Open Questions

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 Harpy Eagle

Why It Is Open The cited English language Wikipedia article on the harpy eagle (Harpia harpyja) gives no total population number or range anywhere in its text; a full-article search this pass found only regional decline and extirpation patterns, no comprehensive count.

What Would Settle It A dedicated IUCN Red List population assessment, or a peer reviewed range wide survey, stating a number of mature individuals or total adults for the species as a whole.

Expertise Needed conservation biology

Question posed in Harpy Eagle (Wikipedia), Population section, absent from article.

Open Baobab

Why It Is Open As of the cited source (Wikipedia, current to February 2025), the African baobab has not yet been classified by the IUCN Red List, even though there is evidence its populations may be declining. This atlas's conservation-status property is a closed enum of assessed categories (Least Concern through Critically Endangered, plus Data Deficient), and none of them honestly represents the simple absence of any assessment, so no property value was written.

What Would Settle It A future IUCN Red List assessment publishing a conservation-status category for Adansonia digitata, at which point the live category can be recorded directly on the species entity.

Expertise Needed Conservation biology, IUCN Species Survival Commission assessment

Question posed in Adansonia digitata (Wikipedia).

Open Rafflesia

Why It Is Open Rafflesia lives almost entirely as thread-like tissue hidden inside a host vine and only becomes visible when it briefly flowers, so no reliable method exists to count total individuals, only the flowers observed at any given time.

What Would Settle It Genetic sampling of host Tetrastigma vines to detect latent Rafflesia infections independent of flowering, combined with systematic habitat surveys.

Expertise Needed Conservation botany

Question posed in Rafflesia (Wikipedia), Description section, no-leaves-stems-roots sentence.

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.

Open Termite

Why It Is Open Termite abundance is usually measured as a share of insect biomass rather than a raw individual count, and biomass estimates vary sharply by region, so no reliable global population figure exists across the nearly 3,000 described species.

What Would Settle It Standardized biomass and colony-density surveys across representative habitats worldwide, converted to a defensible global population estimate.

Expertise Needed Entomology and ecology

Question posed in Termite (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 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 Poison Dart Frog

Why It Is Open Population studies exist for individual Dendrobatidae species at specific field sites, but chytrid fungus disease and habitat loss are changing numbers unevenly across roughly 200 species, so no reliable total population figure has been assembled for the family.

What Would Settle It Coordinated field surveys across the family range tracking chytrid impact and habitat loss by species.

Expertise Needed Herpetology and conservation biology

Question posed in Poison Dart Frog (Wikipedia).

Open Moray Eel

Why It Is Open Moray eels are cryptic reef and crevice dwellers across roughly 200 species, and most population data are local reef-survey counts rather than range-wide totals, so no global population figure exists for the family.

What Would Settle It Systematic reef and habitat surveys across the family full range, aggregated by species.

Expertise Needed Ichthyology and marine ecology

Question posed in Moray Eel (Wikipedia).

Open Green Sea Turtle

Why It Is Open The Wikipedia article consulted states the IUCN reclassified the species from endangered to least concern in 2025 and that the population has risen about 28 percent since the 1970s, but gives no absolute global count of individuals or nesting females; regional nesting-female counts exist but no consolidated global total was found in the source consulted.

What Would Settle It A consolidated global population figure (total individuals or total nesting females) from the 2025 IUCN Red List assessment (Seminoff et al., article e.T4615A285108125) or an equivalent named, fetchable source.

Expertise Needed Marine biology

Question posed in Green Sea Turtle (Wikipedia), Population section (absent).

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 Stingray

Why It Is Open Fisheries and conservation bodies track catch and status data species by species, but no single stock assessment aggregates population across all roughly 220 stingray species and eleven families.

What Would Settle It Coordinated global elasmobranch population assessments combining fishery, bycatch, and habitat survey data across all stingray families.

Expertise Needed Marine biology and fisheries science

Question posed in Stingray (Wikipedia), opening paragraph, species count sentence.

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 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 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 Deep Sea

Why It Is Open Published figures for the total area of the deep ocean floor vary by more than 10 percent depending on the depth-contour definition used (commonly 200m) and the underlying bathymetric data set, ranging from roughly 300 to 335 million square kilometers in different sources; NOAA itself states the extent only as a share of the ocean (over 90 percent of the ocean is deep ocean) rather than a single agreed area figure, and less than 0.001 percent of the deep seafloor has ever been directly observed, which is part of why no more precise consensus figure exists.

What Would Settle It A single, standardized global bathymetric survey below the 200m contour, using one consistent methodology, of the kind not yet completed as of this writing (Seabed 2030 and similar mapping initiatives are working toward this but are not yet complete).

Expertise Needed Oceanography and bathymetric mapping

Question posed in How Much of the Ocean Has Been Explored? (NOAA Ocean Exploration), Ocean fact: How much of the ocean has been explored?.

Open Bird-of-paradise

Why It Is Open Population studies exist for some individual birds-of-paradise species, but the 44 species in the family are not tracked under one combined census, and several inhabit remote New Guinea forest interiors that have never been comprehensively surveyed.

What Would Settle It Species-by-species population surveys across the full range of Paradisaeidae, aggregated into one family-wide estimate.

Expertise Needed Ornithology and conservation biology

Question posed in Bird-of-paradise (Wikipedia), opening paragraph, family size sentence.

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 Sphagnum

Why It Is Open Peatland mapping is incomplete in remote boreal and arctic regions, and existing global wetland inventories do not isolate the area or biomass specifically dominated by Sphagnum from other peat-forming vegetation.

What Would Settle It Satellite-based global peatland mapping cross-referenced with species-level vegetation surveys distinguishing Sphagnum-dominated bogs from other peatland types.

Expertise Needed Peatland ecology and remote sensing

Question posed in Sphagnum (Wikipedia), opening paragraph, species count sentence.