The Brief

Across California’s public university systems, students, faculty and staff are learning and working in aging academic buildings where air conditioning, roofs, plumbing and electrical systems are either deteriorating or not functional. Every year, maintenance costs for University of California and California State University campuses total a combined $1.5 billion.

But those repairs don’t always get made. The unpredictable nature of the state’s budget means there isn’t always enough money to make all the necessary fixes. State revenue has been sporadic, with hundreds of millions some years and no money in others. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed 2025-26 budget does not include any money for repairs, known as deferred maintenance, or other infrastructure projects.

Absent a long-term funding plan, the deferred maintenance backlog has grown to an estimated $9.1 billion for the University of California and $8.3 billion for Cal State University as of the 2023-24 school year, driven by aging buildings and increasing costs for labor and parts.

Given the size of the backlog, in 2023 the state Legislature’s budget advisory office urged lawmakers and system leaders to create a long-term funding solution for maintenance. Without those fixes, students and employees have had to endure extreme indoor heat, electrical and plumbing problems, and failing, outdated roofs.

State funding has been sporadic

The state’s public university systems are some of the largest in the nation, both in terms of enrollment and physical size. The UC operates 63 million square feet of academic space across 10 campuses and the Cal State system spans 43 million square feet across 23 campuses. Large physical systems come with large price tags to maintain them, especially as campus infrastructure ages. A majority of both systems' buildings are over 30 years old, according to the Legislative Analyst's Office.

Each year the UC and Cal State systems provide the Legislature with a five-year plan of proposed building improvement projects with cost estimates. This year, one proposed project includes replacing Santa Clara Hall at Sacramento State. Built in the 1960s, the building houses the engineering laboratory and has HVAC, electrical and telecommunications infrastructure that have “exceeded their useful life,” according to the California State University’s five-year plan.

While both university systems have robust tracking to quantify the size and cost of their maintenance backlogs, it's harder to track the amount they spend on deferred maintenance projects. That’s because a building project, like Santa Clara Hall, may include replacement of old or faulty components in addition to other improvements or renovations, like making a building safer during an earthquake. What also complicates matters is the various sources of funding the systems tap to pay for expensive projects.

Noah Galbraith with Students Against Tuition Hikes shows fallen and bulging ceiling tiles inside of King Hall across from the a Pan-African studies office at Cal State LA on Feb. 29, 2024.

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At the campus level, administrators can choose to use a portion of their base budget or reserves saved from previous budget allocations to fund repairs to academic buildings, though some campuses spend “little, if any, ongoing funds” on such replacements, according to the Legislative Analyst's Office.

In 2013 and 2014, respectively, state legislation granted the UC and CSU systems the ability to issue their own bonds to finance large projects, like entire building renovations or replacements. The systems then pay back the debt from those bonds using their general budget allocation. From 2013 to 2023, the UC financed about $1.1 billion in projects using university issued bonds and Cal State financed roughly $1.8 billion in projects through its own bonds from 2014 to 2023, according to data reviewed by the Legislative Analyst's Office. In addition to financing, both UC and Cal State can use revenue from system investments to pay for building improvements.

But the amount that the campuses and systems have been spending on replacements has not kept pace with the growth of the maintenance backlog. “To have the ongoing funding, to any degree, any amount — the restoration of that would be a significant plus towards working down this inventory,” said Ron Kalich, the director of Facilities and Asset Management for UC.

State support has been sporadic in recent years, largely influenced by the overall state budget conditions. Since 2015, the state has provided $689 million to UC and $784 million to Cal State to fund deferred maintenance projects in addition to making seismic safety and energy efficiency updates. Nearly half of that money came from the 2021-22 budget. That year each system received $325 million. Other years have been more lean. Newsom’s proposed 2025-26 budget has no allocation for deferred maintenance, nor was there any this year or last year.

We have not seen any designated facility deferred maintenance related funding from the state for a few years now, which has exacerbated critical issues as our campus continues to age,” said Mark Zakhour, Cal State Long Beach associate vice president of the building services division.

The Legislative Analyst's Office recommends the Legislature work with UC and Cal State to develop a plan to provide ongoing funds for future deferred maintenance repairs based on the size of each system’s needs. In the meantime, the Legislature is reviewing a newly introduced bill to put a bond before voters in 2026 that would fund repairs for both systems.

Students and faculty await fixes across the state

In the meantime, students and faculty are in buildings with broken or dilapidated equipment. At Fresno State around 62% of campus buildings are over 60 years old, according to Lisa Bell, Fresno State’s public information officer. Faith Van Hoven, a fourth-year philosophy major, says the air conditioning is so outdated it can’t keep up with the heat. She remembers sitting down during her ethics in criminal justice course on a day when the temperature reached triple digits. She looked up at the ceiling fan as it rotated but felt no reprieve.

“When it gets to be 110 [degrees] here, it can be really, really hot, and there's not always accommodations that are made for students and for the faculty,” Van Hoven said.

She’s tried to push through the heat with a small, personal fan that does little to cool the air. Students like Frederick Lisitsa, a fourth-year double major in philosophy and psychology at Fresno State, choose to avoid the indoor heat altogether.

“I do not stay in that class. I'm like, ‘I will do the homework, but I'm gonna go home,’” he said.

Rats, heat and cold have kept Carolynn Patten, a professor of neurobiology at the UC Davis School of Medicine, and her team from safely conducting research with recovering stroke patients. Her lab is housed within the 86-year-old Hickey Gymnasium building.

“The building is so old and the HVAC system is so decrepit that without exaggeration, in the winter, it will get so cold that we will be working indoors in outdoor jackets, hats, gloves,” Patten said.

The Janss Steps and Dickson Plaza are featured in this aerial view.

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During hotter weather, extreme indoor heat isn’t just uncomfortable for her students and research participants. It affects her temperature-sensitive research equipment. “The temperatures in the room get to a point that they're really out of the operating range for my equipment. And so now I have $2 million of equipment in there that is being compromised just because we can't create the right environment,” Patten said.

Rats have also chewed the cables that power her equipment, leading her to cancel experiments and halt her research. Patten explained that due to the constant delays, her research partner said he will stop payments because he’s not getting timely data.

“The reason we haven't delivered data is we couldn't do experiments,” said Patten. “I will, in no way, do anything that will compromise patient safety. It wasn't safe to do experiments because the rats had damaged their equipment, and now it's going to have an impact on funding my research.”

How maintenance backlogs grow on campus

UC officials say ignoring small fixes can lead to costly repairs down the road. “If you don't do the proper preventive maintenance, you shorten the life cycle of these things, so then they become deferred maintenance,” said Clint Lord, associate vice chancellor of facilities at UC Davis.

That’s part of the reason why money is allocated for operations and maintenance in the budget for any new building project. Money is allocated per square feet to pay for ongoing upkeep of the building. But the cost to eventually replace building components is not included in those building budgets, which is part of the reason why backlogs have grown so large. When something needs replacing every couple of decades there’s no pot of money set aside specifically to pay the replacement costs.

“When the state started funding academic facilities, they missed one key component,” said Shawn Holland, chief of Facilities Operations at Cal State. “What they never considered was, ‘What does it cost to renew that building 20 years later?’”

That’s not the case for all buildings on campus, though. Buildings that generate revenue, like parking structures or dormitories, do have money allocated by square footage to pay for forecasted replacement costs over time. Making that process uniform with academic buildings is one way the state can begin budgeting for the costs of academic buildings that will need new equipment or upkeep in the future, Holland said.

That change wouldn’t impact the current backlog, however. Campuses leaving deferred maintenance projects unfixed can also put a university’s mission in jeopardy, said Matt Gudorf, assistant vice chancellor of facilities at UC Irvine. Emergencies caused by infrastructure failure can displace students, faculty and staff and strain campus operating budgets.

“Now we are impacting people's ability to go to class, to go to their office, to do research,” Gudorf said. “It not only costs facilities more money, but you're disrupting the whole mission of the university, and that's a huge issue.”

Leaving items on the backlog can also make the replacement more expensive as inflation drives up pricing for parts and workers who are qualified to make updates. Inflation has been “the biggest driver in cost increases” of the deferred maintenance backlog at UC, according to Kalich.

Exploring alternative funding

In 2023, the Legislative Analyst's Office proposed that the university systems and lawmakers develop a long-term funding model that would provide universities an ongoing percentage of the value of their deferred maintenance backlog to help bring it down over time. University officials and legislators haven’t done that though lawmakers are looking at ways to increase funding outside of the systems’ budget allocations.

Assemblymember David Alvarez, a Democrat from Chula Vista whose district includes San Diego State University, introduced AB 48 to put a bond measure on the 2026 ballot to raise billions of dollars for UC and Cal State to address their growing maintenance backlogs. The bill doesn’t have a dollar amount yet, said Alvarez, who sits on the Assembly Education committee.

“We have to go back and really explain to the voters why this [bond] is important and why we should invest in higher education facilities,” Alvarez said.

A cyclist rides through campus at Cal State Long Beach on July 25, 2022.

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The last time UC and Cal State received money from a statewide bond initiative was in 2006, when voters approved $3.1 billion for community colleges, UC and Cal State campuses to address infrastructure needs.

In 2020, voters rejected Proposition 13, the largest school bond proposal in state history, which would have provided the UC and Cal State $2 billion each to fund infrastructure projects and repairs in addition to $11 billion for K-12 schools and the California community colleges.

Lawmakers included UC and Cal State in an early version of Proposition 2, a school bond measure approved last November, but the university systems were eventually left out to limit the amount of bond money voters were asked to approve. At the UC, where total capital needs are expected to grow to $30.7 billion by 2030, system leaders said they were disappointed to be left off the state bond despite 18 months of lobbying the Legislature.

“Going forward, UC will be exploring other options to address our construction, renewal and deferred maintenance needs,” wrote UC spokesperson Heather Hanson via email.

Cal State trustee Jack McGrory said being left out of the bond was “upside down” at a board meeting in September and urged the board to figure out a plan to secure desperately needed state funding. The deferred maintenance backlog at Cal State is expected to increase by $397 million annually due to inflation and aging facilities, according to Steve Relyea, Cal State’s executive vice chancellor and chief financial officer.

“We've got to figure out some different strategy, some alternative for this, because our buildings are in really bad shape,” McGrory said.

Mercy Sosa and Victoria Mejicanos are fellows with the College Journalism Network, a collaboration between CalMatters and student journalists from across California. CalMatters higher education coverage is supported by a grant from the College Futures Foundation.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

President Donald Trump said his administration will, for now, halt its efforts to deploy National Guard troops to Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland, Ore., after his deployments to the Democratic-led cities suffered a series of legal setbacks.

In a Truth Social post on Wednesday, Trump praised the deployments and claimed they have helped curtail crime.

"Portland, Los Angeles, and Chicago were GONE if it weren't for the Federal Government stepping in," he said.

The deployments in Chicago and Portland were blocked by the courts and Guard members left California after a sharp rebuke from a U.S. District Court judge earlier this month.

More recently, the Supreme Court last week ruled against the administration's emergency appeal to deploy troops to Chicago. It was the first time the high court waded into the matter. While not precedent-setting, the ruling brought some clarity to Trump's presidential powers.

Trump had argued that the Guard was needed in the Democratically led cities to quell crime and protect federal immigration officers and facilities. Democratic governors in those states staunchly opposed the deployments and federal judges were also wary of allowing the military to intervene in civilian matters.

"This principle has been foundational to the safeguarding of our fundamental liberties under the Constitution," U.S. District Court Judge Karin Immergut wrote in her November ruling freezing Trump's deployment of troops to Portland.

Trump has also deployed National Guard troops to other U.S. cities, including Washington, D.C., where more than 2,000 members of the Guard have been patrolling since August.

Those deployments have also faced legal challenges — earlier this month a federal appeals court ruled that troops can remain in the capital city while a panel of judges examines whether the deployment is legal.

A handful of Republican-led states have welcomed the Guard. In Tennessee, troops began patrolling in October. And moments after the Supreme Court ruling, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry said 350 troops would deploy to New Orleans. National Guard members arrived in the city Tuesday, member station WWNO reported.

In his Truth Social post on Wednesday, Trump promised, "We will come back, perhaps in a much different and stronger form, when crime begins to soar again - Only a question of time!"

Copyright 2026 NPR

Starting on Jan. 1, hundreds of new state laws will go into effect, some with the potential to shape the everyday lives of Californians. They’re meant to tackle the state’s housing affordability crisis, establish guardrails on the use of artificial intelligence and protect the sharing of personal information for those who could face federal immigration enforcement.

Most new laws won’t all bring change overnight. But some could stoke continued controversy and legal challenges. For example, if you live near public transit, one new state law will give developers the freedom to build taller, denser housing, overriding local zoning rules and potentially transforming some single-family neighborhoods. Some cities and counties remain vehemently opposed and are considering legal action.

If you’re a renter, your landlord starting Jan. 1 will be required to provide a working stove and refrigerator and keep them in working order, a nod to efforts to ease the state’s severe affordability challenges. And if you work in law enforcement or the health care field, new state laws will regulate what you can and can’t do with AI on the job.

Here’s a small sample of the many new California laws that will go into effect Jan. 1:

More housing near transit

California lawmakers approved a significant and controversial new housing law this year, Senate Bill 79. It allows for building denser, taller housing near major transit stations even in areas where local rules ban that level of development. The law will pave the way for apartment buildings as tall as 75 feet close to metro, light rail, and some bus stations. Democratic lawmakers were divided over the measure. Some argued it was necessary to speed housing development and alleviate the state’s housing shortage while others warned it would change neighborhoods of single-family homes and impact property values. Developers will officially get the green light to break ground on projects that fall under the new law starting in 2026.

— Laura Fitzgerald

Requiring stoves and fridges in rentals

While it’s quite common for rental units to include a stove and a fridge, it hasn’t been the law. Beginning Jan. 1, Assembly Bill 628 adds refrigerators and stoves to the state’s definition of a “habitable” home. This means landlords must provide them, keep them in working order and handle repairs or replacement. The rule applies to new or renewed leases. Tenants may voluntarily bring their own fridge, but they aren’t required to. The law makes exceptions for supportive housing and shared living buildings with communal kitchens. Supporters say the change is designed to improve affordability for low-income renters.

Arturo Rodriguez of the California Democratic Renters Council says this protects many renters in larger cities, where stoves and refrigerators are not included in a unit, which is more common.

“When landlords offload basic costs onto renters, it’s really destabilizing families,” said Rodriguez.

Several landlord and real-estate groups, such as the California Apartment Association and the California Association of Realtors, opposed the bill. They say new costs and installation could complicate expenses for property owners.

— Tony Rodriguez

Rideshare drivers can unionize and will have lower insurance requirements

In this Tuesday, Jan. 12, 2016, file photo, a driver displaying Lyft and Uber stickers on his front windshield drops off a customer in downtown Los Angeles.

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California’s 800,000 rideshare drivers will get the right to unionize in 2026. In turn, rideshare companies will also have drastically lower insurance costs. That’s under two new laws Governor Gavin Newsom signed after brokering a deal between labor and major rideshare companies, including Uber and Lyft. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which sponsored Assembly Bill 1340 to expand collective bargaining rights to gig drivers, has already reached out to drivers ahead of the law’s implementation. Senate Bill 371 will slash insurance requirements for rideshare companies for underinsured drivers from $1 million to $300,000 per incident.

— Laura Fitzgerald

Getting election results faster

Staffers at Los Angeles County Recorder/County Clerk's headquarters sort ballots in this file photo from 2008, for the California presidential primary.

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Californians could see faster election results in 2026. That’s under a new law that will require election officials to count the vast majority of ballots by 13 days after election day, with exceptions for some ballots that require additional verification. There are no current requirements for counting benchmarks, just a deadline for officials to send final election results to the Secretary of State within 31 days after election day. That rule will still apply.

The new law comes as the state has seen a rise in close contests where results can take weeks. Proponents, including some election experts, say speeding up ballot counting will bolster trust in the state’s election process. “We're at the point where people are losing faith in the political process and the elections process because they hear these claims from some political leaders casting doubt on the reliability of our results, and that's a real problem,” said Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation.

— Laura Fitzgerald

Ban on AI Chatbots misrepresenting themselves as medical professionals

Starting Jan. 1, Assembly Bill 489 will make it illegal for AI Chatbots to misrepresent themselves as doctors, therapists or other licensed clinicians when people go to them for advice. This has been an emerging problem with the artificial intelligence technology available online.

The California Medical Association helped sponsor the bill. Lobbyist Stuart Thomspon told CapRadio that oftentimes vulnerable people seeking mental health advice are not aware the chatbot they are speaking to is not being monitored by a real person.

“ A lot of these chatbots will imply, or not even imply, directly state, that the patient who's interacting with them is actually interacting with a licensed mental health professional,” Thompson said. “When in fact all the content generated is purely AI.”

Assemblymember Mia Bonta is the law’s author. She said it provides safeguards for young people and elders who may have trouble discerning who they are speaking with.

 ”The world is our oyster when it comes to AI and the advancements that are being made with agentic AI,” she said, referring to artificial intelligence systems that act with autonomy. “It's very important that we are providing enough of the human in the loop to be able to ensure that those experiences end up being positive and ensure that consumers are protected.”

A spokesperson for Bonta said developers of these AI systems may be held to the same consequences as humans who impersonate medical professionals – up to a $10,000 fine and/or up to a year in prison.

— Riley Palmer

Renewed Cap-and-Trade

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California lawmakers passed legislation to renew the state’s cap-and-trade program — now officially calling it “cap-and-invest” — through 2045, with some amendments. The California Air Resources Board will begin rulemaking in the new year to figure out how to integrate the changes.

One change to the program allows CARB the chance to limit the distribution of free allowances. These allowances are meant to help address leakage risk, which refers to the risk that a company may decide to take its operations outside of California to avoid certain state restrictions. But critics have long said the leakage risk associated with the program is overblown, and these allowances allow companies to continue polluting.

CARB will soon announce the results of a revised assessment of the program’s leakage risk, which could guide their decisions to possibly limit free allowances after 2031.

— Manola Secaira

Protecting street vendors' personal data

Senate Bill 635 aims to protect street vendors in California from having their sensitive personal data shared with the federal government as the Trump administration continues to crackdown on undocumented immigrants.

Beginning Jan. 1, state and local governments will be prohibited from voluntarily providing street vendors’ identifying information to federal immigration authorities. The law also bars local agencies from collecting information on immigration status or criminal history, or from requiring fingerprints or LiveScan background checks as part of the street vendor permitting process.

Under the new law, local authorities that collected this prohibited information prior to the law’s effective date must destroy those records by March 1.

“Street vendors are a cornerstone of our communities and contribute significantly to California’s vibrant culture and economy,” said Democratic Senator María Elena Durazo, the bill’s author. “SB 635 ensures that these hardworking entrepreneurs can operate their businesses without fear that their personal information will be turned over to immigration authorities.”

Opposition to the bill was limited during the legislative process, with critics primarily raising questions about language surrounding food safety enforcement and administrative costs rather than immigration policy.

— Chris Felts

Disclosing AI use in police reports

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A new law going into effect Jan. 1 will require California law enforcement officers to disclose when they use AI to help write official reports.

Under the new law, agencies will need to provide a statement when the technology is used in a report as well as a signature from the officer involved in it.

Democratic State Senator Jesse Arreguín of Berkeley is the law’s author. Arreguín told a Senate committee earlier this year that its purpose is to promote transparency and safeguards for the new technology.

“Prosecutors, defense attorneys and courts rely heavily on police reports to determine criminal outcomes,” he said. “It's critically important that additional uses to generate a report is accurate to prevent someone’s livelihood from being wrongly impacted.”

The bill’s supporters included many criminal justice groups. Meanwhile, a few law enforcement agencies in Southern California opposed it.

Sgt. Amar Ghandi is a spokesperson for the Sacramento Sheriff's office. He said the agency does not use AI yet for helping with reports, but it isn’t out of the question in the future.

“The technology is evolving daily, at exponential, light speed,” Gandhi said. “It could come to us, but as of right now we don’t use it because again it is imperfect. There are still some things that need to be worked on and issues we have with it.”

— Riley Palmer

Establishing a framework for reparations

Senate Bill 518 is a new California law that would establish the Bureau for Descendants of American Slavery.

The law was created by a 2023 task force that issued an 1,100-page document with recommendations for reparations for the descendants of enslaved people.

The law requires the bureau to create a Genealogy Division and to verify an individual's status as a descendant of slaves.

Democratic Assemblymember Corey Jackson co-authored the bill and said in July that it’s the first step in a long effort to implement reparations.

“We are not only creating a place to certify eligibility and provide education, but also laying the groundwork for future programs that can deliver remedies and opportunities for descendants.”

— Keyshawn Davis

Legal counsel for immigrant youth

Starting Jan. 1, immigrant youth going through immigration court in California will have access to legal counsel when facing deportation. That’s because of a new law, Assembly Bill 1261, requiring the state to pay for youth legal counsel if the federal government fails to do so. The law could cost taxpayers as much as $77 million.

— Gerardo Zavala

From backyard parties to sweaty moshpits, music lovers of all ages flocked to Riverside in the late 1980s and early 2000s to experience bands like Voodoo Glow Skulls and The Skeletones at smaller, independent venues — a community of fans, artists and promoters that shaped the city’s underground music scene before the days of the internet.

Some of that history is now on display at the Riverside Art Museum in an exhibition called “60 Miles East.” Curators Zach Cordner and Ken Crawford compiled thousands of photographs, flyers and other materials to showcase the impact of local punk, ska and hardcore bands — an era that was separate and distinct from what was happening in Los Angeles and Orange County at the time.

“ We were definitely in the shadow,” Crawford told LAist. “We kinda had to make do with hodgepodge shows and backyard bands. And then these great venues ended up emerging.”

That included places like The Barn at UC Riverside, as well as the Showcase Theatre and Spanky’s Cafe — both of which are now closed. Cordner and Crawford said they would learn about upcoming performances from friends, magazines and at record stores like the now-shuttered Mad Platter.

“As the mid nineties kind of progressed… bands were coming to Riverside finally, so we really didn't have to go too far,” Cordner said. “It was amazing.”

At the time, there was no social media to spread the word about shows, and very little internet access, which made it difficult to navigate the scene. Most people would draw maps and scribble directions to venues on the back of hand-copied flyers and posters.

“We had to actively seek it out, and hope that the map was accurate enough to actually get you there,” Cordner said. “It was definitely a more participatory thing.”

The title of the exhibition is a nod to the Inland Empire — sometimes the simplest way to describe where cities like Riverside and San Bernardino are located is to say they’re about “60 miles east” of L.A.

Ken Crawford and Zach Cordner met as kids in Riverside.

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Cordner and Crawford first met as kids in the I.E. and later bonded over their shared love of skateboarding and concerts during their teen years at Riverside Polytechnic High School.

“My parents had the hangout spot and I had the car with the most seats in it, so I got to be the host and chauffeur,” Crawford said.

During that time, Cordner got hooked on photography. He was about 14 or 15 when he shot his first-ever show featuring a hardcore band called Process. That experience helped him develop relationships with other artists who would then use his prints for their albums and other promotional materials.

“After that I was just smitten,” Cordner said. “I was like, ‘This is what I want to do.’”

The pair reconnected about three decades later. Cordner now serves as publisher of Riversider Magazine, and Crawford is editor-at-large.

In 2023, Crawford said he was covering a story at the opening of a Stater Bros. when he ran into an executive at Riverside Art Museum and later pitched her the idea for “60 Miles East.”

“And we ran with it. We started collecting not only from (Zach’s) stuff but from the community,” he said. “It became very evident very quickly that curating was going to be more of an issue than collecting.”

Cordner said it took almost half a year to sort through all the materials and narrow it down — and that’s “just the tip of the iceberg” of what they have.

The exhibition "60 Miles East" runs through April 12 at the Riverside Art Museum.

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Today, the music scene in Riverside is still alive, Crawford said, but it’s smaller and lacks institutional support. But thanks to social media, it’s also easier to connect with bands and to learn about events in your area.

“I mean, it's Riverside. We still have a lot of these bands here…. it's just a matter of connecting and creating a community that really fosters the scene,” Cordner said.

Part of the reason they created “60 Miles East” was to educate people on how great the underground scene in Riverside was in its heyday — and how great it can still be today.

“I really love it when I see younger generations in the exhibition, reading the walls and just soaking all of that in,” Cordner said. “Hopefully they see that and can do it, and restart it. That's my hope for it.”

The exhibition “60 Miles East” runs through April 12 at the Riverside Art Museum.

This story was produced with help from Gillian Morán Pérez.

Even as some scientists search for signs of life beyond Earth, other researchers have been discovering new species on our own humble planet faster than ever before.

From high up in the mountains to the deep sea, take a tour across the world to meet five new species discovered in 2025.

An ancient sea cow in the Persian Gulf

Qatar Museums staff and colleagues visit the excavation site of Salwasiren qatarensis, a 21-million-year-old sea cow species.

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Cows often get a bad rap for contributing to greenhouse gas emissions, but a newly discovered species of their ocean counterparts suggests that sea cows have been key contributors to a natural climate change solution for the past 21 million years.

This long-extinct sea cow's fossil remains were discovered in Al Maszhabiya, Qatar, which is now known to be the richest fossil sea cow deposit in the world. Like today's manatees and dugongs, it mainly grazed on seagrass and was considered an "ecosystem engineer" in the coastal waters of the Persian Gulf, where it primarily lived.

With their fleshy muzzles, these mammals would browse the seafloor, grab the plants, and use their tusks to snip the roots and eat them. In the process, they lift up nutrients from the seafloor that would otherwise be buried, which other animals in the ecosystem can use. These nutrients, in addition to the sea cow's excrement, help cultivate a healthier and more diverse ecosystem.

"Supporting seagrass communities through ecosystem engineering is a great natural climate solution, because seagrass communities store an incredible amount of carbon," says Nicholas Pyenson, curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

The name of the new species, Salwasiren qatarensis, honors the fossil's discovery site in Qatar, and the Bay of Salwa in the Persian Gulf, where the largest herd of dugongs can be found today. But Pyenson says Salwa, an Arabic word which roughly translates to "solace," is also a nod to the potential for the new species to "elevate the visibility and protection of natural heritage," adding that "natural heritage doesn't actually, in all cases, respect geopolitical boundaries."

Pyenson is referring to the fact that the seagrass meadow in the Bay of Salwa spans the coasts of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. His colleagues are currently in the process of applying for UNESCO World Heritage status to protect the region.

"This is a great example of science diplomacy," Pyenson says, "where data sharing, making data open access and available when you publish, has the potential to actually form a metaphorical bridge between countries that maybe have not historically seen eye to eye."

You can see a 3D model of the sea cow fossil here.

A mini marsupial in the Andes Mountains

This new species of mouse opossum, called Marmosa chachapoya, has bright reddish fur and a long and delicate snout which distinguishes it from its closest relatives.

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A beady-eyed mouse opossum living high up in the Peruvian Andes wasn't what Silvia Pavan initially set out to find during her expedition in Río Abiseo National Park, but the new species gives yet another reason why this special region is protected as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Pavan, an assistant professor at Cal Poly Humboldt, was on the hunt for a specific squirrel species when she and her colleagues came across an animal they eventually named Marmosa chachapoya to honor the Chachapoya people who formerly occupied the area.

The tiny marsupial (which, despite its scientific name, is not a marmoset) was the first small mammal that the researchers collected on their trip. While the animal looked a lot like a mouse opossum, its long and delicate snout and home high in the mountains set it apart from other marmosa species. But once Pavan brought the samples back, DNA analysis — coupled with a close examination of its skull — proved that this was indeed a new species.

The high-altitude area of the mountains where the expedition took place is difficult to access, but Pavan says these underexplored areas are even more important to study: "We do not know yet completely what we have, and it highlights how much we still need to explore and study the area, and how unique and important [it] is for biodiversity."

With the threat of climate change and human impact, Pavan says, "the species are being lost before we know they exist."

On this trip alone, the team of researchers collected roughly 100 different specimens that they are continuing to identify.

An undercover spider in Northern California

Marshal Hedin discovered this brown spider, Siskiyu armilla, along the river near where he grew up.

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Marshal Hedin

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Marshal Hedin was walking along the river near where he grew up in Northern California when he came across a spider he hadn't seen before. Fifteen years later, the professor of biology at San Diego State University finally got to identify it as a new species of an entirely new genus, which he named after his home of Siskiyou County.

Brown spider species like Siskiyu armilla are very difficult to tell apart using only their physical characteristics. Many species look similar because they live in the same kind of habitat: under rocks or in other dark, humid places.

To make sure the spider Hedin found was genetically different from existing species, he and his colleagues decided to perform a DNA analysis. So he returned to the river to search for a new specimen of the rare spider (and brought his son along with him, too).

Coauthor Rodrigo Monjaraz Ruedas, an assistant curator of entomology at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles who focused on the DNA analysis, was surprised to find that there was such a huge diversity of spider species in the area.

He says that if we simply assume that spiders that look similar are the same species without actually examining their DNA, "we're going to be missing a lot of the actual diversity these spiders have."

California plays an especially important role in this diversity, according to Monjaraz Ruedas. As part of a project from the California Institute of Biodiversity, which hasn't yet been published, he has found that close to 40% of the total number of described species of spiders in the U.S. can be found in the state.

Hedin, who was once oblivious to the diversity of species his home boasts, says that this journey has brought him full circle: "Now I know that it's a very unique place." He hopes that this discovery shows the other folks living along the river how special their home is.

And "this is just the tip of the iceberg," Monjaraz Ruedas says, because they're still examining 40 to 50 other spiders that might also be new species.

A smiley snailfish from the deep sea

The bumpy snailfish, Careproctus colliculi, was officially described by MBARI researchers this year.

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MBARI

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Nearly 11,000 feet into the deep sea, scientists discovered a new species that caught the attention — and affection — of viewers from around the world. The bumpy snailfish was captured on video by researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute during their expedition off the shores of Central California — and with its big eyes, feathery fins and a mouth bearing the suggestion of a smile, it was an instant hit.

To help determine if the floppy pink sea creature was new or one of the 400 existing species of snailfish, they assembled a team of scientists, including Mackenzie Gerringer, an associate professor of biology at the State University of New York at Geneseo.

Even though Gerringer has "never met a snailfish [she] didn't love," she knows that the deep sea, where some of the species live, is seen as a bit of an alien environment by many people, which can come with a negative connotation.

She says the new species can help people question their assumptions about the deep sea because "you're left with these fishes that are, in my opinion, quite cute, and they really look quite fragile in an environment that we think of as being very harsh."

The research team also identified two other species of snailfish, which Gerringer says highlights just how much there still is to learn about the deep sea.

While discovering a new species can be very exciting, Gerringer believes the importance of the practice goes beyond that.

"It's critical to know who is in these ecosystems, so that we can understand how they're working, so that we can protect habitats like the deep sea that we know play hugely important roles," she says. Some of those roles, including the deep sea's ability to store enormous amounts of carbon, are especially important given the threat of climate change.

Live-birthing toads in Tanzania

Scientists have described three toad species in Tanzania, including the Luhomero Glandular Tree Toad (Nectophrynoides luhomeroensis), that give birth to live young — a rare phenomenon among frogs and toads.

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Many people remember learning about the typical life cycle of frogs and toads in elementary school: Eggs turn into tadpoles, which eventually become adults. But scientists have found three new species of toads in Tanzania that do something very unusual: they give birth to live young.

Another striking thing about these new species, which are all part of the genus Nectophrynoides: The journey to discover them took over 100 years. The first toad in this genus was described in the early 1900s, and because all the specimens collected looked so similar, they were all thought to belong to a singular species.

But Christoph Liedtke, an academic researcher from the Spanish National Research Council who has spent the last decade studying these toads, wondered whether there was more biodiversity in the highlands of the Eastern Arc mountains of Tanzania than previously thought. So he and his colleagues tried to see if there was more than one species in the Nectophrynoides genus.

This was no easy task because many of the specimens they needed to examine and compare to modern-day samples were collected before the time of DNA sequencing. Coauthor John Lyakurwa, an assistant lecturer at the University of Dar es Salaam, says that the process was like a "big puzzle that we had to solve."

So they teamed up with researchers from Denmark and Belgium to extract DNA from over 200 museum specimens. From there, they used next-generation sequencing to identify three new species in the genus, which was more than previously thought.

It's not clear how these toads will fare in the future. Like many species, their populations are in decline, with one species already extinct and others not being spotted for the past 20 years. For his PhD thesis, Lyakurwa has been focusing on understanding why these toad populations have been shrinking. Especially because of their unusual method of reproduction, he stresses that "if we lose them, we lose a very big evolutionary history."

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