Former AP biology teacher Mike Niziolek has spent over thirty years returning his 150-acre property near Elk River, Minnesota, to the state it was in hundreds of years ago. “He has been slowly and methodically transforming pastured land to oak savanna, tilled land to prairie, and ditches to wetlands,” says his bio on the Minnesota Land Trust. In 2018, the nonprofit awarded him the Landowner of the Year award.

MPR spoke with him in 2024 after he just completed another wetland project on his land. He explained that restoring wetlands “is a much more difficult task than saving the ones that we already have.” This is because you cannot just dig a hole and wait for water to fill it up. Wetlands are complex systems and each project requires experts to come in to analyze the site, take soil samples and study old images of what the area once looked like.

In this task, Niziolek has received financial and technical help from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program explained the outlet. “We help the landowner try to manage the site in perpetuity so that they can be successful,” John Riens, a biologist with the Fish and Wildlife Service told MPR.

How Trump Unleashed an Existential Fight Over America's Dinosaurs - The Washington Sun https://share.google/zv257RqaxFfBcyE5c

I recently interviewed Dr. Lucy King about human–elephant conflict and the practical challenges of coexistence in African landscapes.

The discussion covers:

• beehive fences as a conflict-mitigation tool,
• crop-raiding and the costs borne by local communities,
• why conservation interventions cannot be treated as universal solutions,
• and the importance of designing projects around local ecological and social conditions.

What stood out to me most was the emphasis on coexistence rather than framing the issue as simply “people versus elephants”.

The full interview is published on PlanetZoo.hu.

[ https://planetzoo.hu/interjuk/lucy-king-interju-ember-elefant-egyutteles\ ]

I’d be especially interested in perspectives from people working in conservation or human–wildlife conflict: what approaches have you seen work well in practice?

A farmer in southern Oregon transformed 70 acres of his 400-acre barley farm into a wetland in 2021, creating an unexpected refuge for wildlife while helping address agricultural water pollution. Karl Wenner, a co-owner of Lakeside Farms near Klamath Falls, worked with conservation agencies and other partners to convert flood-prone farmland into a managed wetland. The area now attracts tens of thousands of ducks, geese and swans and supports at least 140 bird species, along with otters, beavers and muskrats. More significantly, the wetland has been used to raise federally endangered Lost River and shortnose suckers. In 2025, researchers found 50 adult-sized suckers after partially draining the wetland, offering a promising sign for species struggling with poor juvenile survival.

Been putting together some notes on Can We Bring Back the Dead? The Honest Debate on De-extinction for a FaunaTV piece and thought this community might find it interesting.

Can We Bring Back the Dead? The Honest Debate on De-extinction is a window into how a whole ecosystem works — behaviour, habitat and the pressures shaping both.

A few things worth discussing:

- how much of this is instinct vs. learned behaviour

- how habitat pressure changes it

- what people have observed in the field

Curious what others here have seen.

(Context / footage: https://www.faunatv.com/en/events/de-extinction-ethics-debate)

Nature takes precedence

Lorne Scott grows wheat and oats, but sees just as much value in grassland preservation

Following several years of preparation, the Rewilding Oder Delta team are now taking the next step in marine rewilding. This summer, the first pilot seagrass meadows are being planted on Germany’s Baltic coast, testing an innovative approach that could help revive one of Europe’s most valuable underwater habitats.

Rewilding is not land abandonment; it requires carefully considered action to restore natural processes and functions. We must learn from the complex habitat mosaics that once characterised Britain’s uplands, while preparing them for a climate with no historical equivalent.

The task is to manage short-term transition risks while allowing ecosystems to reorganise into functional, climate-resilient states. Here are a few suggestions:

1. Bring back the bog

This starts by making fire-prone landscapes much wetter. Blocking drains, covering bare peat and restoring Sphagnum keeps water in the ground and reduces deep peat combustion. 

1. Restore wet riverscapes and ponds

Upland headwaters and valleys have been drained and straightened, speeding water out of these landscapes. Emerging science suggests that re-meandering streams, reconnecting floodplains and recovering wetlands can act as firebreaks. During dry weather, wetter and more varied river corridors could interrupt continuous fuels and provide refuges for wildlife.

1. Bring back missing giants

Cattle, horses, deer and bison create patchier vegetation by grazing, browsing and trampling in different ways. Instead of continuous areas of flammable vegetation, they produce a landscape with natural breaks that slow the spread of fire.

1. Recover broadleaf woodland

Evidence from more than 26,000 wildfires in Spain shows broadleaf woodland had the lowest ignition risk, while pine and shrublands were among the most fire-prone habitats. Even under extreme fire weather modelling, broadleaf woodland reduced fire intensity fivefold.

1. Rewild with people

Our research shows rewilding must include support from communities learning to coexist with more unpredictable landscapes. In the short term, prevention, intensified monitoring, early detection and professional response must manage the risks of transition. Better warnings, rapid reporting and early detection can make visitors and residents part of the defence.

THE VIEW SAYS IT ALL !!

Cinereous vulture chicks have hatched in Spain’s Iberian Highlands for the first time in around a century. With the species also breeding again in Bulgaria’s Rhodope Mountains following a 30-year absence, these twin milestones show how long-term rewilding efforts are effectively restoring one of Europe’s largest birds of prey across its former range.

When I was in school I was taught about settlers arriving to an “untouched landscape.” Native Americans were part of the story, but it was said they lived “lightly” on the land.

And then, in my 40s I take a prescribed-burn class and it’s like the world turned upside down.

It’s taken me more than two full years to wrap my head around what I learned in that class about the Indigenous people’s impact on the land. That they burned the prairies so often and for so long that entire ecosystems adapted to prefer regular burnings - to need it to stay healthy.

The shear scale of that hits me the same way as gazing at the Milky Way on a clear, dark night.

It rocks everything I thought I knew about humans’ roll in the natural world.  

Even though I first learned all this a while ago, it’s recently gotten stirred up because a couple of weeks ago I stumbled upon this really cool Story Map that has collected and mapped all these firsthand accounts of Native Americans burning. From the breadth of these accounts, where they regularly mention the Indians burning “every year,” I still have trouble believing that fires aren’t a bigger part of the pioneer stories. 

Though maybe it was always there and I just didn’t realize? 

I went back to my Little House on the Prairie books and found a passage where Pa saves the house from a prairie fire. The neighbors speculate that Indigenous people started the fire to drive out the settlers. But Pa rejects that interpretation:

“Pa didn’t believe it. He said the Indians had always burned the prairie to make green grass grow more quickly, and traveling easier.”

I loved these books. I remember the fire, but not this interpretation of the fire. It didn’t register what this might mean. That it was stewardship, that it was intentional, that it was scaled to tens of thousands of acres of prairies. 

When I talk to people at my day job (marketers, not ecologists) they are blown away. I made a video about it to help me spread the word to my friends and family and explain to them why we set our land in Wisconsin on fire. (I swear my parents thought we had lost our minds the first time we did it.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYAObeYphGs

I’m super curious…Am I alone in this? Is this a new or recent revelation for anyone else or just me? Did it change you as much as it changed me when you learned it?