While natural and managed ecosystems like wetlands, forests, and agricultural fields often receive credit for emitting or absorbing carbon, there is an equally important yet largely overlooked contributor, acting within these ecosystems. Microbes, tiny single-celled organisms that live everywhere on Earth, are a powerhouse of carbon exchange, capable of absorbing and storing greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane. Woodwell Climate researchers are studying both forests and fields to understand how natural microbial communities might be optimized into “climate heroes”, enhancing the carbon absorption capacity of natural and managed ecosystems.

One project leading the charge on this is Boreal Biosequester. Led by Associate Scientist Dr. Jennifer Watts and Senior Research Scientist Kathleen Savage along with collaborators at Arizona State University and the University of Maine Orono, this project is studying a particular class of microbe that “eats” methane, called methanotrophs.

Methane is 28 times as adept at trapping heat in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Today, atmospheric methane is around 2.6 times higher than during pre-industrial times. While some of these emissions are due to human sources, such as landfills and fossil fuels, around one-third of global methane emissions come from wetlands, and approximately 20-35% of wetlands are found in boreal and northern temperate forests. As a potent greenhouse gas, removal of atmospheric methane is a key natural climate solution that would help mitigate climate warming. The Boreal Biosequester team seeks to optimize the power of methane-eating microbes present in and on trees to turn methane-emitting landscapes into methane absorbers.

With funding from CarbonFix, a philanthropic organization dedicated to funding potential climate solutions, the Boreal Biosequester team has begun the first phase of the project: identifying microbial species present in the tree bark and foliage of Maine’s Howland Research Forest and studying their behavior. The researchers are investigating how trees in this northern forested wetland absorb and emit methane and how this capacity changes with environmental conditions like light, soil moisture, acidity, and temperature, to determine optimal environmental conditions for methane absorption

Much of this data is gathered from 30-meter-tall towers in the Howland Research Forest that measure methane and other gases being emitted and absorbed from this northern forest landscape. Howland boasts one of the longest global records of carbon dioxide and methane fluxes; these tower observations are paired with data collected directly from tree trunks and canopies to complete a comprehensive picture of microbial methane activity across the landscape.

“The different types of organisms that are in the trees absorbing methane have different sensitivities to temperature and how much nitrogen or sulfur or other [nutrients are] available to them,” says Watts. “What we really don’t know is: How do they live in the same space? Are there shared resources? We want to know what those preferences are.”

Boreal Biosequester team member Dr. Hinsby Cadillo-Quiroz, an ecology of microorganisms and ecosystems professor at Arizona State University, is leading the effort to isolate and study methanotrophs, sequencing their RNA and DNA to learn more about who they are and where they “like to live” in the forest.

“Plant surfaces host methanotrophs undoubtedly, although at low apparent density, so a critical question in this project is to figure out where, when, and how plant methanotrophs have the highest activity and potential to maximize their work,” says Cadillo-Quiroz. He is currently testing this question in sites around the world, including Howland.

The next phase of the Boreal Biosequester project will apply the knowledge gained from this early work to look at how the identified optimal environmental conditions can be “harnessed” to maximize methane absorption from trees using controlled greenhouse experiments.

“With greenhouse experiments, we can manipulate their environments and different tree species and then see how those microbes respond, so we can get a better sense of what those microbes like versus not, and how to optimize their behavior,” Savage says.

The final research phase of this project focuses on inoculating a forested wetland with “hardy” natural versions of these methane-eating microbes and tracing the response in landscape methane uptake. “If we can start to cultivate them successfully in the lab, we can start to select populations through natural selection,” Watts says. “We don’t want to do any direct genetic modification, but [we want to] grow the microbes that are a little bit more hardy.”

This work could yield natural climate solutions that are cost-effective and scalable for use by governments and land managers, and provide multiple benefits for carbon removal in restored or regenerating forests.

“If we understand what drives the natural activity of methanotrophs, it can inform the industry practices and plans,” Cadillo-Quiroz says.

Microbes could also be a powerful natural climate “ally” in other human-managed systems, like agricultural fields. Microbes in agricultural fields function as active climate engines by converting plant-derived carbon into stable carbon in soil, a process that could be optimized by using different land-management practices. According to Woodwell, soil microbial ecologist and biogeochemist, Dr. Taniya RoyChowdhury, properly managed croplands have the potential to become major carbon sinks.

“Global croplands have the theoretical capacity to sequester up to 2.6 gigatonnes of CO2 (carbon dioxide) annually,” RoyChowdhury says. “The research being pursued at Woodwell Climate is the critical link in the chain, providing the data needed to shift soil carbon storage from a ‘theoretical’ possibility into a ‘verifiable’ climate solution.”

RoyChowdhury is studying how regenerative agriculture practices like cover cropping could enhance a process called “necromass formation,” where carbon absorbed from the atmosphere by plants is consumed by soil microbes that then die. This carbon-rich “necromass” is then stored more permanently in the soil. This process is unique to microbes, so RoyChowdhury wants to understand how altering agricultural management practices, like cover cropping, could alter microbial activity in our favor.

“We’re trying to look at what the cover crop actually does to the microbial community. We’re genetically sequencing the microbial community in its totality and also looking at their functions,” says RoyChowdhury.

She says that working with microbes could also have co-benefits beyond carbon removal.

“Nature-based solutions [like microbes] are critical because they are the only tools we have that address the triple crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss, and food insecurity simultaneously,” says RoyChowdhury.

The other benefit of using natural climate solutions like microbes across ecosystems, RoyChowdhury says, is that once they are established, they manage themselves.

“Rightly managed natural systems are self-sustaining; once a wetland is restored or a forest is established, it continues to remove or sequester carbon and provide ecosystem services with minimal human intervention, making it a suitable strategy for long-term planetary stability,” RoyChowdhury says.

The Trump administration wants to take an ax to the East’s last great forests

The fight over the roadless rule has long focused on the West, but its repeal could fragment some of the last pristine forests in the eastern United States.

View of a green forest with the camera angle pointed slightly upwards. Trees are tall and skinny with a white sky in the background.

When most people think about national forests, they imagine vast Western landscapes: Alaska, the Rockies, the Pacific Northwest. But millions of acres of federal woodlands dot the eastern half of the country, too. These great swaths of vibrant ecosystems have long been free of roads, protected by a policy called, appropriately enough, the “roadless rule.”

That may soon change.

How a retired cranberry bog helped change the game for wetland restoration

Glorianna Davenport looks out at hundreds of acres of protected wetlands that were once her family’s cranberry farms. In her hands are laminated pictures of striking red cranberry bogs fed by razor-straight water channels. It’s hard to believe the land where she stands — full of sinuous streams, wildlife, moss and tall trees — once looked so different.

The land’s transformation, documented through a network of cameras and sensors, offers a playbook for wetland restoration as cranberry farms see slimmer profits from New England to Wisconsin because of climate change and other factors. The crop requires cold winters and plenty of water, but warmer temperatures and longer droughts are challenging harvest seasons.

Continue reading on AP News.

The return of river herring

A group of river herring swimming in clear water

Every spring, river herring migrate from the ocean to freshwater rivers to spawn. Before Europeans arrived in this region, millions of fish could be seen in herring runs. But pollution, dams, and overfishing drastically reduced the number.

Over the past two decades, conservation groups, local towns, the state and Mashpee Tribal leaders have worked to restore river habitat. The herring are making a slow comeback. So much so that for the first time, people who are not members of a tribe are allowed to take herring from a run in Harwich.

Listen on The Point (WCAI).

A message from President & CEO Dr. R. Max Holmes

Last week, I sat on two panels at CERAWeek in Houston—the world’s premier energy conference, attended by thousands of energy executives but also several climate scientists. One panel focused on nature-based climate solutions: the management and conservation of forests, soils, and other natural systems to harness their extraordinary capacity to draw carbon out of the atmosphere and store it. That is Woodwell’s home territory, and a topic I can discuss with the confidence of decades of institutional science behind me.

The second panel was on a topic many serious climate scientists have considered almost too hot to handle: that we may need to think carefully about intentionally reflecting sunlight away from Earth to slow global warming.

Woodwell has never shied away from science that challenges comfortable assumptions. If the status quo of climate action is insufficient to meet this moment—and it is—then expanding what we are willing to seriously examine is not a departure from our mission. It is an expression of it.

Let me start with what we know. The most important things society must do to address climate change remain exactly what they have always been: slash greenhouse gas emissions, draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere (most immediately through nature-based climate solutions), and prepare communities for the disruption already baked into the system. Woodwell’s science and policy work is built on that foundation, and nothing about our consideration of solar radiation management (SRM) changes it.

But we also have to be honest with ourselves about where we are. Despite decades of warnings from climate scientists, emissions continue to rise. We are on a trajectory to blow past the Paris Agreement’s temperature targets, likely in the next few years. Our own research underscores the danger: thawing Arctic permafrost, warming feedbacks from wetlands, and the potential dieback of Amazonian rainforest could accelerate emissions in ways that overwhelm even our best efforts. In that context, responsible science demands that we examine every possible option, including ones that make us deeply uncomfortable.

Solar radiation management refers to proposed approaches that would cool the Earth by reflecting a portion of incoming sunlight back into space. The most-discussed approach, stratospheric aerosol injection, would involve releasing reflective particles into the upper atmosphere via aircraft—mimicking the temporary cooling effect of large volcanic eruptions. Research suggests that if deployed, SRM could reduce surface temperatures and potentially limit the risk of crossing dangerous climate tipping points.

To be very clear, Woodwell is not advocating for deployment. SRM would do nothing to address the root causes of climate change, nor harmful consequences of rising carbon dioxide levels like ocean acidification. It carries real and poorly understood risks, including uncertain effects on rainfall patterns, crop yields, and ecosystems. And it raises profound questions of fairness and governance: who decides, and on whose behalf, to alter the global climate system? What happens if deployment begins and then stops abruptly, triggering “termination shock,” a rapid and dangerous rebound in warming?

These are exactly the questions that responsible research needs to answer. Woodwell believes that research on SRM must tackle priority scientific and ethical questions; must be international in scope, with meaningful participation from Global South nations and Indigenous communities; and must be well-governed, with robust standards. Our concerns include the Arctic, where the stakes of rapid warming are especially dire, consideration of SRM is increasing, and governance frameworks for SRM research are lacking.

There has been a temptation in the climate community to treat SRM, indeed, climate engineering more broadly, as a forbidden subject, to worry that even discussing it signals a surrender on mitigation, or opens the door to reckless deployment by actors unwilling to do the hard work of decarbonization. Those are legitimate concerns, and I share them. But the answer to the risks of SRM is not to ignore them. If deployment were to happen, whether carefully governed or not, we would be far worse off without the science to understand what was coming.

SRM is no longer a fringe conversation. It is being considered by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), taken up in government research programs, in philanthropic investment decisions, and (whether we like it or not) in the ambitions of private actors operating with little to no oversight. Woodwell’s role is not to champion solar geoengineering. Rather, our mission is to provide science-based guardrails to ensure that as this conversation accelerates, it is shaped by rigorous science, ethical seriousness, and a commitment to effective and equitable governance.

This topic is not new to Woodwell. In 2023, we issued a policy brief on the need for research and governance of SRM and this past August, Woodwell awarded a grant through our Fund for Climate Solutions program to investigate whether Woodwell should further responsibly-governed SRM research. Led by Senior Science Policy Advisor Dr. Peter Frumhoff, a longtime thought leader on SRM governance, the project will bring together subject matter experts, NGOs, Arctic community thought leaders, and philanthropists to help inform future work in this space.

I had plenty of time to think about the challenges of SRM governance on my way home from CERAWeek. Flying out of Houston on Friday, I waited over four hours in a TSA screening line. Funding TSA would seem to be a relatively simple task, a core function of government.

Now consider governing a planetary intervention that would alter rainfall patterns, growing seasons, and temperatures across every nation on Earth, requiring sustained international cooperation among countries with profoundly different interests and vulnerabilities. The governance of SRM may in fact be a far greater challenge than the science of SRM.

Nature-based climate solutions will always remain central to Woodwell’s work. But we also recognize that they alone are not enough, and will not shy away from uncomfortable conversations about other approaches that may someday be necessary. Given the current reality of accelerating climate change impacts and relatively modest climate action, it may be that the only thing crazier than talking about solar radiation management is not talking about it.

Onward,

Max signature

Chaotic March weather has a surprising secret

Seemingly unrelated weather systems illustrate how connected we are by larger patterns that move around in our atmosphere. Meanwhile, “weather whiplash” could be evidence of the warming climate.

lightning lights up a dark stormy sky

As its final days wind down, weather in March 2026 has been one for the record books. It showed why old sayings endure and rivaled college basketball for “March Madness.”

True to the proverb, the month came “in like a lion,” and later echoed Shakespeare’s warning to “beware the ides of March.”

Relentless, record-breaking heat persisted in the West. Powerful storms and bouts of polar air blew through the Central and Eastern U.S., bringing extreme swings in temperature within hours. Hawaii endured flooding rains in a string of kona lows.

It may come as a surprise, but these weather systems also illustrate how connected we are by larger patterns that move around in our atmosphere.

Continue reading on USA Today.

In a new paper, published today in Science, climate scientists from Woodwell Climate Research Center and leading research institutions across the world propose the creation of a new, global methane observation system to track methane emissions from natural ecosystems in near real-time and inform mitigation strategies and global climate policy.

Methane’s powerful near-term warming effects–80 times that of carbon dioxide–position methane mitigation as an urgent and important target for actionable global climate policy. Over the past decade, scientists and policymakers have made important strides in tracking methane emissions from anthropogenic sources, including fossil fuels, livestock, agriculture, waste management, and integrating those emissions in international climate policy and mitigation strategies. However, escalating methane emissions stemming from natural ecosystems driven by global temperature increases and climate feedbacks, such as tropical wetlands and thawing permafrost, make up more than one-third of the global methane budget, and yet remain largely omitted from global methane budgets and decisionmaking due to gaps in monitoring.

“As the planet warms, methane emissions from these natural systems, including permafrost, lakes, and wetlands, are rising quickly, bringing the potential for increased frequency and impact of extreme weather events like flooding, drought, wildfire, and extreme heat. Our ability to track and detect these emissions will be critical to informing solutions to the climate crisis,” said Dr. Jennifer Watts, Scientist at Woodwell Climate Research Center and lead author of this paper. “We are calling on national governments, international institutions, philanthropies, the private sector, and other partners to invest in adequate infrastructure to detect and monitor temperature-driven methane emissions from ecosystems to guide solutions that curb the impacts of methane and the climate crisis.”

This paper grew out of a multi-day convening of more than 30 leading methane scientists, modelers, and policy experts held in Aspen, Colorado in October 2025, organized through the Aspen Global Change Institute (AGCI). Co-chaired by scientists from Woodwell Climate Research Center/Permafrost Pathways, Stanford University, Arizona State University, and Spark Climate Solutions, the workshop brought together participants from universities, federal agencies, and research institutions spanning six continents to identify critical gaps in natural methane monitoring and chart a course for an integrated global observation system. The findings and recommendations in this paper reflect the collective expertise of that broader scientific community.

As global leaders in methane science, policy, and innovation prepare to gather at Methane 250 in Italy next week to chart a path forward for methane mitigation, this paper makes the case for investing in the development of an integrated Global Ecosystem Methane-Observation System to inform future Global Methane Pledges and action. Specifically, this system would close gaps in methane monitoring by securing and expanding ground-based networks of greenhouse gas observing towers, including flux towers, across underrepresented regions including rapidly thawing Arctic permafrost and wetlands in the tropics.

“Through Permafrost Pathways, we’ve seen firsthand how critical it is to fill the monitoring gaps in the Arctic, where thawing permafrost releases methane across landscapes so vast and varied that our current observation systems cannot fully capture them,” said paper co-lead and workshop co-organizer, Dr. Sue Natali, Senior Scientist at Woodwell Climate and lead of Permafrost Pathways. “This paper charts a path toward the integrated, global monitoring infrastructure we need to account for these emissions in climate policy before they outpace our ability to act.”

“Methane from natural systems is one of the biggest emerging climate risks,” said Dr. Danie Potocek, paper co-author and scientist at Spark Climate Solutions. “And right now, we simply don’t have the monitoring infrastructure to fully understand what we are up against. The global community has made real progress in building systems to track methane from human sources. Now we need to extend that to the rest of the methane challenge.”