Wild science is happening at the zoo

For about 16 months, the Trump administration eliminated subspecies of federal science in small batches—a few hundred data measures here, a National Climate Assessment there, 50-or-so forestry research centers across 31 states. Then, it scheduled the mass extinction. On May 29, its Office of Management and Budget (OMB) proposed changes to the Guidance for Federal Financial Assistance that, if implemented, will inject political interference directly into the federal grantmaking process.

But, as much as Washington is becoming inhospitable to it, government is not the only habitat for responsible science.

According to the NCSES (National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics), nonprofit organizations are the third-largest noncommercial R&D spenders in the US. This cohort spent $28 billion on research in 2022, about 39 times more than every municipal and state government combined. And that includes institutions like museums, zoos, and botanical gardens.

Lately, I’ve been calling these institutions that span the much-exploited gap between academia and the public, bridge institutions. Halls of colossal dinosaur skeletons, enclosures housing two-inch-tall monkeys, and greenhouses spawning carnivorous plants get regular people excited about science. Excited enough to support it, in many cases.

And sometimes, excited enough to participate in it.

Here are three bridge institutions conducting innovative research away from Trump’s defunding spree. Not only have these organizations advanced their fields, they did it with the public in mind (and at hand). Here’s what they’ve been working on:

Zoological research force

• Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA), a nonprofit that accredits zoological institutions around the globe, requires its 254 members to develop research programs in animal care, wildlife conservation, or other biological fields according to the member’s specialty

  • members reported 1,839 projects and 435 peer-reviewed papers in 2024, and employed a total of 288 full-time researchers

    • these projects have not been impacted by recent federal cuts because they’re not reliant on federal grants, AZA president Dan Ashe told me

    • the zoo (and aquarium) business model allows the public to support research initiatives via ticket purchases

    • research involving AZA and its members produced a vaccine for a deadly elephant virus, a report on TikTok’s black market for trafficked monkeys, and the world’s longest-running study of a wild dolphin population

    • you can find information on AZA members’ projects, including the names of associated publications, in their Conservation and Research Database

Studying local wildlife, with locals

• San Diego Natural History Museum (the Nat) includes community scientists in its biodiversity and conservation research

• its Healthy Canyons Initiative enlisted high school and college students, families, and thousands of other residents through in-person events and a virtual portal (iNaturalist) to collect original data on wildlife in San Diego regional canyons

  • community members helped harvest spiderwebs for their eDNA

• the Nat also partners with other pro research teams in the US and Mexico for scientific expeditions, such as the first biodiversity investigation of the Sierra de las Cacachilas mountain range in Baja California

• the museum turns research into a revenue stream through its consulting services, which have been contracted by conservation groups, construction projects, and the US Marine Corps

  • the BioServices department brought in $1.6 million for the museum last year, according to the Nat’s 2025 Impact Report

Protecting plants at home and abroad

• Chicago Botanic Garden conducts restoration and climate response research with the help of scientists and community members around the world

• its research institute helped develop the PlantSearch database, which conserves plant species by allowing botanic gardens to “share genetic information about individual plants and manage their living collections as a single, global population,” preventing inbreeding and protecting biodiversity

  • this “plant studbook approach” was inspired by breeding systems developed by zoos, according to the Garden

• the Garden manages the Budburst program, which provides researchers with data on climate change’s effects on plants gathered by 34,680 community members through the Budburst app

From the Field: data news we’re watching

Each week, we collect press coverage of the US knowledge sector in the age of Trump, and add the best items to the Prairie Fire blog. Here’s one highlight from Monday’s update.

Grist. The plan to make climate science harder to erase

I can’t tell you how vindicated I felt reading this piece about the independent efforts to save federal climate research. Not only does Grist writer Kate Yoder highlight Prairie Fire frequent flyers like Climate.us, the American Geophysical Union, and Climate Central, but she also states, “The world’s science has relied on massive support from the US government, but experts see a future that disperses some of its responsibilities, including how data is collected, handled, preserved, and used.” It’s the first reporting I’ve seen that acknowledges the possibilities of post-government science. I think this is incredibly exciting, and I hope we see more experts and journalists thinking along these lines.

Help a data-dealer: liberators needed

Dillon Bergin, a data reporter with MuckRock, is looking for volunteers to help with the Data Liberation Project. He says:

“There's a whole lot of data that belongs to the public that is locked away in outdated formats, scattered across obscure sites or buried in databases nobody outside the government can access. The Data Liberation Project exists to change that: we find, request, clean, and publish public datasets so journalists, researchers and anyone in the public can actually use them.

“We're looking for volunteers who want to put their skills toward liberating more data. Whether you can write a few lines of Python or R, know your way around a spreadsheet, have FOIA experience or just want to learn how to get important data to the people on the fly. No newsroom required. No experience required, either — just curiosity and a willingness to nerd out. Join the MuckRock Slack and look for the #public-data-liberation-project channel, or reach out directly to dillon@muckrock.com.”

(Do you have an announcement, question, or call to action for our Prairie Fire community? Send your Help a Data-Dealer requests to morgan@newsjunkie.net)

I’ll leave it here

This is just a snippet from the full story on bridge institutions. Nonprofit research is impressive, and it may become a more important steward of responsible science. But if I’m highlighting its potential to sub-in for federal science, I should also mention the obstacles in its path. The nonprofit world is rife with its own issues—funding struggles, a culture of exploitation, and in some cases, a dependence on the government’s favor. The $28 billion spent by nonprofits was only 3% of all R&D spending in 2022, compared to the federal government’s 8% (both were overshadowed by commercial research conducted by private companies, which accounted for 78% of US R&D spending—quite a lopsided ratio).

But, one advantage these bridge institutions have over nonprofits is their relationship to the public. They can weather political storms, with extra funds left over for research, because regular people think they’re valuable and (most importantly) fun. As AZA president Dan Ashe put it when I asked him why people are willing to support zoos, “We have animals.”

This relationship to the public also puts them at an advantage over federal research, I think. MAGA has been able to weaponize distrust of government science and its regulations because so much of it happens behind closed doors. What better way to keep the people from burning down your castle than to invite them in for a tour? Or better yet, invite them in to help renovate.

I’ll be exploring more of the nuances of nonprofit science and research—the possibilities, the advantages, the disadvantages, and how libraries and social science fit into all of this. Stay tuned.

Until next time, data-dealers.

—Morgan