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An interview with science writer Melissa L. Sevigny about Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon
In late June 1938, three small boats pushed off from the banks of Green River, Utah, with plans to run the raging Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, all the way to Lake Mead. In addition to Grape Nuts, a bottle of Four Roses whiskey, and the latest USGS survey maps tied up with a “lucky string,” the boats carried something rather unusual on board: women.
At the time that Elzada Clover and her assistant, Lois Jotter, set out to become the first botanists to catalog the Grand Canyon, rumors still swirled that prehistoric creatures might lurk in its labyrinthine side canyons. Only 12 non-native expeditions had made the trip down the Colorado River since John Wesley Powell’s inaugural 1869 trip, and almost all of those rafters were men (the only woman to have attempted the journey vanished without a trace, along with her husband).
Though Clover and Jotter had serious work ahead of them, the contemporary coverage focused almost exclusively on the fact that the pair were women. Clover and Jotter weren’t much better respected by the men accompanying them; in addition to their significant scientific duties, they served as cooks for the crew on the entire 43-day journey. Even in spite of the distractions, though, Clover and Jotter’s catalog of over 400 species, including four previously unknown cactus species, remains the botanical ur-text of the region: “There was simply no other comprehensive plant list [of the Grand Canyon] published prior to the closure of Glen Canyon Dam,” explains science writer Melissa L. Sevigny’s Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon, an excellent new book about the river expedition. “Anyone who wanted to understand how the vegetation had changed — because of dams, exotic species, or any of the other human and natural influences at work on ecosystems in the past half-century — had to refer to Clover and Jotter’s work.”
Sevigny aimed to do Clover and Jotter justice by restoring them to their rightful place in science — and remembered history. But her book is also a rollicking, keep-you-up-at-night adventure story, told in utterly enveloping and immediate prose. Happily, Sevigny is earning her accolades; the book has received a rare triple-crown of early starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Booklist.
Brave the Wild River is out on May 23. Ahead of its publication, I had the chance to speak with Sevigny about Clover and Jotter, her writing process, and the continued uphill battle of women in the sciences today. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
It was the fact that they were female scientists that drew me in. I always wanted to be a scientist; I wanted to be a geologist when I was a kid. I stayed on that path for quite a while and then I became a writer. I feel myself drawn to those stories because I suspect they might have changed things for me if I had known more stories about women in science when I was on that path.
I was surprised that I had never heard of these two women before, Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter. I’ve lived in Arizona all my life. I thought I knew a lot about its history, and yet somehow their names had never come up. Something about that really compelled me and the more I looked, the more I realized I couldn’t find what I was looking for, which was the story of the botanical work that they did. If I wanted to know that story, I was going to have to write it myself.
I was lucky enough right from the start to have the diaries of both of these women. A diary is such an immersive document, you really do feel like you’re in their heads. They’re writing things down that maybe they wouldn’t say out loud to anyone. And so I got to know them first through their diaries, which were wonderfully descriptive, and through letters, which are another really intimate form of communication. They had friends and family that they were very close with and that they would write these letters to on the trip. Whenever they could stop and post a letter, they would do that.
But I also had to do some other things to get into their heads and one of them was raft the Grand Canyon myself. I was incredibly nervous. I’d never done a whitewater rafting trip before. But I knew I was going to need to do that.
I went with a botany crew; we were tasked with weeding out an invasive species of grass. I wanted to do that so I could get a sense of what it was like to actually have to work as a botanist on the river. It was a small group: We had three boats and six people, just like they did. Of course, a lot of things have changed since 1938 about river rafting, but it did feel like a very immersive experience. I remember at one point, turning around to watch the boat behind me come through a rapid and I thought, ‘Oh, there’s Lorin Bell.’ That is a character from 1938 in my book; it was not, in fact, Lorin Bell. Time, it feels different down at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. And sometimes I did forget that it wasn’t 1938.
I’m grateful to them for having the foresight to keep the materials because while they were alive, people often told them — or gave them the impression — that what they did wasn’t that important. And if they had listened to those people, they wouldn’t have kept these materials. The fact that they saved their diaries, they saved their letters, they saved the newspaper clippings, and they donated them to these archives shows a lot of foresight and a lot of courage. I couldn’t have written this book if they hadn’t felt that way.
I did keep my own diary. I made sure I wrote in it every night. I also had a waterproof river map with me and I made notes on it before the trip of things I wanted to make sure I looked at. Because there would be a moment in the diaries where they would say, like, “We looked up and we saw the Desert View watchtower.” That would be the whole description. And so I knew, okay, stop and look up here so that you can describe what they were seeing.
When I got home, I typed up little bits of description out of my diary and I printed them out and I cut them up with scissors and then I actually would tape them into my draft and work at integrating them in.
That’s a direct quote from something that Lois Jotter said. I found out pretty quickly that both these women wanted to be remembered as botanists and they struggled because people wanted to talk about them as if they were the first women to succeed at rafting the Grand Canyon. Elzada Clover actually pushed back against that for a very specific reason: She would refer to herself as the first non-native woman to raft the Grand Canyon. She knew that the region had a long Indigenous history — Navajo and Hopi both have stories of running this river long before a white person came along and did it. Elzada knew that and so that was one reason she pushed back against that label.
But the second reason was that she did want to be remembered as a scientist, as a botanist, and I don’t think that really happened for her during her lifetime. But it’s difficult to center a story on science when the fact that they were women shaped so much of their experience. When I first dove into writing this book, I wanted to stay on the science and I really thought the sexism that they experienced would be a smaller thread — I thought it would be there, but I didn’t want it to center it. But as I was writing, it was impossible to ignore all of the obstacles they faced because they were women, so I hope I managed to strike the right balance and do justice to their story. It was a frustration for them when they were alive and it was a difficulty for me when I was writing, like “How can we tell this as a science story when they’re constantly being told that they shouldn’t be scientists?”
I think that’s absolutely right. And I’m glad you said you were shocked by that because I was fairly shocked too, and then I was embarrassed for being shocked. I expected going into it — this is embarrassing to admit — I really expected the sexism would almost be kind of funny, you know, it would be like, “Look at how those people acted in the 1930s!” And it is funny, but it’s a much darker humor than I expected because women are still facing all of these things today.
Maybe not to the same degree — it might be a little more hidden or subtle now — but all of the same things that [Clover and Jotter] experienced: struggle getting a job, struggle getting a promotion, struggle to be taken seriously, to have a seat at the table. Smaller things too, like people fixating on their physical appearance, telling them to smile. All of those things still happen to women today. I wasn’t expecting to write as much about that going into this book as I did, but I knew I had to because it was a very real part of their story and an extremely relevant part of their story.
It’s become only more relevant as time goes on. Clover and Jotter were the only people to make a formal plant list published in a Western scientific journal before Glen Canyon Dam went up. Today, there’s been a shift in thinking about the Colorado River. In their era, it was a given that people were going to build dams and they were going to harness this river. But today, a lot of people want to figure out how we can undo some of that damage, how we can protect the rivers, cultural values, and environmental values. And in that discussion, it’s hard to know how to do that if you don’t know what the river used to look like.
Clover and Jotter’s plant lists are just one part of that story. There’s also Indigenous wisdom about the plants along the river. There are other pre-dam records, but together it creates a picture of how this place used to look. Not saying that we can make it look like that again, but it gives us a way to pin our baselines in place so as we move forward, we can understand what kind of processes we need to restore this river. How do we want to protect it?
Yeah, so many things. Gosh. I was lucky to be able to track down some of their relatives and some of their former students and had really wonderful interviews with them. But there’s always questions, like, did you get it quite right?
There’s a key moment in the book where [Clover and Jotter] lose part of their plant collection and all I have are these little scraps and I don’t know exactly how that happened. Like, what were you planning? Who did you give that collection to, who was entrusted with it, and then what happened? I’d love to fill in those kinds of details.
I’d also like to ask them how they feel about how their botanical work has been used today. So many things changed from the 1930s to the present day and they lived through those changes, but because I don’t have as detailed records later in their life, I don’t know how they felt about what happened to the Colorado River, how they felt about how their work was used or ignored or misused over that time. I would just love to sit and talk with them about that. That’s one of many, many questions I would have.
This was a story about two ordinary women. I mean, I think they were remarkable, I wrote a whole book about them. But sometimes when we tell stories about science, we focus on the lone genius in the laboratory discovering a new element or breaking the laws of physics. Most science actually gets done in a much more incremental fashion. It’s about ordinary people who are passionate about some part of the natural world and they go out and they chase that curiosity and they move our knowledge forward. Just a little step. That’s what [Clover and Jotter] did and I think that’s how science works.
I started this conversation by saying that I wanted to be a scientist, right? I hope that young people or people of any age who are interested in science will see that it’s not something done by geniuses locked away in laboratories. Anybody can be a scientist.
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The failure of the once-promising sodium-ion manufacturer caused a chill among industry observers. But its problems may have been more its own.
When the promising and well funded sodium-ion battery company Natron Energy announced that it was shutting down operations a few weeks ago, early post-mortems pinned its failure on the challenge of finding a viable market for this alternate battery chemistry. Some went so far as to foreclose on the possibility of manufacturing batteries in the U.S. for the time being.
But that’s not the takeaway for many industry insiders — including some who are skeptical of sodium-ion’s market potential. Adrian Yao, for instance, is the founder of the lithium-ion battery company EnPower and current PhD student in materials science and engineering at Stanford. He authored a paper earlier this year outlining the many unresolved hurdles these batteries must clear to compete with lithium-iron-phosphate batteries, also known as LFP. A cheaper, more efficient variant on the standard lithium-ion chemistry, LFP has started to overtake the dominant lithium-ion chemistry in the electric vehicle sector, and is now the dominant technology for energy storage systems.
But, he told me, “Don’t let this headline conclude that battery manufacturing in the United States will never work, or that sodium-ion itself is uncompetitive. I think both those statements are naive and lack technological nuance.”
Opinions differ on the primary advantages of sodium-ion compared to lithium-ion, but one frequently cited benefit is the potential to build a U.S.-based supply chain. Sodium is cheaper and more abundant than lithium, and China hasn’t yet secured dominance in this emerging market, though it has taken an early lead. Sodium-ion batteries also perform better at lower temperatures, have the potential to be less flammable, and — under the right market conditions — could eventually become more cost-effective than lithium-ion, which is subject to more price volatility because it’s expensive to extract and concentrated in just a few places.
Yao’s paper didn’t examine Natron’s specific technology, which relied on a cathode material known as “Prussian Blue Analogue,” as the material’s chemical structure resembles that of the pigment Prussian Blue. This formula enabled the company’s batteries to discharge large bursts of power extremely quickly while maintaining a long cycle life, making it promising for a niche — but crucial — domestic market: data center backup power.
Natron’s batteries were designed to bridge the brief gap between a power outage and a generator coming online. Today, that role is often served by lead-acid batteries, which are cheap but bulky, with a lower energy density and shorter cycle life than sodium-ion. Thus, Yao saw this market — though far smaller than that of grid-scale energy storage — as a “technologically pragmatic” opportunity for the company.
“It’s almost like a supercapacitor, not a battery,” one executive in the sodium-ion battery space who wished to remain anonymous told me of Natron’s battery. Supercapacitors are energy storage devices that — like Natron’s tech — can release large amounts of power practically immediately, but store far less total energy than batteries.
“The thing that has been disappointing about the whole story is that people talk about Natron and their products and their journey as if it’s relevant at all to the sodium-ion grid scale storage space,” the executive told me. The grid-scale market, they said, is where most companies are looking to deploy sodium-ion batteries today. “What happened to Natron, I think, is very specific to Natron.”
But what exactly did happen to the once-promising startup, which raised over $363 million in private investment from big name backers such as Khosla Ventures and Prelude Ventures? What we know for sure is that it ran out of money, canceling plans to build a $1.4 billion battery manufacturing facility in North Carolina. The company was waiting on certification from an independent safety body, which would have unleashed $25 million in booked orders, but was forced to fold before that approval came through.
Perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, Natron’s founder, Colin Wessells, stepped down as CEO last December and left the company altogether in June.
“I got bored,” Wessels told The Information of his initial decision to relinquish the CEO role. “I found as I was spending all my time on fundraising and stockholder and board management that it wasn’t all that much fun.”
It’s also worth noting, however, that according to publicly available data, the investor makeup of Natron appears to have changed significantly between the company’s $35 million funding round in 2020 and its subsequent $58 million raise in 2021, which could indicate qualms among early backers about the direction of the company going back years. That said, not all information about who invested and when is publicly known. I reached out to both Wessels and Natron’s PR team for comment but did not receive a reply.
The company submitted a WARN notice — a requirement from employers prior to mass layoffs or plant closures — to the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity on August 28. It explained that while Natron had explored various funding avenues including follow-on investment from existing shareholders, a Series B equity round, and debt financing, none of these materialized, leaving the company unable “to cover the required additional working capital and operational expenses of the business.”
Yao told me that the startup could have simply been a victim of bad timing. “While in some ways I think the AI boom was perfect timing for Natron, I also think it might have been a couple years too early — not because it’s not needed, but because of bandwidth,” he explained. “My guess is that the biggest thing on hyperscalers’ minds are currently still just getting connected to the grid, keeping up with continuous improvements to power efficiency, and how to actually operate in an energy efficient manner.” Perhaps in this environment, hyperscalers simply viewed deploying new battery tech for a niche application as too risky, Yao hypothesized, though he doesn’t have personal knowledge of the company’s partnerships or commercial activity.
The sodium-ion executive also thought timing might have been part of the problem. “He had a good team, and the circumstances were just really tough because he was so early,” they said. Wessells founded Natron in 2012, based on his PhD research at Stanford. “Maybe they were too early, and five years from now would have been a better fit,” the executive said. “But, you know, who’s to say?”
The executive also considers it telling that Natron only had $25 million in contracts, calling this “a drop in the bucket” relative to the potential they see for sodium-ion technology in the grid-scale market. While Natron wasn’t chasing the big bucks associated with this larger market opportunity, other domestic sodium-based battery companies such as Inlyte Energy and Peak Energy are looking to deploy grid-scale systems, as are Chinese battery companies such as BYD and HiNa Battery.
But it’s certainly true that manufacturing this tech in the U.S. won’t be easy. While Chinese companies benefit from state support that can prop up the emergent sodium-ion storage industry whether it’s cost-competitive or not, sodium-ion storage companies in the U.S. will need to go head-to-head with LFP batteries on price if they want to gain significant market share. And while a few years ago experts were predicting a lithium shortage, these days, the price of lithium is about 90% off its record high, making it a struggle for sodium-ion systems to match the cost of lithium-ion.
Sodium-ion chemistry still offers certain advantages that could make it a good option in particular geographies, however. It performs better in low-temperature conditions, where lithium-ion suffers notable performance degradation. And — at least in Natron’s case — it offers superior thermal stability, meaning it’s less likely to catch fire.
Some even argue that sodium-ion can still be a cost-effective option once manufacturing ramps up due to the ubiquity of sodium, plus additional savings throughout the batteries’ useful life. Peak Energy, for example, expects its battery systems to be more expensive upfront but cheaper over their entire lifetime, having designed a passive cooling system that eliminates the need for traditional temperature control components such as pumps and fans.
Ultimately, though, Yao thinks U.S. companies should be considering sodium-ion as a “low-temperature, high-power counterpart” — not a replacement — for LFP batteries. That’s how the Chinese battery giants are approaching it, he said, whereas he thinks the U.S. market remains fixated on framing the two technologies as competitors.
“I think the safe assumption is that China will come to dominate sodium-ion battery production,” Yao told me. “They already are far ahead of us.” But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to build out a domestic supply chain — or at least that it’s not worth trying. “We need to execute with technologically pragmatic solutions and target beachhead markets capable of tolerating cost premiums before we can play in the big leagues of EVs or [battery energy storage systems],” he said.
And that, he affirmed, is exactly what Natron was trying to do. RIP.
They may not refuel as quickly as gas cars, but it’s getting faster all the time to recharge an electric car.
A family of four pulls their Hyundai Ioniq 5 into a roadside stop, plugs in, and sits down to order some food. By the time it arrives, they realize their EV has added enough charge that they can continue their journey. Instead of eating a leisurely meal, they get their grub to go and jump back in the car.
The message of this ad, which ran incessantly on some of my streaming services this summer, is a telling evolution in how EVs are marketed. The game-changing feature is not power or range, but rather charging speed, which gets the EV driver back on the road quickly rather than forcing them to find new and creative ways to kill time until the battery is ready. Marketing now frequently highlights an electric car’s ability to add a whole lot of miles in just 15 to 20 minutes of charge time.
Charging speed might be a particularly effective selling point for convincing a wary public. EVs are superior to gasoline vehicles in a host of ways, from instantaneous torque to lower fuel costs to energy efficiency. The one thing they can’t match is the pump-and-go pace of petroleum — the way combustion cars can add enough fuel in a minute or two to carry them for hundreds of miles. But as more EVs on the market can charge at faster speeds, even this distinction is beginning to disappear.
In the first years of the EV race, the focus tended to fall on battery range, and for good reason. A decade ago, many models could travel just 125 or 150 miles on a charge. Between the sparseness of early charging infrastructure and the way some EVs underperform their stated range numbers at highway speeds, those models were not useful for anything other than short hauls.
By the time I got my Tesla in 2019, things were better, but still not ideal. My Model 3’s 240 miles of max range, along with the expansion of the brand’s Supercharger network, made it possible to road-trip in the EV. Still, I pushed the battery to its limits as we crossed worryingly long gaps between charging stations in the wide open expanses of the American West. Close calls burned into my mind a hyper-awareness of range, which is why I encourage EV shoppers to pay extra for a bigger battery with additional range if they can afford it. You just had to make it there; how fast the car charged once you arrived was a secondary concern. But these days, we may be reaching a point at which how fast your EV charges is more important than how far it goes on a charge.
For one thing, the charging map is filling up. Even with an anti-EV American government, more chargers are being built all the time. This growth is beginning to eliminate charging deserts in urban areas and cut the number of very long gaps between stations out on the highway. The more of them come online, the less range anxiety EV drivers have about reaching the next plug.
Super-fast charging is a huge lifestyle convenience for people who cannot charge at home, a group that could represent the next big segment of Americans to electrify. Speed was no big deal for the prototypical early adopter who charged in their driveway or garage; the battery recharged slowly overnight to be ready to go in the morning. But for apartment-dwellers who rely on public infrastructure, speed can be the difference between getting a week’s worth of miles in 15 to 20 minutes and sitting around a charging station for the better part of an hour.
Crucially, an improvement in charging speed makes a long EV journey feel more like the driving rhythm of old. No, battery-powered vehicles still can’t get back on the road in five minutes or less. But many of the newer models can travel, say, three hours before needing to charge for a reasonable amount of time — which is about as long as most people would want to drive without a break, anyway.
An impressive burst of technological improvement is making all this possible. Early EVs like the original Chevy Bolt could accept a maximum of around 50 kilowatts of charge, and so that was how much many of the early DC fast charging stations would dispense. By comparison, Tesla in the past few years pushed Supercharger speed to 250 kilowatts, then 325. Third-party charging companies like Electrify America and EVgo have reached 350 kilowatts with some plugs. The result is that lots of current EVs can take on 10 or more miles of driving range per minute under ideal conditions.
It helps, too, that the ranges of EVs have been steadily improving. What those car commercials don’t mention is that the charging rate falls off dramatically after the battery is half full; you might add miles at lightning speed up to 50% of charge, but as it approaches capacity it begins to crawl. If you have a car with 350 miles of range, then, you probably can put on 175 miles in a heartbeat. (Efficiency counts for a lot, too. The more miles per kilowatt-hour your car can get, the farther it can go on 15 minutes of charge.)
Yet here again is an area where the West is falling behind China’s disruptive EV industry. That country has rolled out “megawatt” charging that would fill up half the battery in just four minutes, a pace that would make the difference between a gasoline pit stop and a charging stop feel negligible. This level of innovation isn’t coming to America anytime soon. But with automakers and charging companies focused on getting faster, the gap between electric and gas will continue to close.
On the need for geoengineering, Britain’s retreat, and Biden’s energy chief
Current conditions: Hurricane Gabrielle has strengthened into a Category 4 storm in the Atlantic, bringing hurricane conditions to the Azores before losing wind intensity over Europe • Heavy rains are whipping the eastern U.S. • Typhoon Ragasa downed more than 10,000 trees in Yangjiang, in southern China, before moving on toward Vietnam.
The White House Office of Management and Budget directed federal agencies to prepare to reduce personnel during a potential government shutdown, targeting employees who work for programs that are not legally required to continue, Politico reported Wednesday, citing a memo from the agency.
As Heatmap’s Jeva Lange warned in May, the Trump administration’s cuts to the federal civil service mean “it may never be the same again,” which could have serious consequences for the government’s response to an unpredictable disaster such as a tsunami. Already the administration has hollowed out entire teams, such as the one in charge of carbon removal policy, as our colleague Katie Brigham wrote in February, shortly after the president took office. And Latitude Media reported on Wednesday, the Department of Energy has issued a $50 million request for proposals from outside counsel to help with the day-to-day work of the agency.
At the Heatmap House event at New York Climate Week on Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer kicked things off by calling out President Donald Trump’s efforts to “kill solar, wind, batteries, EVs and all climate friendly technologies while propping up fossil fuels, Big Oil, and polluting technologies that hurt our communities and our growth.” The born and raised Brooklynite praised his home state. “New York remains the climate leader,” he said, but warned that the current administration was pushing to roll back the progress the state had made.
Yet as Heatmap’s Charu Sinha wrote in her recap of the event, “many of the panelists remained cautiously optimistic about the future of decarbonization in the U.S.” Climate tech investors Tom Steyer and Dawn Lippert charted a path forward for decarbonization technology even in an antagonistic political environment, while PG&E’s Carla Peterman made a case for how data centers could eventually lower energy costs. You can read about all these talks and more here.
Nearly 100 scientists, including President Joe Biden’s chief climate science adviser, signed onto a letter Wednesday endorsing more federal research into geoengineering, the broad category of technologies to mitigate the effects of climate change that includes the controversial proposal to inject sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to reflect the sun’s heat back into space. In an open letter, the researchers said “it is very unlikely that current” climate goals “will keep the global mean temperature below the Paris Agreement target” of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial averages. The world has already warmed by more than 1 degree Celsius.
Earlier this month, a paper in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers argued against even researching technologies that could temporarily cool the planet while humanity worked to cut planet-heating emissions. But Phil Duffy, Biden’s former climate adviser, said in a statement to Heatmap that the paper “opposes research … that might help protect or restore the polar regions.” He went on via email, “As the climate crisis accelerates, we all agree that we need to rapidly scale up mitigation efforts. But the stakes are too high not to also investigate other possible solutions.”
President Trump and Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Leon Neal/Getty Images
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer plans to skip the United Nations annual climate summit in Brazil in November, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday. He will do so despite criticizing his predecessor Rishi Sunak a few years ago for a “failure of leadership” after the conservative leader declined to attend the annual confab. One leader in the ruling Labour party said there was a “big fight inside the government” between officials pushing Starmer to attend the event those “wanting him to focus on domestic issues.”
Polls show approval for Starmer among the lowest of any leaders in the West. But he has recently pushed for more clean energy, including signing onto a series of nuclear power deals with the U.S.
The Tennessee Valley Authority has assumed the role of the nation’s testbed for new nuclear fission technologies, agreeing to build what are likely to be the nation’s first small modular reactors, including the debut fourth-generation units that use a coolant other than water. Now the federally-owned utility is getting into fusion. On Wednesday, the TVA inked a deal with fusion startup Type One Energy to develop a 350-megawatt plant “using the company’s stellarator fusion technology.” The deal, first brokered last week but reported Tuesday in World Nuclear News, promises to deploy the technology “once it is commercially ready.” It also follows the announcement just a few days ago of a major offtake agreement for fusion leader Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which will sell $1 billion of electricity to oil giant Eni.
Climate change is good news for foreign fish. A new study in Nature found that warming rivers have brought about the introduction of new invasive species. This, the researchers wrote, shows “an increase in biodiversity associated with improvement of water in many European rivers since the late twentieth century.”