Long-distance migratory shorebirds travel thousands of kilometers each year along the Pacific Americas Flyway, relying on a chain of wetlands from Alaska to Chile. Our peer-reviewed study asked a deceptively simple question: Are conservation dollars actually helping them? Using more than a decade of data and a rigorous counterfactual approach — essentially estimating what would have happened at key sites without conservation investment — we evaluated trends for six shorebird species across 17 wintering sites in Latin America. We found that shorebird populations are declining across the entire flyway and, overall, the heavily funded sites did not show clear improvements compared with similar unfunded sites. However, some locations with high investment, such as the Colorado River Delta in Mexico, showed promising positive signals. Our results highlight both the complexity of protecting migratory species, whose fates depend on many sites across continents, and the importance of long-term monitoring infrastructure now in place to guide smarter, more impactful conservation investments going forward.

The United States imports more seafood than any other country, and ensuring that these products aren’t linked to illegal fishing or seafood fraud is a major challenge. Our peer-reviewed study provides the first quantitative look at how well the U.S. Seafood Import Monitoring Program (SIMP) — the nation’s primary traceability system — is designed to meet that goal. By analyzing trade data, illegal fishing risk scores, and seafood mislabeling rates, we found that SIMP currently covers about one-third of U.S. seafood imports by volume. While the products it targets do show higher average risks of illegal fishing and mislabeling, these differences are no better than what would be expected if species were selected at random. We also uncovered substantial information gaps: two-thirds of imported seafood volume lacks any mislabeling data, and about 5% of imports don’t even specify a species. These findings suggest that expanding SIMP to additional high-risk species and improving data transparency across global supply chains could significantly strengthen the program’s impact on seafood sustainability.