It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Since day one of his second term, Donald Trump has been waging a war against information, government data collection and the public’s right to know. And yet over a year later, the White House is still finding new ways to delete inconvenient facts.
Most recently, CBS News reported that the Justice Department has deleted press releases having to do with the January 6, 2021, riots at the Capitol. As CBS framed it, “The purge of news releases documenting criminal charges, convictions and sentencings is the latest step by the Trump administration to revise the history of the assault on the Capitol.”
Given Trump’s commitment to pardoning or commuting the sentences of those who sought to overturn the 2020 presidential elections, these latest actions may come as no surprise. Nonetheless, the actions would appear to be tied to the administration’s drive to create a $1.7 billion slush fund to compensate its political allies who were supposedly “targeted” by the Biden Justice Department. While this plan has run into some legal and political headwinds of late, the Trump administration’s delete-the-evidence strategy serves a purpose. As CBS noted, the Justice Department removed releases detailing convictions against far-right groups like the Proud Boys – several of which were recently vacated by request of the administration.
The Justice Department, it should be noted, is proud of its work to memory hole the January 6 crimes: “We will do everything in our power to make whole those who were persecuted for political purposes…. This includes stripping DOJ’s website of partisan propaganda.”
Destroying CFPB
There are other ways they are purging inconvenient information from the previous administration. From the start, the Trump administration made no secret of its intention to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the independent agency established under the Dodd-Frank Act that enforces consumer protection laws. The Trump administration’s actions to undermine and essentially eliminate the CFPB – Elon Musk famously vowed to ‘delete’ it – have resulted in a protracted legal battle over its very existence.
For the White House, destroying the CFPB means disappearing the work that the agency has done. As reported by the news site NOTUS, “The CFPB removed around 1,700 website pages spanning press releases, consumer advisories, speeches, testimony and op-eds dating before February 2025.”
The administration has removed archives of material that are a core part of what the CFPB does – protecting consumers. As NOTUS reported, this includes consumer advisories and resources to help consumers navigate financial matters like medical debt collection and hidden fees. And it’s not as if the agency has replaced the existing material – there have been no new advisories since the Trump strategy was put into effect.
Deleting inconvenient information obviously does a disservice to the public; in these cases, it increases the chances that Americans will be scammed and erases information about crimes that were committed in support of Trump’s campaign to overturn an election he lost. The wider story of this administration’s destruction of government data – which has ranged from cancelling research on food insecurity to deleting a government report on right-wing domestic terrorism to cutting funding for climate tracking satellites – is about fulfilling a more fundamental goal: Making it harder for all of us to know what is happening in the world.
Peter Hart is the domestic communications director at CEPR. He previously worked in communications at the national advocacy group Food & Water Watch and before that was the activism director at the media watchdog group FAIR. For over a decade he co-hosted the group’s weekly radio show CounterSpin and coauthored a book about Fox News called The Oh Really? Factor.
Friday, May 22, 2026
Power, Men’s Silence, and the Urgent Need to Overhaul Masculinity
Image by MissLunaRose12/Wikimediacommons, licensed via CC BY 4.0
This is a call to action for men. How can so many of us stay silent in the face of an ongoing epidemic of men’s sexual and domestic assaults against women—including rape?
Enough is enough. We have to do better.
In just the past month, the U.S. has seen a relentless drumbeat of male-perpetrated violence: mass shootings at social gatherings, a string of urban gun deaths, and one of the deadliest incidents in years—a Louisiana man who killed multiple family members, including children, in a domestic violence–driven attack. As of early May, the Gun Violence Archive reported nationwide more than 100 mass shootings. These are the incidents that make headlines. They don’t include the largely unreported acts of domestic abuse and sexual violence crimes overwhelmingly committed by men.
Then there’s the multiyear investigation into sexual assault allegations involving United Farm Workers cofounder César Chávez, along with the political fallout surrounding former congressmembers Rep. Tony Gonzales and Rep. Eric Swalwell, are among recent cases to surface. The list is long—and shows no sign of abating. TheGuardian reports that over the past two decades at least 53 allegations of workplace sexual harassment have been made against more than 30 members of Congress.
Consider a small sampling of perpetrators from the early years of the #MeToo movement: Roger Ailes, Mario Batali, Louis C.K., Andrew Cuomo, Matt Gaetz, Matt Lauer, Conor McGregor, Bill O’Reilly, Charlie Rose, Russell Simmons, Kevin Spacey, Mike Tyson, Harvey Weinstein. Here’s another sampling—from the Epstein files: Former Prince Andrew, Jean-Luc Brunel, Deepok Chopra, Alan Dershowitz, Glenn Dubin, Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, Marvin Minsky, Les Wexner. The files reveal not simply individual depravity, but vast networks of male power, access, and protection.
Nearly a decade after #MeToo emerged, reports of abuse by powerful men continue to surface at alarming rates. Today, such cases are more likely to be documented—and sometimes prosecuted. Yet a deeper truth persists: the behavior has not fundamentally changed—only its visibility.
For decades, feminist thinkers have named exactly what we are witnessing. bell hooks described patriarchy as a system that trains men into dominance. Gloria Steinem linked personal violation to political power. Robin Morgan, Gail Dines, Jennifer Pozner, Liz Plank, and V (Eve Ensler) have each exposed how misogyny is normalized through culture and institutions.
These aren’t isolated incidents. They are manifestations of a system.
One way to understand—and change—that system is to look at the often-overlooked work of profeminist men. For more than half a century, in the United States, Canada, and beyond, these men have challenged sexism and male violence, working to transform masculinity from dominance toward accountability and care.
Emerging after women’s consciousness-raising movements of the 1970s, this work continues today through organizations such as MenEngage Alliance, Equimundo, MVP Strategies , Next Gen Men , and A Call to Men, among many others. Yet their efforts remain largely invisible in mainstream media, which prefers the spectacle of abuse over the substance of change.
There’s something deeply wrong with a media ecosystem that amplifies the “manosphere” while ignoring decades of profeminist, antisexist men’s work. Why hasn’t MS NOW’s host Nicolle Wallace, who recently began regularly invoking the “manosphere”, ever meaningfully covered men working for gender justice?
Since 2020, reports of sexual misconduct have surged again. Donald Trump has been found liable for sexual abuse. Sean “Diddy” Combs was also convicted and faces multiple lawsuits. NFL quarterback Deshaun Watson has been accused by more than 20 women. Actor Danny Masterson has been convicted of rape.
And still, too many men remain silent.
This is where educator-author Jackson Katz offers indispensable insight. In his Substack, In the Arena, reflecting on Swalwell, Katz argues that the issue is not only individual perpetrators, but the systems and peer cultures that enable them. The “bystander approach”, he writes, is not about isolated acts of courage—it is about transforming the norms of entire communities.
Men often know, or suspect. Or, they hear rumors, but they don’t act.
Katz, author of Every Man: Why Violence Against Women Is a Men’s Issue, has long argued that true leadership requires men to challenge other men. Silence = complicity. Bystander intervention means interrupting harmful behavior early, questioning abusive dynamics, and refusing to normalize misogyny.
Which brings us to the “guy code”: the unwritten rules of male culture—loyalty, silence, protecting status. Speaking out risks exclusion, backlash, even professional consequences. So men stay quiet.
Silence is also not passive; it’s enforced.
Breaking that code is essential. It means men calling each other out—in locker rooms, workplaces, offices, and private conversations. It means redefining loyalty—not as protecting other men, but as protecting those harmed.
The DOJ is refusing to release two-and-a-half million Epstein files. Donald Trump’s name appears more than anyone. What are they hiding? Reps. Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie cannot carry this burden alone.
Is it a pandemic without a vaccine? Katz says no. There is a vaccine: cultural transformation rooted in accountability. A long-term strategy involving education, peer leadership, institutional reform, and men willing to break ranks.
For years, profeminist men—myself included—have spoken of “redefining” masculinity. But this moment makes clear: masculinity, as currently constructed, is a system—of power, reinforcement, and silence. It cannot simply be rebranded. It must be overhauled.
And that overhaul begins with men: speaking up, intervening, refusing complicity, and standing with the women who have been naming this reality all along.
The question is no longer whether we understand the problem. The question is whether we men are finally willing to confront it in ourselves.
Rob Okun (rob@voicemalemagazine.org), syndicated by Peace Voice, is editor emeritus of Voice Male, which for more than three decades has chronicled the profeminist men’s movement. The magazine is now published by the Canadian NGO, Next Gen Men.
Wednesday, May 20, 2026
Amid Fury Over AI Data Centers, Watchdogs Denounce ‘Absurd’ $67 Billion NextEra-Dominion Merger “These megautilities are merely using rising concern about data centers as an excuse to concentrate political and economic power of two giant utilities to maximize financial returns to shareholders,” one advocate said. The logo of NextEra Energy is seen at the entrance of its headquarters on May 18, 2026 in Juno Beach, Florida. (Photo by Marco Bello/Getty Images)
Seeking to cash in on spiking energy demand from the expansion of artificial intelligence data centers across the US, the Florida energy giant NextEra announced a $67 billion deal on Monday to acquire Virginia’s Dominion Energy.
But while the deal is expected to be lucrative for the massive new entity, with national power demands projected to spike perhaps by as much as 25% over the next five years, consumer advocates fear that the proposed merger will be bad for consumers, creating an unaccountable corporate behemoth that will raise costs on ratepayers.
According to Utility Dive, the new entity created by the merger will serve a combined 10 million customers across Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina.
With a market cap of $250 billion, the companies said they’d be the “world’s largest regulated electric utility business by market capitalization and one of the world’s largest energy infrastructure companies.”
But the deal still needs to be approved by federal regulators, a process that will likely pose minimal difficulty given the Trump administration’s friendliness toward other corporate megamergers across industries, from media to railroads.
It will also be required to obtain local approvals, including in Virginia, where the recently elected Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger has made lowering utility costs and requiring data centers to “pay their fair share” central campaign promises, as massive new projects have been met with furious local backlash around the country.
Tyson Slocum, director of the energy program for the consumer advocacy watchdog Public Citizen, said that “this absurd proposal to merge two massive, well-capitalized utilities should be dead on arrival for state and federal regulators.” He added that “household customers have everything to lose and nothing to gain by allowing two behemoths, NextEra and Dominion, to merge.”
The company’s combined rate base—the value of assets recognized by regulators when setting rates—are valued at about $138 billion, according to the deal announcement. It said they plan to expand that value by 11% by 2032 with major infrastructure expansions.
Though the company has proposed offering $2.25 billion in credits to customers for two years after the deal closes, consumer advocates fear it is simply meant to ease upfront investment costs, leaving the real rate hikes to show up later once the credits expire.
The group Clean Virginia argued that the proposal needed to be subject “to the most rigorous scrutiny possible,” given NextEra’s “deeply troubling track record” in Florida.
The company and its subsidiaries in Florida have faced criticism for profiting from a $1.5 billion rate hike on Floridians and for pocketing $1 billion in tax savings without passing it on to consumers.
The company is also renowned for its extensive use of dark money to influence legislators in both parties, as well as Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, to kill clean energy and other policies that disfavor its business.
David Pomerantz, the executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute, told The New York Times that “a megamonopoly of this size, with the kind of money to buy political influence that NextEra will have, will be nearly impossible to regulate.”
NextEra CEO John Ketchum has said the deal is necessary to accommodate “America’s golden age of power demand.”
“Electricity demand is rising faster than it has in decades,” Ketchum said. “We are bringing NextEra Energy and Dominion Energy together because scale matters more than ever.”
But Slocum called this “a false narrative.”
“The merger will do nothing to increase generating capacity, let alone desperately needed renewable generating capacity,” he said. “These megautilities are merely using rising concern about data centers as an excuse to concentrate political and economic power of two giant utilities to maximize financial returns to shareholders.”
He said federal and state regulators “should reject this outlandish, unnecessary merger as completely contrary to the public interest.”
Tuesday, April 21, 2026
Trump Invokes Wartime Law to Fulfill ‘Wish List for Oil, Gas, and Coal Industries’ “Trump is abusing emergency authorities and wasting taxpayer resources through unprecedented abuse of the Defense Production Act to promote his politically favored fossil fuel projects.”
THE THREE STOOGES
US Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, and President Donald Trump appear at an event in Washington, DC on March 4, 2026. (Photo by Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)
US President Donald Trump on Monday invoked wartime authority in an effort to boost domestic fossil fuel production—with the help of taxpayer funding—as his administration faces growing political backlash over gas price spikes, driven by the illegal assault on Iran.
The five presidential memos Trump signed cite his executive powers under the Cold War-era Defense Production Act, which gives the president the ability to expand and accelerate production of key supplies. Critics accused Trump of abusing his emergency authority, once again, to give handouts to an industry profiting massively from the Iran war, which the president launched without congressional authorization.
“President Trump is abusing emergency authorities and wasting taxpayer resources through unprecedented abuse of the Defense Production Act to promote his politically favored fossil fuel projects at the expense of energy affordability and common sense,” said Tyson Slocum, energy director at the consumer watchdog Public Citizen. “Today’s unjustified suite of executive orders is a wish list for the oil, gas, and coal industries, who are already enjoying record profits under Trump’s Energy Unaffordability Agenda.”
“America is already—far and away—the world’s largest oil and gas producer, and the world’s largest petroleum and gas exporter,” Slocum added. “Promoting more fossil fuel exports at a time when Trump has failed to deliver affordable, sustainable energy for American communities is just another example of the president’s incompetent, failed energy policies.”
Trump’s memos aim to bolster petroleum, coal, and liquefied natural gas production, asserting that the nation’s “current inadequate and intermittent energy supply leaves us vulnerable to hostile foreign actors and poses an imminent and growing threat to the United States’ prosperity and national security.”
“Action to expand the domestic petroleum production, refining, and logistics capacity is necessary to avert an industrial resource or critical technology item shortfall that would severely impair national defense capability,” the memos state.
Trump signed the directives hours after he publicly disagreed with his own energy secretary’s assessment of when Americans can expect to see relief at the gas pump, where they’re paying over $4 per gallon on average nationwide. US Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Americans might not see significantly lower gas prices until next year; Trump claimed that assessment was “totally wrong,” even as economists warned of lasting impacts to US and global energy markets stemming from the Iran war.
The world’s largest oil and gas giants have profited massively from war-induced price spikes, with the biggest beneficiaries—including US-based Chevron and ExxonMobil—banking over $30 million an hour in windfall gains during the first month of the conflict.
Trump’s memos came days after a group of Republican lawmakers in the House and Senate introduced legislation aimed at shielding fossil fuel companies from legal action to hold them accountable for their central role in the climate emergency.
“Big Oil companies have raked in massive profits at the pump while lying to the American people about the catastrophic harm of their products, and now they want to deny Americans their rightful day in court and stick taxpayers with the bill for the mess they made,” Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, said in response to the bill. “If fossil fuel companies have done nothing wrong, why do they need immunity?”
Monday, April 20, 2026
Disabled parrot is undefeated alpha male of his group thanks to novel “beak jousting”
A study reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on April 20 shows how physical disabilities in the animal world can be overcome through behavioral innovation. The report features an endangered kea parrot in captivity at New Zealand’s Willowbank Wildlife Reserve named Bruce who is missing his entire upper beak. While earlier reports had described his unique use of pebbles as self-care tools, the new findings show how he uses a novel beak jousting technique to turn his disability into social dominance.
“Bruce is the alpha male of his group,” says study first author Alexander Grabham of Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha | University of Canterbury (UC) in New Zealand. “He achieved this status by himself with the aid of a completely novel fighting technique—a jousting thrust with his exposed lower beak—that beak-intact kea cannot replicate.”
Compared to other kea using their beaks during fights, the researchers found that Bruce not only used jousting more frequently but also targeted different body areas in different ways. His jousting was also more effective than when he kicked. His innovative fighting technique led him to win every single male dominance interaction that the researchers recorded.
His winning record apparently led to other health benefits. Bruce had the lowest levels of corticosterone hormone metabolites levels, which is a sign of reduced stress compared to his peers. He enjoyed priority access to feeders and was the only male to be allopreened by other males, including beak cleaning.
Bruce had already earned some fame before, offering the first recorded case of self-care tool use in a kea. Grabham and colleagues noticed that Bruce fought other kea in a way they had never seen before. They wanted to learn more about what he was doing exactly and what it meant for his social position and the rest of his group.
Overall, the researchers have recorded 227 agonistic interactions from the Willowbank kea, including 9 males and 3 females. Out of 162 interactions between males, Bruce came out on top, winning all 36 interactions he was part of. The findings confirmed Bruce as the clear winner and dominant alpha male of the group.
The researchers describe how he uses his exposed lower beak in jousting thrusts, both at close range and from afar. Bruce uses his beak up close by extending his neck. He also would run or jump to propel his beak at opponents. They found that 73% of the time, his jousting behaviors, which other parrots don’t replicate, displaced opponents immediately. Their observations show he dominates not only in agonistic interactions but also socially during feeding and allopreening.
The findings highlight the remarkable behavioral flexibility and intelligence of endangered kea. But they also have broader implications about physical disabilities and what’s possible, according to the researchers.
“Bruce shows us that behavioral innovation can help bypass physical disability, at least in species with the cognitive flexibility to develop new solutions,” Grabham says. “Previous research has shown links between large brains, behavioral flexibility, and survival at the species level. Bruce demonstrates how those links play out in a single individual, on traits that matter day-to-day, like social dominance. Our findings also raise an important welfare question: if a disabled animal can innovate its way to success, well-intentioned interventions like prosthetics might not always improve their quality of life. Sometimes the animal can do better without help.”
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This work was supported by the Templeton World Charity Foundation, an ERC Consolidator Grant UNIPROB, a Robert C. Bates Postgraduate Fellowship, and a Gordon Grant Postgraduate Fellowship.
Current Biology (@CurrentBiology), published by Cell Press, is a bimonthly journal that features papers across all areas of biology. Current Biology strives to foster communication across fields of biology, both by publishing important findings of general interest and through highly accessible front matter for non-specialists. Visit: http://www.cell.com/current-biology. To receive Cell Press media alerts, contact press@cell.com.
Bruce perched in a tree on one leg preening himself
A migratory bird brain, the Eurasian blackcap (Sylvia atricapilla), has been mapped for the first time using high-resolution light microscopy. The open-source software tools developed, and the detailed processes published, form a foundation for new brain atlases to be built for any species, providing a valuable resource for neuroscience worldwide. Created by a team from the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre at UCL and the University of Oldenburg, Germany, a paper describing the atlas has been published today (20 April 2026) in Current Biology.
Brain atlases - digital, high-resolution, 3D maps of brain structures - are transforming neuroscience. They improve the ability of researchers to interpret their own data, they enable cross-validation between and within experiments, and they foster collaboration - driving forward studies into learning, memory and cognition.
“A digital open-source brain atlas allows researchers to directly align their own experimental multimodal data to the common coordinate space of the atlas. It enables consistency, meaning researchers around the world can speak the same language when it comes to the brain. We are delighted to bring this resource to the community, and even more excited about building many more atlases for other research communities in the future,” said Dr Simon Weiler, Senior Research Fellow at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre at UCL, and lead author of the study.
The team is already working on creating a similar digital 3D brain atlas of the zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata), a bird used to study vocal learning.
The new Eurasian blackcap atlas is freely accessible via BrainGlobe for the neuroscience research community and will advance studies of magnetoreception, migration and navigation. The technology means that any brain sample, even historic histology samples that have been stored for years on glass slides, for example, can be mapped onto the atlas.
Birds are among nature’s foremost navigators, using the Earth’s magnetic field to orient themselves and travel between breeding and wintering grounds. Many species travel thousands of miles with centimetres of precision. In the same publication, the team has revealed a previously unknown direct link between magnetosensitive areas in the brain and the decision-making centre, the nidopallium caudolaterale (equivalent to the prefrontal cortex in mammals), demonstrating how the atlas can assist in characterising novel brain pathways.
"To me, this is a key tool that the migration, navigation, and magnetoreception community has been lacking for decades. It will greatly improve consistency and comparability between studies and related species and will significantly accelerate our understanding of underlying neuronal mechanisms,” said Professor Henrik Mouritsen, University of Oldenburg, an author of the study.
To create the atlas, the team at SWC used serial two-photon (STP) tomography to image eight male Eurasian blackcap brains. This advanced imaging technique results in well-aligned 2 x 2 x 5 μm voxel size images of entire brains. The individual 3D images from different brains were then iteratively aligned and averaged to create a representative brain template. Following this, experts at the University of Oldenburg manually annotated the template. This resulted in 44 segmented brain areas, including principal brain compartments, prominent anatomical subdivisions shared across all bird species, regions of the song system, and sensory regions implicated in magnetic field processing.Finally, the atlas was incorporated into the BrainGlobe ecosystem and automatic registration, cell detection and object mapping were demonstrated on experimental data.
“The core aim of BrainGlobe is to democratise computational neuroanatomy. Creating novel atlases is a step in achieving this. All parts of the pipeline are open-source, and over the coming months we will be improving it so that we, and anyone else, can rapidly create new atlases,” said Dr Adam Tyson, Head of the Neuroinformatics Unit at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre at UCL and lead of the BrainGlobe Initiative.
While the team used state-of-the-art STP tomography, other microscopies, including light-sheet images are also suitable for creating atlases. Future advances in whole-brain labelling procedures, paired with STP tomography, will further guide brain area subdivision based on region-specific identification of marker genes or proteins, and the atlas will be regularly updated to incorporate new data.
ENDS
This research was funded by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, Wellcome, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative DAF, the European Research Council and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.
Source:
Read the full paper in Current Biology: ‘An open-source three-dimensional digital brain atlas of a migratory bird, the Eurasian blackcap’
The Sainsbury Wellcome Centre (SWC) brings together world-leading neuroscientists to generate theories about how neural circuits in the brain give rise to the fundamental processes underpinning behaviour, including perception, memory, expectation, decisions, cognition, volition and action. Funded by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation and Wellcome, SWC is located within UCL and is closely associated with the Faculties of Life Sciences and Brain Sciences. For further information, please visit: www.sainsburywellcome.org
About the University of Oldenburg
Carl von Ossietzky University was founded in 1973, making it one of Germany's younger universities. Its goal is to find answers to the big questions facing society in the 21st century through cutting-edge interdisciplinary research and teaching.
Researchers and administrative staff work hand in hand and across disciplines. Many are involved in research – for example, in collaborative research centers, research groups, European projects, or the three clusters of excellence NaviSense, Hearing4all.connects, and Ocean Floor.
The university works closely with more than 300 international cooperation partners and universities. It also has links with non-university institutions in research, education, culture, and business. The research location is further strengthened by the establishment of the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity, Max Planck Research Groups, and Fraunhofer working groups.
The university prepares around 15,000 students for professional life. The spectrum ranges from the humanities and cultural sciences to economics, law, and social sciences to mathematics, computer science, the natural sciences, and medicine.
A new study published in Landscape Ecology shows how fast-growing poplar plantations can improve functional connectivity for forest birds in fragmented agricultural landscapes, provided they are strategically located and species have moderate to high dispersal capacity. The findings suggest that managed forests may contribute not only to biomass supply, but also to biodiversity conservation in highly human-modified regions.
Using spatial connectivity models in two European river sub-catchments in Spain and France, researchers examined how existing forest patches, both within and outside Natura 2000 areas, and poplar plantations interact to support movement across the landscape for three forest bird species with contrasting dispersal abilities.
“Plantations can act as stepping stones between forest patches, although their effectiveness depended strongly on their location within the landscape,” says Sara Pineda-Zapata, a Doctoral Researcher at the University of Eastern Finland and the lead author of the study. “We wanted to understand whether plantations, often viewed only through the lens of wood and biomass production, could also support ecological processes in fragmented landscapes,” she continues.
In Spain, plantations generated connectivity gains that were greater than their area would suggest, with some patches playing an important role in maintaining ecological connectivity for forest networks, including Natura 2000 areas. In France, plantation patches were more isolated and contributed less effectively. The strongest benefits were observed for species capable of moving over longer distances; for short-distance dispersers like the common chaffinch, plantations had a more limited effect unless they were located very close to an existing forest habitat, suggesting that even narrow gaps can remain major barriers for less mobile species.
“Plantations are often assessed only in terms of production, but when strategically located, they can provide much more than wood. They can contribute to landscape structure, help maintain ecological flows and complement conservation efforts in intensively used agricultural regions. The key message is that location matters, and that planning matters,” says Professor Blas Mola at the University of Eastern Finland.
Professor Alejandra Morán of the University of Basel in Switzerland highlighted that the results are relevant beyond bird movement: “Connectivity influences how species move, persist and respond to environmental change. When we think about ecosystem services, we should consider not only what land use produces in one place, but how it shapes ecological processes across the wider landscape.”
Rémi Duflot, from the University of Jyväskylä, emphasised the broader implications: "Birds are particularly informative because they respond quickly to landscape fragmentation. However, we caution that plantations cannot replace natural forests in ecological quality, and that increasing tree cover may reduce habitat for open-habitat species, while forest specialists often require more complex structures than plantations provide.”
“What our results show is that in fragmented landscapes, well-placed plantations can become part of the solution, opening up interesting possibilities for designing productive landscapes that are also more supportive of biodiversity,” concludes Pineda-Zapata.
