FOREST

• From late April through June 2024, the largest brood of 13-year cicadas, known as Brood XIX, will co-emerge with a midwestern brood of 17-year cicadas, Brood XIII.
• A co-emergence like this of two specific broods with different life cycles happens only once every 221 years.
• For about four weeks, scattered wooded and suburban areas will ring with cicadas’ distinctive whistling, buzzing and chirping mating calls.
• Once the eggs hatch, new cicada nymphs will fall from the trees and burrow back underground, starting the cycle again.
• It’s no accident that the scientific name for periodical 13- and 17-year cicadas is Magicicada, shortened from “magic cicada.”

Ancient visitors

• Molecular analysis has shown that about 4 million years ago, the ancestor of the current Magicicada species split into two lineages.
• The resulting three lineages are the basis of the modern periodical cicada species groups, Decim, Cassini and Decula.
• The sudden appearance of so many insects reminded them of biblical plagues of locusts, which are a type of grasshopper.
• During the 19th century, notable entomologists such as Benjamin Walsh, C.V. Riley and Charles Marlatt worked out the astonishing biology of periodical cicadas.

Acting in unison

• This increases their chances of accomplishing their key mission aboveground: finding mates.
• While periodical cicadas largely come out on schedule every 17 or 13 years, often a small group emerges four years early or late.
• Early-emerging cicadas may be faster-growing individuals that had access to abundant food, and the laggards may be individuals that subsisted with less.

Will climate change shift Magicicada clocks?

• As glaciers retreated from what is now the U.S. some 10,000 to 20,000 years ago, periodical cicadas filled eastern forests.
• Today there are 12 broods of 17-year periodical cicadas in northeastern deciduous forests, where trees drop leaves in winter.
• Because periodical cicadas are sensitive to climate, the patterns of their broods and species reflect climatic shifts.
• Although periodical cicadas prefer forest edges and thrive in suburban areas, they cannot survive deforestation or reproduce successfully in areas without trees.

• In the late 19th century, one Brood (XXI) disappeared from north Florida and Georgia.
• Climate change could also have farther-reaching effects.
• As the U.S. climate warms, longer growing seasons may provide a larger food supply.
• This may eventually change more 17-year cicadas into 13-year cicadas, just as past warming altered Magicicada neotredecim.
• We hypothesize that this was due to climate warming.

John Cooley receives funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Geographic Society. Chris Simon has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the National Geographic Society and the New Zealand Marsden Fund.

• Kelp forests help to support fisheries, draw down carbon and improve water quality — in the process contributing billions to the global economy.
• We also show that, despite recent impacts of climate change, kelp forests in some areas have remained stable, offering hope for future kelp forests and shedding light on the drivers of ecosystem resilience.

Marine forests in hot water

• Beginning in 2014, a string of marine heat waves created warmer-than-usual conditions that have wreaked havoc on a range of ocean species.
• Marine heat waves are becoming longer and more intense as greenhouse gas emissions continue.
• Together, marine heat waves and seastar declines led to devastating kelp forest losses along many parts of North America’s west coast over the past decade.

Threats to kelp in Western Canada

• Thanks to ancient glaciers that carved up and reshaped Canada’s Pacific coast, B.C.’s kelp forests inhabit a rich mosaic of environments.
• Nearly 40,000 islands and dozens of glacial fjords create diverse habitats for kelp.
• In these areas, kelp forests have experienced large losses, especially over the past decade.
• In some parts of B.C.’s central and northern coasts, some kelp forests are also in decline despite cooler waters.

Reasons for optimism

• kelp forests have remained stable.
• In fact, some of these healthy kelp forests might even be growing.
• Areas with cool water temperatures, such as the Strait of Juan de Fuca, have stable kelp forests, despite extensive losses close by.

Innovative solutions are needed to save kelp

• kelp forests are faring under intense ocean warming driven by climate change.
• Read more:
  NZ’s vital kelp forests are in peril from ocean warming – threatening the important species that rely on them

  Global and regional initiatives to protect and restore kelp forests are gaining momentum.

• This might include restoration of important predators in the ecosystem, controlling urchins so that kelp forests can flourish, or developing new techniques to restore kelp forests using strains capable of surviving warming conditions.

• He is affiliated with The Kelp Rescue Initiative, based at the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre, and was affiliated with the University of Victoria during this project.
• Christopher Neufeld received funding relevant to this project from the Ngan-Page Family Fund via The Kelp Rescue Initiative, based at the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre.
• She is affiliated with The Kelp Rescue Initiative, based at the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre.

• In an article published today in Nature, my colleagues and I show that illicit, often out-of-control road building is imperilling forests in Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea.
• Once roads are bulldozed into rainforests, illegal loggers, miners, poachers and landgrabbers arrive.
• Once they get access, they can destroy forests, harm native ecosystems and even drive out or kill indigenous peoples.
• All nations have some unmapped or unofficial roads, but the situation is especially bad in biodiversity-rich developing nations, where roads are proliferating at the fastest pace in human history.

Mapping ghost roads

• This workforce then spent some 7,000 hours hand-mapping roads, using fine-scale satellite images from Google Earth.
• For starters, unmapped ghost roads seemed to be nearly everywhere.
• In fact, when comparing our findings to two leading road databases, OpenStreetMap and the Global Roads Inventory Project, we found ghost roads in these regions to be 3 to 6.6 times longer than all mapped roads put together.

• When ghost roads appear, local deforestation soars – usually immediately after the roads are built.
• We found the density of roads was by far the most important predictor of forest loss, outstripping 38 other variables.

Roads and protected areas

• In protected areas, we found only one-third as many roads compared with nearby unprotected lands.
• The bad news is that when people do build roads inside protected areas, it leads to about the same level of forest destruction compared to roads outside them.
• Keeping existing protected areas intact is especially urgent, given more than 3,000 protected areas have already been downsized or degraded globally for new roads, mines and local land-use pressures.

Hidden roads and the human footprint

• To gauge how much impact we’re having, researchers use the human footprint index, which brings together data on human activities such as roads and other infrastructure, land-uses, illumination at night from electrified settlements and so on.
• When ghost roads are included in mapping the human impact on eastern Borneo, areas with “very high” human disturbance double in size, while the areas of “low” disturbance are halved.

Artificial intelligence

• Worse, these roads can be actively encouraged by aggressive infrastructure-expansion schemes — most notably China’s Belt and Road Initiative, now active in more than 150 nations.
• You might think AI could do this better, but that’s not yet true – human eyes can still outperform image-recognition AI software for mapping roads.
• Once we have this information, we can make it public that so authorities, NGOs and researchers involved in forest protection can see what’s happening.

Distinguished Professor Bill Laurance receives funding from the Australian Research Council and other scientific and philanthropic bodies. He is a former Australian Laureate and director of the Centre for Tropical Environmental and Sustainability Science at James Cook University.

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