Open Questions

Open Honey Bee

Why It Is Open Agricultural census data counts managed hives reported by beekeepers, but no comprehensive survey exists of wild and feral honey bee colonies, so no total-species population figure can be assembled from what is currently measured.

What Would Settle It A coordinated global survey methodology for wild and feral colonies, comparable to the managed-hive agricultural census already conducted in most countries.

Expertise Needed Apiculture and conservation biology

Question posed in Encyclopedia of Life.

Open Saguaro Cactus

Why It Is Open Regional density surveys exist within protected areas such as Saguaro National Park, but the IUCN's own assessment does not extrapolate them into a single rangewide total, so no honest total-population figure can be given.

What Would Settle It A coordinated rangewide census across the full Sonoran Desert distribution, extending the plot-based methods already used inside individual protected areas.

Expertise Needed Botany and desert ecology

Question posed in IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

Open Vaquita

Why It Is Open The vaquita is now so rare, and lives in waters turbid enough, that acoustic monitoring (detecting echolocation clicks) and visual survey vessels give estimates that disagree year to year, and an unknown number of individuals likely go undetected by either method entirely.

What Would Settle It Sustained, well-funded acoustic and visual monitoring across several consecutive seasons, combined with genetic sampling to estimate the population from DNA left in the environment, a technique already piloted for this species.

Expertise Needed Marine mammal conservation biology and bioacoustics

Question posed in IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

Open Kelp Forests

Why It Is Open Kelp beds grow along narrow, scattered stretches of cold, rocky coastline worldwide, many of them remote or difficult to survey by boat, so no single comprehensive census exists; published global-extent estimates vary by more than an order of magnitude depending on the survey method (aerial, boat-based or satellite) and the definition of kelp forest used.

What Would Settle It A standardized, repeated satellite remote-sensing survey of the world coastline, cross-validated against in-water surveys, of the kind marine ecologists have begun assembling only in the last few years for select regions.

Expertise Needed Marine ecology and remote sensing

Question posed in National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Open Mesopotamian Marshes

Why It Is Open The marshes were reduced to a small fraction of their pre-1990s extent by deliberate drainage, and reflooding has been underway since 2003, but published figures for the currently restored area diverge significantly by source and by year, and many describe the recovery only in relative terms (a share of the historic maximum) rather than a settled square-kilometer figure. Water flow from the Tigris and Euphrates, itself affected by upstream damming in Turkey, Syria and Iran and by regional drought, keeps changing the extent year to year rather than letting it settle.

What Would Settle It A current, dated satellite-derived wetland-extent survey, ideally repeated over consecutive years by the same methodology, published by a body such as UN Environment, the Iraqi government's own marshland restoration program, or a peer-reviewed remote-sensing study, would give a figure that can be cited with real confidence rather than the mixed and dated estimates currently circulating.

Expertise Needed Wetland ecology and remote sensing

Question posed in UNESCO World Heritage Centre.

Open Amazon River Dolphin

Why It Is Open World Land Trust's own species page states there are no range-wide estimates of abundance or population trends for Inia geoffrensis, only regional survey data; a 22-year standardized count in Brazil's Mamirauá Reserve documents a sustained decline, and Brazilian Amazon surveys separately estimate a 6.7 percent annual population decline, but no basin-wide census across the Amazon, Orinoco and Madeira systems has ever been completed.

What Would Settle It A coordinated, standardized survey across the full range (Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela and Bolivia) using consistent transect methodology, of the kind already run locally in the Mamirauá Reserve, extended basin-wide and repeated on a regular interval.

Expertise Needed Population ecology / conservation biology

Question posed in Amazon River Dolphin (World Land Trust), Species page, population section.

Open Cacao (Theobroma cacao)

Why It Is Open Cultivated cacao is grown across the tropics in the billions of trees, but the ancestral wild population in the Amazon basin has never been adequately censused, which is why the IUCN rates the species Data Deficient rather than assigning it a threat category with a population figure.

What Would Settle It A systematic field survey of wild Theobroma cacao stands across the Amazon basin, of the kind IUCN Red List assessors have run for better-studied tree species.

Expertise Needed Conservation botany / field ecology

Question posed in Theobroma cacao (Wikipedia).

Open Coffee Plant (Coffea arabica)

Why It Is Open The IUCN Endangered rating for wild Coffea arabica is built from range decline and climate-suitability modeling rather than a direct wild census with a published number, so how many wild individuals remain in the Ethiopian, South Sudanese and Yemeni highland forests is not established.

What Would Settle It A range-wide field census of wild Coffea arabica stands across its native Ethiopian, South Sudanese and Yemeni highland forests.

Expertise Needed Conservation botany / field ecology

Question posed in Coffea arabica (Wikipedia).

Open Gobi Desert

Why It Is Open The Gobi Desert's own Wikipedia entry states that some geographers and ecologists treat its western area as a separate desert, the Taklamakan, rather than as part of the Gobi itself.

What Would Settle It A geomorphological and ecological survey establishing where the Taklamakan's dune sea and dry climate genuinely diverge from the Gobi's cold steppe-desert character, agreed on by the physical geography community.

Expertise Needed Physical geography

Question posed in Gobi Desert (Wikipedia).

Open Sonoran Desert

Why It Is Open The Sonoran Desert's own Wikipedia entry asserts, with an acknowledged caveat, that it may be the joint hottest desert on Earth, while noting possible contrary evidence exists.

What Would Settle It A standardized comparative temperature survey across the world's hot deserts using one consistent measurement method and time period.

Expertise Needed Climatology

Question posed in Sonoran Desert (Wikipedia).

Open Canadian Boreal Forest

Why It Is Open The Canadian boreal forest's own Wikipedia entry states that increasing temperatures and disturbance rates will make the forest a net carbon source for more than a hundred years, and that this will have global impacts researchers are still uncertain about.

What Would Settle It Long-term carbon-flux monitoring across the boreal forest's major disturbance regimes, combined with climate modeling of the resulting global feedback.

Expertise Needed Forest ecology

Question posed in Boreal Forest of Canada (Wikipedia).

Open Patagonian Steppe

Why It Is Open A cited further-reading source on the Patagonian Desert Wikipedia article poses whether dust raised from the Patagonian Steppe reaches the sub-Antarctic Atlantic Ocean as an open research question.

What Would Settle It Atmospheric dust-transport modeling or sediment-core sampling in the sub-Antarctic Atlantic tracing mineral signatures back to Patagonian sources.

Expertise Needed Atmospheric science

Question posed in Patagonian Desert (Wikipedia).

Open Great Plains

Why It Is Open Fossil dental-wear evidence has revived a dispute over why grazing mammals on the Great Plains evolved such abrasion-resistant teeth: the traditional account credits grass itself, while a competing hypothesis points to windblown grit and dust instead.

What Would Settle It Comparative dental microwear and phytolith analysis distinguishing tooth wear caused by grass silica from wear caused by ingested mineral grit.

Expertise Needed Paleontology

Question posed in Great Plains (Wikipedia).

Open Kruger National Park

Why It Is Open Kruger National Park's own recorded insect inventory is incomplete; its Wikipedia entry states the total number of Lepidoptera species in the park is unknown but could be in the order of 7,000.

What Would Settle It A systematic lepidopteran survey of the park's full range of habitats and seasons.

Expertise Needed Entomology

Question posed in Kruger National Park (Wikipedia).

Open Antarctic Peninsula

Why It Is Open The Antarctic Peninsula's own Wikipedia entry states that the IPCC has been unable to determine the greatest potential effect on sea level rise that glaciers in the region may cause.

What Would Settle It Long-term glaciological monitoring and ice-sheet modeling of the peninsula's glacier mass balance under different warming scenarios.

Expertise Needed Glaciology

Question posed in Antarctic Peninsula (Wikipedia).

Open Bolson Tortoise

Why It Is Open The only published population estimate for the Bolson tortoise, fewer than 10,000 individuals, comes from research published in 1991 using data collected in 1983. No more recent field census of the wild population was found.

What Would Settle It A current field survey of the Bolson de Mapimi population, comparable in method to the 1983 study, to establish whether the species has declined further since its 2018 uplisting to Critically Endangered.

Expertise Needed Conservation Biology

Question posed in Bolson Tortoise (Wikipedia), Population section.

Open Indri

Why It Is Open Published population estimates for the indri range from 1,000 to 10,000 individuals, a full order of magnitude of uncertainty, reflecting how little of its fragmented eastern Madagascar rainforest range has been systematically surveyed.

What Would Settle It A systematic acoustic or transect survey across the indri's remaining rainforest fragments, standardised so counts from different reserves can be summed without double counting.

Expertise Needed Population Ecology

Question posed in Indri (Wikipedia), Population section.

Open Coral Bleaching

Why It Is Open Bleached coral can survive and recover if the stress is brief, but scientists are still working out how repeated, prolonged heat stress under continued warming affects a reef's long-term capacity to bounce back.

What Would Settle It Long-term monitoring of reef recovery trajectories across repeated bleaching events under different warming scenarios, tied to disease-susceptibility research.

Expertise Needed Marine biology and coral reef ecology

Question posed in Coral Bleaching (NOAA Ocean Service).

Open Ocean Acidification

Why It Is Open The chemistry of ocean acidification is well established, but how various calcifying species and food webs will respond as pH continues to drop is still being actively researched.

What Would Settle It Long-term, multi-species experiments and field observation tracking calcification rates and population effects as ocean pH continues to fall.

Expertise Needed Marine chemistry and marine biology

Question posed in Ocean Acidification (NOAA Ocean Service).

Open Desertification

Why It Is Open Desertification has no single settled scientific definition (more than 100 formal definitions were in circulation as of 2005), and satellite vegetation records showing Sahel greening since the 1980s are read by different researchers either as a genuine reversal of land degradation or as a rainfall-driven rebound that leaves the underlying vulnerability unresolved, a live disagreement already on record for the Sahara-Desertification link on this atlas.

What Would Settle It Long-term, ground-truthed monitoring that separates rainfall-driven vegetation greening from actual soil and land-productivity recovery, replicated across the Sahel's different rainfall zones and tested against a future return of drought conditions.

Expertise Needed Dryland ecology and climatology

Question posed in Desertification (Wikipedia), Definitions section.