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      Grassland and shrubland fires destroy more U.S. homes than forest fires

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      Forest fires can devastate vast swaths of land, but in the United States, another category of conflagrations takes the title of most destructive.

      Of the homes destroyed in wildfires across the contiguous United States from 1990 to 2020, 64 percent — nearly 11,000 — were razed by grassland and shrubland fires, researchers report in the Nov. 10 Science.  

      “We often think about forest fires because that’s what we see on the news … they’re dramatic, they’re huge, they’re intense,” says ecologist Volker Radeloff of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “but grassland and shrubland fires can also be quite destructive.” For instance, the 2023 Lahaina fire on the Hawaiian island of Maui, fueled by invasive wild grasses, killed at least 98 people and destroyed some 2,200 buildings.

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      For the new study, Radeloff and his colleagues analyzed three decades of data on wildfire occurrence, land use and housing, hoping to learn more about what factors fuel such destructive blazes.

      The team found that about 337,000 square kilometers of grasslands and shrublands burned from 1990 to 2020, compared with about 144,000 square kilometers burned by forest fires. Though forest fires were about twice as likely as grassland fires to burn down homes they encountered, the much larger expanse burned by grassland and shrubland fires helped make them more destructive overall.

      The data also revealed that U.S. wildfire risk had risen substantially. Today, roughly 148,000 houses stand in areas where wildfires have burned before — that’s more than twice as many as in 1990. About half of those additional homes were built on land that had already burned prior to 1990, the team found, while the rest were already standing when a blaze burned through.

      Radeloff hopes more people will consider their wildfire risk and take steps to prepare, be that planning evacuation routes or fireproofing their homes. Evading wildfire danger, it seems, takes more than getting out of the woods. More

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      The last 12 months were the hottest on record

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      The last 12 months were the hottest in 150 years of recordkeeping — and probably in the last 125,000 years — thanks to human-caused climate change, a new report finds.

      From November 2022 through October 2023, the planet’s average temperature was about 1.3 degrees Celsius higher than the average temperature from 1850 to 1900, say researchers with the nonprofit group Climate Central. That’s just shy of the 1.5-degree threshold often cited as a benchmark for avoiding irreversible impacts on the climate (SN: 1/11/22).

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      And over the past year, about 1 in 4 people around the world experienced a climate change–driven heat wave that lasted at least five days, the scientists found.

      The report, released on November 9, comes just ahead of the 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties, which begins on November 30. That’s intentional, says Andrew Pershing, vice president for science at Climate Central. There is no doubt that fossil fuels are driving most of this heat, and it’s to be hoped that the world’s nations will take note of these findings, he says (SN: 4/4/22).

      Global average numbers can be hard to grasp. So the new report also quantifies temperatures that people around the world are actually experiencing day-to-day, and how much those are attributable to climate change, Pershing says.

      “We have these super important global numbers such as the 1.5- or 2-degree warming targets, but that isn’t the experience that people on planet Earth have,” he says (SN: 12/17/18). “We wanted to develop a way to really localize that experience … to talk about how climate change influenced that day’s temperatures on any given day anywhere in the planet.”

      To that end, the analysis used Climate Central’s Climate Shift Index, or CSI, a system first described by the organization in 2022. CSI is a daily local temperature attribution system that uses a combination of observational data and climate simulations to determine the likelihood that local temperature variations are attributable to climate change.

      Extreme heat is a relative term, dependent on both place and time. So, in this report, the researchers considered extreme heat for a given location to be daily temperatures that would have been in the 99th percentile for that place from 1991 to 2020 — temperatures, in other words, that locals would recognize as insanely hot.

      Using that index with data from hundreds of countries, states, provinces and major cities, the researchers found that about 90 percent of the world’s population, or 7.3 billion people, experienced at least 10 days of extreme temperatures in the last year that were very strongly affected by climate change.

      Those days had a CSI rating of at least 3, indicating that human-caused climate change made those temperatures at least three times as likely. Nearly 3 out of 4 people experienced over a month of those temperatures.

      The report also reveals stark inequities in the burden of climate change around the world. Earth’s least developed countries, including many nations in sub-Saharan Africa and in Southeast Asia, had a relatively high average CSI of 2, the report notes, though they have contributed the least amount of fossil fuel emissions.

      But climate impacts are also accelerating in many of the world’s richest countries, including the United States. The last 12 months saw brutal heat waves across much of the southern United States. Houston sweltered through a 22-day streak of extreme heat, where each consecutive day topped 38° C (100° Fahrenheit). That was the longest such extreme heat streak of the 700 cities examined with a population of at least 1 million people.

      The CSI analysis is similar to the analyses performed by the consortium World Weather Attribution, or WWA, which looks for the fingerprints of human-caused climate change in specific extreme events around the world (SN: 7/25/23).

      WWA examined a handful of extreme heat waves over the last 12 months, all of which were strongly attributable to climate change, says Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London who has led many of WWA’s attribution studies.

      An immediate reduction of fossil fuels won’t shut off some effects of a century of emissions, including heat absorbed by the oceans or melted glaciers, Otto says. But global temperatures would stop rising, and heat waves would stop getting worse, she says. Keeping the planet below a 1.5-degree warming threshold “is in reach,” she says, “if we want it to be in reach.”

      The last 12 months saw the onset of an El Niño climate pattern, which can bring higher global temperatures on top of the longer-term global warming trend (SN: 6/15/23). But the greatest temperature impact from El Niño generally takes a year or so to develop, as the heat gets disseminated around the globe, Pershing says.

      The previous 12-month record was set from October 2015 to September 2016, as heat from a strong El Niño event spread around the globe. That record — where the global average was 1.29 degrees Celsius higher than the average preindustrial temperature — was tied earlier this year, for the period ending in September 2023.

      That means that, as the El Niño pattern continues to develop into next year, 2024 will probably smash records once again. More

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      in Heart

      On some Australian islands, sea level rise may be helping mangroves thrive

      by

      Some mangrove forests off Australia have flourished in the last several decades, a new study reports. And, counterintuitively, rising sea levels may be responsible.

      Off Australia’s northern coast, the skeletal remains of ancient coral reefs form the bedrock of numerous wooded islands. These low-lying tropical oases are home to diverse animals and plants, including mangrove forests that pepper their coasts and serve as vital habitat and carbon storers. A recent survey of one cluster of those islands — the first in 50 years — shows that swelling seas might have led to a massive mangrove expansion, researchers report November 1 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

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      In other parts of the world, rising seas have put mangroves at risk (SN: 6/4/20). But at the Howick Islands in the Great Barrier Reef, the story is different because of its unique geologic history.

      “We usually are focusing on areas of mangrove loss,” says Temilola Fatoyinbo, a forest ecologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who was not involved with the study. “So it’s always encouraging to see areas where there’s mangrove gain.”

      Mangroves — groupings of different plants that have adapted to thrive along coastlines — soak up carbon dioxide and store it as “blue carbon,” a term for carbon that is sequestered in marine environments (SN: 9/14/22; SN: 11/18/21).

      “There’s a lot of interest in using mangrove blue carbon to mitigate climate change,” says Kerrylee Rogers, an environmental scientist at the University of Wollongong in Australia. “But there remains a lot of questions around their capacity to adapt to sea level rise.”

      In 2021, a team led by Wollongong environmental scientist Sarah Hamylton visited the Howick Islands to see how the mangroves there are coping with sea level rise. Hamylton flew a drone over the mangroves to capture aerial imagery, while others walked through the brine to assess the plant diversity and measure individual trees. Using the measured widths and heights of several mangroves, the team extrapolated tree widths for the rest of the forest from the drone’s height data to estimate the total mangrove biomass.

      The islands host nearly 54,000 metric tons of mangroves, the team estimates, which is roughly 10,000 more metric tons than was there in 1973. The forest’s reach has also expanded on many islands. While about 25 hectares of every 100 on Newton Island were covered by mangroves in 1973, for example, the forest now blankets close to 40 hectares out of 100.

      Mangrove cover on Bewick Island (pictured) has grown by 50 percent since 1973. Researchers attribute this expansion to rising sea levels, which opens new habitat for the coast-loving plants.Oxana Repina

      The Howick Islands are uniquely suited to supporting mangroves as the ocean rises. At the end of the Last Glacial Maximum, around 12,000 years ago, water levels rose around northern Australia, and coral reefs grew upward to fill the space that had opened for them. When sea levels fell thousands of years later, the exposed reefs eroded into sediment. With sea levels now rising again, the researchers suspect the mixture of saltwater and sediment makes a perfect home for the salt-tolerant mangroves (SN: 9/29/22).

      “As sea level came back down, it wasn’t suitable mangrove habitat,” Rogers says. With those parts of the island now submerged, “it now is suitable again, and it’s largely because it was set up for those conditions [2,000] to 4,000 years ago.”

      The new findings highlight the need for mangrove research on a local scale, Rogers says. “In a global model, this would get lost.” Fatoyinbo agrees. “Studies on the local scale are really useful,” she says, “to better understand big patterns.”

      Rogers and Hamylton are now working on a bigger effort to study mangroves around Australia. “If we’re going to invest in mangroves … to provide us blue carbon and to protect shorelines, we need to understand how dynamic they are,” Rogers says. “And then get some more understanding of how they’re going to adapt to sea level in the future.” More

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      Fake fog, ‘re-skinning’ and ‘sea-weeding’ could help coral reefs survive

      by

      Erinn Muller should have reason to despair. The marine biologist studies coral health in Florida, a state whose reefs have been devastated by extreme heat, increasingly ferocious hurricanes and deadly infectious diseases (SN: 6/15/23; SN: 9/13/23; SN: 7/9/19).

      “We’ve lost 98 percent of our living coral cover,” says Muller, of the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Fla. While among the hardest hit, Florida isn’t alone. From Australia’s Great Barrier Reef to the Caribbean, coral reefs globally are in trouble.

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      But innovative efforts to protect and restore coral reefs buoy Muller’s hopes. She just has to visit Mote’s Caribbean king crab nursery, a project of reef restoration expert Jason Spadaro. There, tiny specks of crustaceans will grow into salad-loving foragers. Once they are set loose on nearby reefs, Maguimithrax spinosissimus eat away suffocating seaweed.

      “I’m optimistic because there is really truly so much work being done” to restore coral reefs, says Tali Vardi, a marine biologist and executive director of the Coral Restoration Consortium, a global community of scientists, managers and restoration experts dedicated to helping coral reefs. While safeguarding the future of coral reefs ultimately depends on halting climate change, “we’re trying to maintain pockets of biodiversity” that can serve as a springboard for the long-term recovery of reefs.

      Given how diverse coral reefs are, Vardi says, researchers need a diversity of solutions to match. “There’s no silver bullet here.”

      Around the globe, coral biologists are trying everything from low-tech seaweed removal to high-tech artificial fog production to protect corals. Here’s a closer look at three projects that researchers are developing to help save coral reefs.

      Sea-weeding, literally

      In Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, it’s not crabs doing the weeding. It’s volunteers with Earthwatch Institute — an international environmental organization — snorkeling and diving underwater to pluck macroalgae, the weed of the sea. The volunteers’ goal is to free parts of the reef from a seaweed scourge to see if that leads to a resurgence in coral.

      “There’s been this issue with increases in macroalgae versus corals for a long time,” says David Bourne. “If something’s out of whack” with the reef ecosystem, “the corals lose out and the macroalgae take over.”

      Though they seem like a cross between plants and rocks, the hard corals that form reefs are actually giant colonies of tiny animals called coral polyps. The polyps secrete a hard skeleton made of calcium carbonate, and skeleton by skeleton, they build an undersea city. Tiny photosynthetic algae partners living inside the polyps give the corals their brilliant colors and generate energy for their hosts.

      Seaweed, however, takes up space and soaks up light that could otherwise be used by corals. If corals decline in number due to stressors like heat or disease, seaweed can quickly proliferate and take their place.

      Bourne, a marine biologist at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, wanted to know if the seaweed-removal program being run by Earthwatch was effective. From 2018 to 2021, volunteers pruned seaweed from 24 sections of the reef — each 5 meters by 5 meters — several times per year, while leaving other seaweed-laden areas alone. In total, they removed a whopping 2,148 kilograms of seaweed.

      At the start, the tended plots had enough corals to cover only about 34 square meters. Removing macroalgae from those plots led to a total gain of nearly 203 square meters of coral cover, enough to blanket a tennis court, Bourne’s team reported September 13 in the Journal of Applied Ecology. This change wasn’t seen in the plots left unpruned.

      After volunteers removed suffocating seaweed from sections of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, coral cover expanded dramatically in just a few years. These photos show the same part of the reef in May 2019 and May 2023.Hillary Smith

      “It’s not surprising that we saw some recovery,” Bourne says. “What was surprising was the amount of recovery and how quickly it happened.” Sea-weeding is a straightforward way to skew the reef’s competitive balance and help corals thrive, he says.

      Bourne hopes the simplicity of the approach will help it spread. “The advantage of sea-weeding is it’s really low tech; anybody can do it,” he says. Plus, seaweed tends to be an issue on reefs that are close to shore and known to local communities, “so there’s active groups that are interested in helping.”

      ‘Re-skinning’ a coral skeleton

      Though it may sound macabre, the calcium carbonate skeletons of dead reefs can serve as vital scaffolding for new corals to flourish. “Re-skinning” a dead reef takes advantage of coral microfragments, small bits of coral polyps. Growing microfragments in the lab and then transplanting them onto reef skeletons can, in a way, bring a dead ecosystem back to life.

      David Vaughan discovered the restorative potential of coral microfragments through what he calls a “eureka mistake.” Vaughan, formerly executive director of Mote and now head of the nonprofit Plant A Million Corals in Summerland Key, Fla., accidentally broke off shards of a branching coral while moving it to a new tank. Some coral polyps remained on the bottom of the tank. Vaughn assumed the tiny animals wouldn’t survive. But when he checked on them about two weeks later, he saw instead that they had quickly grown and multiplied.

      Large corals grow slowly, Muller says, because they have to put a lot of energy into creating more of their calcium carbonate skeleton. If you instead affix multiple microfragments, consisting of a thin skeletal layer with a small bit of live coral tissue on top, near each other on a hard surface, they grow rapidly and fuse together. Mote scientists “hacked the biology of a lot of these slow-growing species to encourage them to put a lot of their resources into creating tissue faster,” Muller says.

      Microfragments of slow-growing corals that are placed near each other on the skeleton of a dead coral will quickly grow and merge together. Coral fragments, like these pictured at Mote Marine Laboratory, can be grown in land-based nurseries.Mote Marine Laboratory

      A 2018 study found that microfragments of the mountainous star coral (Orbicella faveolata) grew 10 times as much tissue over a 31-month period as the normal, larger fragments that were previously used for reef restoration. For every square centimeter of coral that was planted at the beginning of the experiment, microfragments grew an average of 3.38 square centimeters of new tissue, while larger fragments grew only 0.35 square centimeters. Ocean plantings of coral microfragments have since withstood disease, bleaching and hurricanes, and grown large enough to reproduce within several years.

      “Spawning after five years,” Spadaro says, “was definitely a game changer in terms of restoration.” Re-skinning with microfragments can give you functional reef ecosystems in a fraction of the time as previous methods. Mote scientists have since shared their knowledge with others working to restore corals around the world, such as in Hawaii and the Caribbean.

      Making shade

      Bleaching is the dramatic outcome of great hardship; pushed to the brink by extreme stress, a strained coral belches out its symbiotic photosynthetic algae, turning stark white and losing its primary food source. Excessive heat is the most common culprit, but it’s not the only one.

      Excess light can lead to bleaching, too, says Peter Butcherine, a biologist at Southern Cross University in Coffs Harbour, Australia. Too much light during photosynthesis, performed by the corals’ algae partners, leads to an abundance of toxic oxygen-containing molecules that are highly reactive and can cause cell death. Protecting corals from too much sun exposure can help prevent bleaching, but “you can’t roll out thousands of square meters of shade cloth” to shield an area the size of the Great Barrier Reef, Butcherine says.

      Instead, Butcherine and others have turned to a more ephemeral approach: creating fog. “It’s essentially a sea mist,” Butcherine says. Though misting the entire Great Barrier Reef isn’t feasible, marine fog could be used to protect sensitive parts of the reef during the time of day when sunlight is at its harshest.

      [embedded content]
      Too much sunlight can lead to coral bleaching, much like excessive heat can. By creating artificial marine fog using arrays of misters mounted to ships, like what’s seen in this video, researchers hope to shield reefs such as Australia’s Great Barrier Reef from harmful rays.

      Butcherine and colleagues showed that shading corals for just four hours a day can delay bleaching even when water temperatures are high, such that corals could withstand three extra weeks of bleaching-level heat. The results of that laboratory study were published in the Sept. 20 Frontiers in Marine Science. This delay could help corals hold on to their algal partners until the environment around them cools.

      Because it’s still being developed, marine fogging is quite expensive; it requires large arrays of misters mounted to ships. But Butcherine is excited by the potential of using solar power, including sun-powered drones mounted with misters, to implement the technique at a wider scale, and even at other reefs around the world.

       “I’m optimistic that we can make a difference,” Butcherine says. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Heart

      See the wonders of two newfound deep-sea coral reefs off the Galápagos

      by

      Four decades ago, warm waters from an El Niño event killed off nearly all the corals surrounding the Galápagos. Most coral reefs never recovered (SN: 1/9/15). But in recent months, researchers have discovered vast landscapes of thriving corals in deeper waters surrounding the equatorial islands.

      In April, scientists documented the first pristine deep coral reef found in the region, dubbed Cacho De Coral, which sits atop the ridge of an underwater volcano and stretches about 250 meters. On October 26, a second team announced the discovery of an even bigger reef, this one more than 800 meters long, spanning the length of eight football fields.  

      With coral reefs around the globe in peril due to climate change, the finds are a small piece of good news (SN: 8/9/23). These newfound reefs within the Galápagos Islands Marine Reserve have so far been protected from human influence and the direct impacts of warming waters.

      Brittle stars and shrimps are among the creatures living in and around a newly discovered reef west of the Galápagos’ Fernandina Island.Schmidt Ocean Institute

      The newest reef was discovered when oceanographer Stuart Banks and colleagues set out on a 30-day expedition to explore parts of the ocean using a remotely operated robot named SuBastian. While in the Galápagos Islands Marine Reserve, which included a visit to Cacho De Coral, the team spotted a second reef.

      “It’s like coming into your house and realizing that you’ve got a basement that you never knew was there,” says Banks, of the Charles Darwin Research Station on Santa Cruz Island in the Galápagos. “And it’s full of really cool stuff.”

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      The newly identified reefs are in cold waters up to 420 meters below the surface, the Schmidt Ocean Institute, a nonprofit based in Palo Alto, Calif., that operates ocean research vessels, announced in a news release. Such a location probably helped corals living there remain pristine. Unlike corals that flourish in warm, shallow water with lots of sunlight to fuel symbiotic algae, deep-sea corals survive in darker parts of the ocean that don’t warm up as quickly under climate change (SN: 12/11/18).

      It’s rare to find so much living coral in one spot, and scientists often need to get close to glimpse everything that’s hiding inside rocky reefs, Banks says. “Seeing these things for the first time is always a big ‘wow.’”

      [embedded content]
      Using a remotely operated vehicle, researchers captured the marvels of pristine coral reefs found hundreds of meters below the surface of the ocean. Shown are various creatures the team observed on deep-sea reefs in the Galápagos Islands Marine Reserve, including one dubbed Cacho De Coral. More

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      in Heart

      Pumping cold water into rivers could act as ‘air conditioning’ for fish

      by

      PITTSBURGH — Salmon may now have their own version of human air conditioning.  

      This past summer, hundreds of fish in the Wrights River in Nova Scotia, Canada, found reprieve from the heat in human-generated plumes of cold water, civil engineer Kathryn Smith reported October 17 at the Geological Society of America meeting. The work, though only proof of concept, could aid efforts to conserve cold-water species amid the widespread warming of rivers due to climate change (SN: 10/20/22).

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      When water temperatures get too hot, fish can become stressed or even die. In rivers, Atlantic salmon and other cold-water species sometimes escape the heat by flocking to cooler areas, which often arise near groundwater springs or relatively cool tributaries.

      Lots of work has been done to preserve and augment these naturally occurring refuges, said Smith, of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, “but there hasn’t really been an emphasis or focus on if we can create cold-water habitat.”

      So she and her colleagues pumped groundwater that was about 9° Celsius (or about 48° Fahrenheit) from a nearby well into the river, manifesting an artificial plume of water that could be as much as 20 degrees Celsius cooler than the surrounding water.

      Researchers pumped groundwater into the Wrights River during the summer to create a plume of cooler water that fish could shelter in (image on the left). A thermal image (right) shows the effect: Cooler water appears darker purple while warmer water and sun-baked rocks are orange and yellow.Kathryn Smith

      The plume attracted several hundred fish of varying life stages and species, including Atlantic salmon and brown trout. Most were alevins — juvenile fish still attached to yolk sacs — that occupied the plume throughout the tests. But when a heat wave brought on maximum water temperatures of about 30° C, more mature fish also took shelter in the plume.

      For a pump-free approach, the team also rerouted some water from the river into an underground trench, where it cooled before reentering the river. Though this method lowered the water temperature by only a few degrees Celsius, fish were observed frequenting the passively cooled flow throughout the summer.

      More work lies ahead to determine how many of these sites would need to be constructed and sustained to significantly benefit fish populations, and how to do so while keeping energy costs low, says John Ackerman, a consulting engineer based in Hazleton, Pa., who was not involved in the research. But the researchers are demonstrating that these solutions can work, he says. “The concept is solid.” More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Heart

      Berkley Walker wants to revamp photosynthesis for a changing climate

      by

      Berkley Walker didn’t plan on becoming a scientist; he wanted to be an entrepreneur. And he got started early on that goal: In high school in Portland, Ore., he started a granola bar company, which helped pay for his bachelor’s degree in microbiology.

      After college, Walker went to work as a product manager at an instrumentation company in Washington state, planning to go to business school and then into biotech. But a class on environmental biophysics at nearby Washington State University in 2009 changed his trajectory.  

      The course was about using mathematics to model physical systems in nature. “Working that math out to understand how energy and matter exchange within the environment,” Walker says — that was all it took. He decided to pursue a career as a plant scientist. “I wanted to have some kind of usefulness to the world,” Walker says. “Feeding people is where I settled.”

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      Amazing but inefficient plants

      Today, at Michigan State University, Walker wants to understand the intricate details of how photosynthesis works, with the ultimate aim of improving it.

      He remains deeply fascinated by plants: “You just take this little seed, you put it in the dirt and then you get this plant,” he says. “And it spreads these leaves out. And those leaves just take the sun, and they scrub carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and they use that to make the food that we eat, the clothes that we wear, the air that we breathe, energy that we consume. And that’s just miraculous.”

      But as impressive as photosynthesis is, it is surprisingly inefficient. A leaf converts just around 1 percent of the sun’s light into usable energy, Walker says. In part that’s because of mistakes in the first step of photosynthesis. The enzyme that captures CO2 molecules and sticks them to sugar makes a lot of mistakes, often grabbing oxygen instead. Those mistakes result in a compound that actually inhibits photosynthesis. Photorespiration, a kind of recycling process, gets rid of that compound — but photorespiration requires a lot of energy.

      Losses due to this recycling in the American Midwest over an average wheat and soybean growing season add up to about 148 trillion dietary calories, Walker says. “If you were to convert these calories into doughnut equivalents,” he says, “you would have a stack of doughnuts that would go to the moon and back about 11 times.”

      Any efficiency gain could make a huge difference in agricultural productivity. But first scientists have to better understand how photorespiration works.

      To that end, Walker came up with an innovative technique to trace carbon molecules in leaves, research reported in a 2022 paper in Nature Plants. The researchers were using flux analysis, which reveals the movements of molecules through plants’ metabolic network. But they needed a better way to freeze the metabolism of a plant. The problem was, there was no way to spray liquid nitrogen into the instrument chamber that held the leaves.

      After talking to engineers at the company that makes the instrument, Walker decided to drill a hole in the chamber so his team could insert a nozzle to spray in liquid nitrogen and hit the leaf surface instantaneously. “That’s a really critical step,” says Xinyu Fu, who has been a postdoc in Walker’s lab for the past four years. A lot could change in the 10 seconds it would take to open the chamber and take the leaf out.

      Xinyu Fu, a postdoc in Berkley Walker’s lab, prepares to rapidly freeze a leaf for metabolic analysis.Chelsea Mamott/Wisconsin Energy Institute

      The work revealed that up to about 40 percent of the carbon-bearing amino acid serine that is produced during photorespiration gets diverted by the plant to be used for something — perhaps protein synthesis — rather than going all the way through the recycling process. That suggests optimizing photorespiration in the context of climate change could result in more nutritious, protein-rich crops. But, “as we’re trying to change it,” Walker says, “we need to understand what trade-offs there might be.”

      A generosity of spirit

      Colleagues who know Walker best point to his eagerness to collaborate as one of his strengths, along with his generosity of spirit.

      Don Ort, a plant scientist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Walker’s postdoc adviser for nearly three years, says Walker is a committed teacher and colleague. “Being involved in the education of graduate students and postdocs is a passion for him,” Ort says. “He’s very passionate about what he does. He does it with a very high level of enthusiasm and a very high level of optimism. And it’s infectious to people around him.”

      Walker sees plant science as one big community that is trying to solve two big problems: How to make crops more productive to feed a growing population, and how to do it in a changing climate, which may pose any number of challenges to agriculture. And he believes we’ll start seeing solutions in the coming decades, whether they come out of his lab or someone else’s.

      “Whoever comes up with those, and if they’re shown to work and work repeatedly in a lot of crops, then that’s a really big deal,” he says. “That’s the kind of idea that we’re chasing.” More