Coral-fringed tropical atolls are among the landforms most threatened by global warming, but many have a potential superpower: Healthy ecosystems may help them keep pace with rising seas.

Atoll islands with native vegetation and thriving seabird populations are “naturally active systems that can change and adapt to their environmental conditions if they are allowed to do so,” said Nick Graham, a marine ecologist at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom, who led an international team of scientists that studied island resilience across 28 atoll islands in the Pacific and Indian oceans.

Their paper, published Wednesday in Science Advances, shows that restoring atoll ecosystems reinforces their growth. Seabirds ferry nutrients from the open ocean and deposit them on the atolls as guano that nurtures land plants, marine life and coral growth. This provides more material for reef building, as parrotfish and other reef feeders turn dead coral into sand to maintain beaches, while native plants with extensive root networks stabilize sediments.

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Tens of thousands of small barriers hamper fish recovery in the northeastern United States. But while the demolition of big dams out west gets the most attention, a similar revolution is revitalizing northeastern streams and rivers—one tiny dam at a time.

Dam removal is often described as rewilding rivers, but it also liberates the human imagination, the latest installment in Ben Goldfarb's Wildlife at the Crossroads series.

Derek vs. Derek (trailer) is a new (premiered at festivals, opening in London soon) UK documentary about Derek Banbury an intensive dairy farmer with 200 cows who's farm is next to Derek Gow's, a former sheep farmer, rewilding project. While both are initially combative to each other ('The man's a psychopath when it comes to hedgerows'- Guardian interview) the documentary presents Derek Banbury slowly coming around to some ideas of rewilding while Gow tries to keep the animals on his land from disrupting the work of farmers around him.

Of note is that Derek Banbury is presented as using intensive agriculture because of the pressures of modern supermarkets and capitalism, not out of any malice or greed, showing why farmers feel they have to resort to mass use of pesticides and synthetic fertilisers. The team behind the film has chosen The Farming Community Network as the charity it is urging others to donate to and is working toward having screenings in rural Britain as well as in the cities. (press release on subject) BBC Sounds interview with the director and both Dereks (who are now good friends) I haven't seen the documentary yet, but everything I've read about it sounds sweet, a little bit of brightness in the current world.