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Human development and population growth are placing immense pressure on natural ecosystems, necessitating the establishment of a balance between development and biodiversity preservation. Citizen science may serve as a valuable resource for monitoring biodiversity and informing decision‐making processes, but its use has not been investigated within the realm of environmental review. We sought to quantify the extent to which citizen science data are currently being used, mentioned, or suggested in environmental impact statements (EISs) by analyzing more than 1300 EISs produced under the US National Environmental Policy Act. Among the sampled EISs, we found increasing incorporation of citizen science within the environmental review process, with 40% of EISs in 2022 using, mentioning, or suggesting use of such information, as compared with just 3% in 2012. Citizen science offers substantial potential to enhance biodiversity monitoring and conservation efforts within environmental review, but numerous considerations must be broadly discussed before citizen science data can be widely adopted. 

Abstract Global expansion in wind energy development is a notable achievement of the international community’s effort to reduce carbon emissions during energy production. However, the increasing number of wind turbines have unintended consequences for migratory birds and bats. Wind turbine curtailment and other mitigation strategies can reduce fatalities, but improved spatial and temporal data are needed to identify the most effective way for wind energy development and volant migratory species to coexist. Mexican free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis mexicana) account for a large proportion of known bat fatalities at wind facilities in the southwestern US. We examined the geographic concordance between existing wind energy generation facilities, areas of high wind potential amenable for future deployment of wind facilities, and seasonally suitable habitat for these bats. We used ecological niche modeling to determine species distribution during each of 4 seasons. We used a multi-criteria GIS-based approach to produce a wind turbine siting suitability map. We identified seasonal locations with highest and lowest potential for the species’ probability of occurrence, providing a potential explanation for the higher observed fatalities during fall migration. Thirty percent of 33,606 wind turbines within the southwestern US occurred in highly suitable areas for Mexican free-tailed bats, primarily in west Texas. There is also broad spatial overlap between areas of high wind potential and areas of suitable habitat for Mexican free-tailed bats. Because of this high degree of overlap, our results indicate that post-construction strategies, such as curtailing the timing of operations and deterrents, would be more effective for bat conservation than strategic siting of new wind energy installations. 

Abstract Climate change is triggering regional-scale alterations in vegetation including land cover change such as forest die-off. At sufficient magnitudes, land cover change from forest die-off in one region can change not only local climate but also vegetation including agriculture elsewhere via changes in larger scale climate patterns, termed an ‘ecoclimate teleconnection’. Ecoclimate teleconnections can therefore have impacts on vegetative growth in distant regions, but the degrees to which the impact decays with distance or directionally diffuses relative to the initial perturbation are general properties that have not been evaluated. We used the Community Earth system model to study this, examining the implications of tree die-off in 14 major US forested regions. For each case we evaluated the ecological impact across North America as a function of distance and direction from the location of regional tree die-off. We found that the effects on gross primary productivity (GPP) generally decayed linearly with distance, with notable exceptions. Distance from the region of tree die-off alone explained up to ∼30% of the variance in many regions. We also found that the GPP impact was not uniform across directions and that including an additional term to account for direction to regional land cover change from tree die-off was statistically significant for nearly all regions and explained up to ∼40% of the variance in many regions, comparable in magnitude to the influence of El Nino on GPP in the Western US. Our results provide novel insights into the generality of distance decay and directional diffusion of ecoclimate teleconnections, and suggest that it may be hard to identify expected impacts of tree die-off without case-specific simulations. Such patterns of distance decay, directional diffusion, and their exceptions are relevant for cross-regional policy that links forests and other agriculture (e.g. US Department of Agriculture). 

Abstract Natural language processing techniques can be used to analyze the linguistic content of a document to extract missing pieces of metadata. However, accurate metadata extraction may not depend solely on the linguistics, but also on structural problems such as extremely large documents, unordered multi‐file documents, and inconsistency in manually labeled metadata. In this work, we start from two standard machine learning solutions to extract pieces of metadata from Environmental Impact Statements, environmental policy documents that are regularly produced under the US National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. We present a series of experiments where we evaluate how these standard approaches are affected by different issues derived from real‐world data. We find that metadata extraction can be strongly influenced by nonlinguistic factors such as document length and volume ordering and that the standard machine learning solutions often do not scale well to long documents. We demonstrate how such solutions can be better adapted to these scenarios, and conclude with suggestions for other NLP practitioners cataloging large document collections. 

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) provides a trove of data on how environmental policy decisions have been made in the United States over the last 50 years. Unfortunately, there is no central database for this information and it is too voluminous to assess manually. We describe our efforts to enable systematic research over US environmental policy by extracting and organizing metadata from the text of NEPA documents. Our contributions include collecting more than 40,000 NEPA-related documents, and evaluating rule-based baselines that establish the difficulty of three important tasks: identifying lead agencies, aligning document versions, and detecting reused text. 

Abstract Biodiversity conservation efforts have been criticized for generating inequitable socio‐economic outcomes. These equity challenges are largely analyzed as place‐based problems affecting local communities directly impacted by conservation programs. The conservation of migratory species extends this problem geographically since people in one place may benefit while those in another bear the costs of conservation. Thespatial subsidiesapproach offers an effective tool for analyzing such relationships between places connected by migratory species. Designed to quantify ecosystem services provided and received in specific locations across a migratory species’ range—and the disparities between them—the spatial subsidies approach highlights three axes of inequity: between indigenous and settler colonial societies, between urban and rural populations, and between the Global North and Global South. Recognizing these relationships is critical to achieving two mutually reinforcing policy goals: avoiding inequitable conservation outcomes in efforts to conserve migratory species, and ensuring effective long‐term conservation of migratory species. In demonstrating how the spatial subsidies approach enables the identification and quantification of inequities involving three migratory species (northern pintail ducks, monarch butterflies, and Mexican free‐tailed bats), we argue that a spatial subsidies approach could apply to migratory species conservation efforts worldwide under the context of “payments for ecosystem services.” 

Abstract AimAddressing global environmental challenges requires access to biodiversity data across wide spatial, temporal and taxonomic scales. Availability of such data has increased exponentially recently with the proliferation of biodiversity databases. However, heterogeneous coverage, protocols, and standards have hampered integration among these databases. To stimulate the next stage of data integration, here we present a synthesis of major databases, and investigate (a) how the coverage of databases varies across taxonomy, space, and record type; (b) what degree of integration is present among databases; (c) how integration of databases can increase biodiversity knowledge; and (d) the barriers to database integration. LocationGlobal. Time periodContemporary. Major taxa studiedPlants and vertebrates. MethodsWe reviewed 12 established biodiversity databases that mainly focus on geographic distributions and functional traits at global scale. We synthesized information from these databases to assess the status of their integration and major knowledge gaps and barriers to full integration. We estimated how improved integration can increase the data coverage for terrestrial plants and vertebrates. ResultsEvery database reviewed had a unique focus of data coverage. Exchanges of biodiversity information were common among databases, although not always clearly documented. Functional trait databases were more isolated than those pertaining to species distributions. Variation and potential incompatibility of taxonomic systems used by different databases posed a major barrier to data integration. We found that integration of distribution databases could lead to increased taxonomic coverage that corresponds to 23 years’ advancement in data accumulation, and improvement in taxonomic coverage could be as high as 22.4% for trait databases. Main conclusionsRapid increases in biodiversity knowledge can be achieved through the integration of databases, providing the data necessary to address critical environmental challenges. Full integration across databases will require tackling the major impediments to data integration: taxonomic incompatibility, lags in data exchange, barriers to effective data synchronization, and isolation of individual initiatives.