Biodiversity for a Livable Climate

Wildfires Mythology vs. Reality

Did you know? The Black-backed Woodpecker is so closely tied to recently burned forests that some populations find their best habitat in the first few years after wildfire, feeding on beetle larvae in fire-killed trees.

Fire can create life as well as take it away.

Explore more of wildfire’s surprising ecology with Hart Hagan this fall.

Saving the Mother Trees

Did you know? Beaver-dammed waterways can remain noticeably greener during wildfire, creating pockets of wet habitat where plants and animals may find refuge while the surrounding landscape burns.

The connections that sustain a landscape are often hiding in plain sight.

Discover more with Jim Laurie and the Symbiosis Team this fall.

Bio4Climate Mini Conference | The Ocean Starts Upstream

Join us on September 19 for an online mini-conference featuring Dr. Rob Moir of the Ocean River Institute and Dr. Tom Goreau of the Global Coral Reef Alliance.

Together, they will explore ocean restoration from watersheds and rivers to coral reefs and marine ecosystems.

Their perspectives invite us to see the ocean not as an isolated body of water, but as part of a larger living system shaped by what happens both on land and at sea. Free and open to all.

Kachana Station’s Donkeys Face a Cull Order

In 2021, Bio4Climate helped bring attention to the wild donkeys of Kachana Station in Western Australia, where Chris Henggeler has spent decades restoring a degraded landscape through holistic management. Rather than viewing the donkeys as pests, Chris has integrated them into his work alongside cattle, seeing their grazing, movement, and soil disturbance as part of the landscape’s regeneration.

Western Australian authorities take a very different view. Feral donkeys are classified as pests because of their potential impacts on vegetation and water sources. In 2021, authorities ordered Chris to remove the donkeys from Kachana. After four years of appeals, the order was upheld in October 2025. Kachana is now required to cull at least 70 donkeys by August 31, 2026, with the remainder of the 117 animals covered by the order to be culled by August 2027.

This week, Bio4Climate advisor Judith D. Schwartz brought Kachana’s story to her Substack audience and inspired us to speak up again. It may be too late for some of these tireless ecorestoration partners, but the larger questions their story raises remain very much alive.

• Donkeys on Death Row, by Judith D. Schwartz
• Bio4Climate’s interview with Chris Henggeler of Kachana Station
• The Donkey Experiment, ABC News
• The Donkey and the Roads of History Blog — Join the conversation

At Bio4Climate, we rarely ask whether a creature is simply “good” or “bad.” We ask: what role does it play in the web of life? Including humans.

When Care Becomes Partnership

In Nyandarua County, Kenya, farrier John Kiana Mbugua has cared for more than 4,000 donkeys and describes a bond built through familiarity, patience, and trust. Research on human–animal interactions supports what caretakers like John observe: calm, positive treatment can reduce stress and strengthen an animal’s sense of safety. For families who work alongside donkeys every day, good care is more than kindness: it sustains both animal wellbeing and human livelihoods.

Scientists Are Finding Heat-Resilient Corals to Help Damaged Reefs Survive

Researchers in Palau, Micronesia are using surprisingly simple “fitness tests” in inexpensive picnic coolers to identify naturally heat-tolerant corals. Those resilient colonies could then help restore reefs increasingly exposed to marine heatwaves. The approach adapts restoration to ecological variation, rather than assuming every coral responds identically to warming.

Peatland Restoration Could Bring Water and Carbon Back into the Landscape in Finland

Finland is considering restoring roughly 180,000 hectares of drained peatlands. Rewetting peat stops exposed organic soils from continually releasing carbon while rebuilding wetland habitat and biodiversity. It is a striking example of climate action achieved not by constructing new machinery, but by allowing damaged ecological hydrology to function again.

Cows Save the Planet, by Judith Schwartz

Everyone at Bio4Climate is familiar with Judith Schwartz’s groundbreaking journeys into our relationships with other creatures and how we could save each other.

Full of human stories and animal relationships with a good topping of ecorestoration science.

The Reindeer Chronicles, by Judith Schwartz

Judith D. Schwartz is a Bio4Climate advisor whose work traces how communities are restoring degraded land by working with, rather than against, natural systems. In The Reindeer Chronicles, she travels from China’s Loess Plateau to Norway’s reindeer-herding communities and the deserts of the Middle East, gathering stories of regeneration that echo the hopeful, practical spirit behind Bio4Climate’s own work.

Judith has presented at several Bio4Climate events, sharing these same stories of ecological repair.

The Wisdom of Donkeys, by Andy Merrifield

Andy Merrifield’s memoir follows a journey through rural France in the company of a donkey named Gribouille, finding in the animal’s quiet, deliberate nature a lesson in patience and presence.

It’s a fitting companion to this week’s Featured Creature calling attention to the fight to protect Kachana Station’s wild donkeys and how there is so much more to learn from these and other animals.

Wildlife in the Balance, by Simon Mustoe

Ecologist Simon Mustoe argues that animals aren’t just beneficiaries of a healthy planet — they’re the engineers of it, from coral reefs to rainforests to the open ocean.

Wildlife in the Balance lays out how restoring animal populations restores ecosystem function, a case that lines up closely with Bio4Climate’s own view of wildlife as a partner in ecosystem restoration, not just something to protect.