Yet, beyond such charismatic and iconic examples, animal landscape engineers can be viewed as curiosities—interesting but uncommon ... but they were not included in our study.

All over the world, we are cutting down forests, using too much water from rivers, choking our oceans with plastic and pushing many animals to extinction. For both people and wildlife to thrive, now ...

We showed that despite covering only 2.4% of the planet’s land surface, freshwater habitats host over a third of these fascinating animals. We inevitably missed some studied species in our searches.

Yet, beyond such charismatic and iconic examples, animal landscape engineers can be viewed as curiosities – interesting but uncommon ... but they were not included in our study. My team was astounded ...