertainty? Here, we explore this question by quantifying variation in fish species' distributions across future climate scenarios in the Red River basin south-central United States. We modeled historical and future stream fish distributions using a suite of environmental covariates derived from high-resolution hydrologic and climatic modeling of the basin.

Allocating resources for land protection using continuous optimization: biodiversity conservation in the United States.

Spatial optimization approaches that were originally developed to help conservation organizations determine protection decisions over small spatial scales are now used to inform global or continental scale priority setting. However, the different decision contexts involved in large-scale resource allocation need to be considered. We present a continuous optimization approach in which a decision-maker allocates funding to regional offices.

A landscape of conservation philanthropy for U.S. land trusts.

Finding ways to increase financial support is critical to conservation efforts. We used conservation fundraising data, unprecedented in their resolution, to reveal spatial patterns in philanthropic giving to a major land protection organization in the United States. We also quantified the relationship between the amount of effort devoted to fundraising and donations received.

The movement of aquatic mercury through terrestrial food webs.

Mercury has contaminated rivers worldwide, with health consequences for aquatic organisms and humans who consume them. Researchers have focused on aquatic birds as sentinels for mercury. However, trophic transfer between adjacent ecosystems could lead to the export of aquatic mercury to terrestrial habitats.