Alan Templeton, a scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, has been studying collared lizards for decades and has been in love with them since he was a teenager. He found that the lizards only survive as far east as Missouri in an unusual fire-dependent ecosystem. But after a population decline, prescribed burns on these ecosystems didn’t help the lizard’s recovery much. It took landscape-level burns to get the ecosystem back in working order so the lizards could thrive.

Templeton’s paper on the lizard study is on the cover of the journal Ecology this month. 

Read the story from Washington University here.

Read the original press release from Washington University here.

Read the paper in the journal Ecology. (Free access.)