Though wildlife is a key attraction for visitors to national parks, animals don’t often recognize park boundaries. Many species seen in parks range widely into surrounding areas, creating significant management expenses or conservation demands for nearby communities and state and local governments.

The expenses include compensating ranchers for livestock depredation by large carnivores, building highway crossings and wildlife-friendly fences for migrating animals, and securing conservation easements on private land.

Using Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks as case studies, a recent paper co-authored by Berkeley researchers and their colleagues explores how states, working with national parks, could tap park visitors to fund wildlife conservation beyond park boundaries.

“The Greater Yellowstone is where the concept of managing the larger ecosystems beyond park boundaries was first introduced, yet it’s been a largely unfunded mandate for many decades,” said Arthur Middleton, an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management and the lead author on the study, which appeared in Conservation Science and Practice  in December. “The time is overdue for asking park visitors to chip in.”

The authors suggest various possible mechanisms for funding, including charging an entrance “conservation fee,” which would be earmarked for state wildlife-conservation programs. Another idea involves instituting lodging fees and additional sales taxes applicable only within parks.

For Yellowstone National Park, the researchers estimate that a conservation-fee approach—charging $1 to $10 per vehicle—could raise between $500,000-plus and $13 million annually. Tax-based approaches could raise anywhere from nearly a million dollars a year from a $1-a-night lodging fee to $22 million annually from a 2 percent sales tax increase.

— Emilene Ostlind 

What do bananas, wheat, chocolate, and humans have in common? All are in the midst of deadly pandemics. Humans have the tools to fight back; plants need help.

A discovery by plant and microbial biology professor Brian Staskawicz and colleagues, published last December in the journal Science, is a critical step toward assisting plants in fighting pathogens without pesticides or other toxins.

Global banana production is seriously threatened by Fusarium Tropical Race 4  fungus, while a disease called wheat blast endangers the world’s wheat supply and overall food security. Cacao swollen shoot virus is spreading in West Africa, where roughly half of the world’s chocolate is grown. According to Staskawicz, who serves as the director of sustainable agriculture at the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI), the direst predictions foretell an unthinkable future without chocolate in as little as 10 years. 

In the study, Staskawicz, researcher Eva Nogales, and a team of IGI scientists outline their discovery of the structure and function of a resistosome, a plant immune receptor that recognizes pathogens and activates a strong defense. 

Using state-of-the-art cryo-electron microscopes at the Cal-Cryo facility, which Nogales directs, the team captured an image of a resistosome called ROQ1, which helped them understand how ROQ1 uses specific loops of its molecular structure to recognize pathogens. The research could lead to the creation of new resistance genes designed to protect plants from specific diseases and could help explain evolutionary mechanisms behind pathogen resistance. 

— Andy Murdock