When Marielle Ramires disclosed her cancer diagnosis in December 2024, she chose honesty without despair, revealing vulnerability while emphasizing resilience. Her approach was pragmatic, yet deeply hopeful.

“I embraced my destiny,” she wrote, taking each step “one drop at a time.”

For a woman who dedicated her life to articulating collective struggles, her illness became another front in which she championed community, solidarity, and mutual care.

Ramires co-founded Mídia NINJA in 2013, Brazil’s influential network of independent communicators that challenged traditional media paradigms. From the mass protests of June 2013 to the turbulent years under Presidents Michel Temer and Jair Bolsonaro, NINJA’s cameras and microphones brought unseen narratives from the streets directly to the public. Its unapologetic partiality was a guiding principle, rooted in the belief that journalism should amplify marginalized voices rather than claim neutrality. Ramires herself epitomized this ethos: always present, quietly orchestrating the dissemination of critical stories, particularly from the front lines of environmental justice and Indigenous rights.

Her contributions were profound. Friends and colleagues describe her as gentle yet fiercely effective, often working quietly behind the scenes to build bridges between disparate groups—from Indigenous communities in Brazil’s Amazon to global movements in Indonesia and Latin America. She played a key role in initiatives like Peoples For Forests, a global gathering of environmental activists seeking collaborative responses to the ecological crises of our time. Her writings around this event emphasized collective healing, insisting that the path forward lay in collaboration rather than isolation.

“Monoculture suffocates, monoculture kills,” she wrote. “The solution must be collective.”

Born in Cuiabá, Ramires began her activism in culture and human rights early, eventually shaping policy through positions at Brazil’s Ministry of Culture and the UNDP. She was instrumental in organizing the groundbreaking 2018 presidential campaign of Sonia Guajajara, the first Indigenous woman to run for national office in Brazil, an event emblematic of her commitment to intersectional justice.

In recent years, she gained increasing international recognition, engaging audiences in Latin America and beyond on the importance of free, decentralized media. But the core of her work remained the same: to empower communities to tell their own stories, leveraging technology not as an end but as a means of societal transformation.

Marielle Ramires leaves behind a legacy not only of movements and organizations, but of a profoundly humanist vision.

She once described hope as a “stubborn girl” that insists upon renewal, organically growing “with us, or despite us.”

Her passing was mourned via posts on social media as deeply as her life was celebrated, marking a profound loss for Brazil’s activist communities.

Yet, as she herself often reminded her followers, “the grass will grow again. With time.”

A newly published study has found that nearly 75% of bird species in North America are sharply declining across their ranges, and eight in 10 plummeting in the very areas where they’re thought to be thriving and plentiful. Nearly every species, 97%, had gains and losses in their populations depending on the location, the study found.

The researchers used birdwatcher citizen science data from eBird, an online database where birders can record checklists of all the birds they see at a particular place and time. The researchers analyzed observations from 36 million checklists from 2007 to 2021 that included nearly 500 bird species in North America, Central America and the Caribbean.

Rather than just look at population declines for each species, the study identifies specific areas where populations are either declining or increasing, which paints a more comprehensive picture of population trends and highlights areas where conservation actions could be focused.

While three-quarters of all species declined across their ranges, the study found that 83% of bird species experienced significant population decreases in areas where they were most abundant and where habitat is considered most suitable for them — a counterintuitive finding that surprised the researchers. This pattern of decline was pronounced for birds breeding in grasslands and arid lands.

Birds that breed in the Arctic and northern latitudes showed the highest declines. The researchers posit that the warming climate, especially in the tundra, could be impacting breeding habitats there for many of the species, driving the declines.

“That is a worrying signal,” study author Alison Johnston from the U.K.’s University of St. Andrews told Mongabay. “That’s a wake-up call for us in terms of understanding the extent of damage that we’re having on the natural world.”

A 2019 study sounded the alarm on declining North American bird numbers, finding the region lost nearly 3 billion birds since 1970. “This new analysis helps us turn that alarm into action by pinpointing where declines are happening within species’ ranges,” James J. Giocomo from the American Bird Conservancy (ABC), who wasn’t involved with the study, told Mongabay by email.

Despite the troubling overall decline, the study suggests that most bird species still have small areas in their range where populations are growing, which can potentially serve as refuges to help their populations recover.

“We can learn what is working for those species in those places, and that can help our conservation planning,” Johnston said. “We have so much more knowledge about what’s happening ecologically, and that knowledge is power.”

“For American Bird Conservancy, this kind of spatially explicit trend data is invaluable,” Giocomo said, adding it helps prioritize conservation efforts. “We can use this information to fine-tune our collaborative work with ranchers, farmers, and land managers — targeting resources where they’ll matter most and adapting where needed.”

Banner image: Williamson’s sapsucker (Sphyrapicus thyroideus), one of the birds declining in areas where they’re abundant. Image courtesy of Blair Dudeck/Macaulay Library/Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Shy, solitary leopards might lose out to tigers and lions in the game of charisma, but the rosette-patterned big cats are incredibly adaptable — they can survive in the densest of cities just as easily as in forests, grasslands and high mountains.

While highly adaptable, leopards (Panthera pardus), listed as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List, are declining rapidly across most of their range in Asia, the Middle East and Africa, largely due to habitat loss and conflict with people. The big cats are also one of the most illegally traded animal species, coveted for parts like skins, bones, claws and teeth.

For International Leopard Day on May 3, we look back at some of Mongabay’s recent coverage of leopards, particularly in South Asia where they can often be found living alongside human settlements.

India

India’s leopards frequently make headlines after being spotted around towns and cities. In 2018, Mongabay reported on leopards that live, seemingly comfortably, among people in Mumbai, India’s financial capital. Similarly, leopards in central India are increasingly adapting to cities like Indore and Jabalpur as their natural habitat shrinks and cityscapes expand, contributor Sneha Dhamale reported in February 2025.

“With few studies on urban leopards, assessing their presence in cities is now essential,” ecologist Aniruddha Majumder told Mongabay India.

At the same time, in many parts of India, including the northern state of Uttarakhand, conflicts remain high as leopards attack people and livestock, prompting retaliatory attacks, contributor Varsha Singh reported in February 2023.

Nepal

In Nepal, leopards are contracting the canine distemper virus, a dangerous virus that’s previously killed populations of lions in India and Africa, Mongabay’s Abhaya Raj Joshi reported in September 2024. “We know that at least some of these cases [in leopards] are fatal, and the priority must now be to understand their significance at a wider population level,” wild carnivore expert Martin Gilbert told Mongabay.

Researchers suspect that while feral dogs are likely responsible for initially transmitting the virus to wildlife, various strains of the virus are also circulating among other wild species that may be carriers.

Joshi also reported in 2023 that a warming climate could push Nepal’s three big cat species — tigers, leopards and snow leopards — to higher elevations as these regions become more habitable. What this means for their survival is still unknown.

Bangladesh

In Bangladesh, the leopard’s situation is particularly dire. Leopards were once prevalent across the country, in almost all habitats, as recently as 1940. But they’ve now disappeared from most areas. The leopard is listed as critically endangered on Bangladesh’s Red List, contributor Rafiqul Islam reported in September 2024.

Most of Bangladesh’s leopards now live in the northern districts near the border with India, where conflict with people — and killing of leopards — remains high. Experts stress an urgent need for surveys and conservation actions to bring the neglected species into national conservation focus in Bangladesh.

Banner image of a leopard by Udayan Dasgupta/Mongabay.

Illegal gold miners are now operating very close to the second-tallest tree in the Amazon Rainforest, Mongabay’s Fernanda Wenzel reported in April.

Six giant trees, including a red angelim (Dinizia excelsa) that stands 85 meters (279 feet) tall, are found inside the Iratapuru River Sustainable Development Reserve in Brazil’s Amapá state. Despite the area’s protected status, gold miners are illegally operating just a kilometer (0.6 miles) away, the Amapá state public ministry reported.

“The expansion of garimpos [gold mines] at this rate is something new,” said Marcelo Moreira, a prosecutor from the Amapá public ministry. In October 2024, the ministry recommended that the state government create a protected area within a 1-km radius around each giant tree.

Gold mining in Amapá was previously less intensive compared to neighboring Amazonian states like Pará and Roraima. But with the government cracking down on illegal mining in the latter states, miners, or garimpeiros, have moved into Amapá in recent years, Wenzel wrote.

More than 20,000 garimpeiros were forced out of the Yanomami Indigenous Territory in Roraima following government raids that began in 2023. A similar exodus appears to have occurred following raids in the Munduruku Indigenous Territory in Pará in late 2024.

“[Garimpeiros] noticed that in Amapá the inspections weren’t hitting so hard yet and rushed here,” a gold trader currently based in Amapá, who asked for anonymity for fear of backlash, told Wenzel. The trader said that miners arrived at Amapá through word of mouth, even bringing their backhoes with them.

Amapá has a history of artisanal mining, but Moreira told Mongabay the newcomers are bringing in more money and heavier machinery. “Each of these machines degrades at least 100 meters [330 ft] a day. They also use a lot more mercury,” the prosecutor said.

During heavy rains in February, a dam holding mining waste collapsed near the Cupixi and Araguari rivers, located near the Amazon’s giant trees.

Wenzel reported that rising gold prices due to global economic volatility and U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war is also likely incentivizing illegal miners to pursue riskier and pricier operations deeper in the Amazon.

Moreira said that even though the mine near Amapá’s giant angelim is only accessible by helicopter or a three-day boat ride, miners still take heavy machinery with them, dismantling a bulldozer to bring it across the river and then reassembling it at the mine site.

“The high [gold] prices mean that the surplus earned from mining is invested in new areas, machinery, airplanes, and helicopters,” Luiz Jardim de Moraes Wanderley, a geography professor at Brazil’s Fluminense Federal University, told Wenzel.

Indigenous groups say they fear the illegal mining operations will encroach onto their lands and contaminate the rivers.

Read the full story by Fernanda Wenzel here.

Banner image of the Amazon’s second-largest tree in Brazil’s Amapá state. Image courtesy of João de Matos Filho/Prodemac.

Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries.

In a modest home on the edge of Bogotá, a forest lived in exile. Redrawn leaf by leaf from memory with ink and conviction, it existed not on maps or in satellite imagery, but on sheets of paper, in the hands of a man who never called himself an artist.

Abel Rodríguez was born sometime between 1934 and 1941 in La Chorrera in the Colombian Amazon. He died on April 9.

Rodríguez became widely known for his finely detailed drawings of Amazonian flora, now shown in museums around the world. Yet to him, the drawings were never art. They were memories made visible — an attempt to honor and transmit a world increasingly under threat.

From his uncle, a sabedor or “man of knowledge,” Rodríguez learned the names, cycles, uses and spirits of plants: when to harvest, which animals fed on which fruits, how the chagra — a garden borrowed from the forest — could be returned stronger than before. He learned to see the rainforest not as a collection of species, but as a single living system, both material and spiritual.

In the 1980s, Rodríguez worked as a guide for visiting researchers. He could not read or write fluently, but he could identify hundreds of plants and describe their roles in extraordinary detail. That knowledge might have remained oral if war hadn’t intervened. In the 1990s, guerrilla conflict displaced Rodríguez and his family to Bogotá. There, without land to plant, he began to draw.

The early works were rough, made with felt-tip pens. But as he began to “go to the forest in his thoughts,” the drawings sharpened. The pages filled with trees and vines, yet retained breathing room — spaces to wander. His work was encyclopedic in the memory of cycles: floods and fruits, bird migrations and soil shifts. He knew where the scent of a flower lingered, and how long before its petals fell.

Recognition came slowly. In 2008, the Museo Botero in Bogotá showed his work. In 2014, he received the Prince Claus Award from the Netherlands. Then came Kassel, São Paulo, Venice, Gwangju. Still, Rodríguez resisted the artist label. “We don’t have that concept,” he told MoMA in 2024. “In my language, we speak of knowledge, work, intelligence, and craft.”

He believed that knowledge passed down outside its place of origin withers. The Nonuya language is nearly gone. The forest he drew is shrinking. Drawing, for him, may have been a way of walking through that world again — tracing its forms so it might endure a little longer.

He offered no manifestos. Asked what his work meant, he once shrugged: “Well, nothing. I only show a simple image.” But behind each line lay a truth: that remembering is a form of resistance, and that a forest, even when felled, can still take root in the mind.

Banner image of Abel Rodríguez, courtesy of Simon Hernandez.

Jaguar numbers in the Amazon Rainforest may be higher than previous estimates, according to a new large-scale study that offers the most comprehensive population snapshot to date.

Using camera-trap images of jaguars (Panthera onca) across the Brazilian, Colombian, Peruvian and Ecuadorian Amazon, researchers calculated an average density of three jaguars per 100 square kilometers (about eight per 100 square miles) in 22 protected areas. This is triple the density estimate the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority, currently notes for Amazonian jaguars.

“I wouldn’t risk saying that the entire Amazon has the average density of jaguars we found,” study lead author Guilherme Alvarenga, an ecology researcher at the University of Oxford, told Mongabay by phone. “But our results indicate that we likely have more jaguars per square kilometer than the [IUCN estimate] showed.”

Each jaguar’s pattern of spots and rosettes is unique, like a human fingerprint, enabling researchers to identify 389 individuals from camera-trap photos. Based on this, they estimated more than 6,300 jaguars in the 2.5% of the Amazon they assessed. About 62% of the biome is under some form of conservation, but much of it has never been surveyed for jaguars.

Antonio de la Torre, director of Mexico’s Jaguares de la Selva Maya program and author of the study that informed the IUCN estimate, said the new findings show that Amazonian jaguar densities are “higher than previously thought” and provide important conservation insights.

“When we conducted the study published in 2018, data on jaguar densities in the Amazon were very limited,” de la Torre told Mongabay by email. “This collaborative study is incredibly valuable, as it provides crucial data that will help refine population projections.”

Global jaguar numbers may be closer to higher-end estimates around 173,000 individuals, the findings suggest, rather than the IUCN’s conservative estimate of 64,000.

While the jaguar is listed as near threatened on the IUCN Red List, the Amazonian jaguar is the only subpopulation listed as being of least concern. The species has disappeared from half of its historical range, running from the southern U.S. to central Argentina, leaving the Amazon as its last major stronghold. All other subpopulations are either endangered or critically endangered.

“Jaguar populations serve as an indicator of the quality of the environment, which is useful,” Alvarenga said. In the Mamirauá Reserve, a floodplain forest along the Amazon River, densities neared 10 per 100 km2 (26 per 100 mi2), three times the average. But in the Cuieiras Reserve, an area with poor soil quality north of Manaus, the Amazon’s largest city, there were 20 times fewer jaguars.

“First, you need to map how these populations are distributed,” Alvarenga said. “Once you understand that, you can plan more effective actions in areas where numbers are declining, or habitat quality is not as good, to prevent them from disappearing from those places.”

Banner image: Jaguar siblings in Poconé, Brazil. Image by Bernard Dupont via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).