PORTEIRINHA, Minas Gerais — Beneath the shade of the umbu tree, Maria Neves tells Maria José that ripe umbu fruit is like a woman on the brink of giving birth:…
TOKYO — The train to the farm rose from Tokyo’s labyrinthine subway network, revealing a hodgepodge of gray and tan buildings stretched on either side. The world’s largest metropolitan area,…
In 2024, Latin America’s tiger cat, previously recognized as two species, was determined by scientists to be three species — a taxonomic reshuffling that has major conservation implications for these small cats.
While wind turbines and solar panels multiply across the Brazilian dry forests, Tião Alves insists on tin windmills and PET bottle-based heaters. "Backcountry technology," as he defines it, arguing that…
A paper generated by the Merz Institute, an Aotearoa New Zealand-based research institute, and published in the journal Science Progress in 2023, hypothesizes that the environmental crises our planet faces…
In the municipality of Camocim, on Brazil’s northeastern coast, the fishing village of Praia do Xavier was erased from the map. Or at least that’s how it appeared on the…
The ancient Sanskrit epic Ramayana has it that Hanuman was a mighty ape god who marshaled an army to build a bridge linking northern Sri Lanka’s Mannar region with South…
For more than 200 million years, the ancient Valdivian Temperate Forest in southwestern Chile has been a refuge for plant and animal species found nowhere else on Earth. This global…
The Mexico-U.S. border wall has interrupted the ecological connectivity of a nature reserve that’s a World Heritage Site, and should be addressed to remedy the situation, according to UNESCO. Without…
UAUÁ, Bahia, Brazil — Everything is growing in Perpétua's grove now. "Can you see? This is avocado; over there, papaya. This year I already got acerola. We plant a little…
The diminutive Karoo dwarf tortoise (Chersobius boulengeri) may play an outsized role as gardener in its arid South African habitat. Researchers gathered droppings of the miniature species — this endangered…
The world’s two worst nuclear accidents, in Ukraine and Japan, along with the human exclusion zones around them, are informing scientists about radiation effects, and how ecosystems evolve with less pressure from people.
On this episode of the Mongabay Newscast, co-host Rachel Donald speaks with Laura Martin, an associate professor of environmental studies at Williams College in Massachusetts. Donald and Martin dive into…
The sand cat is small, elusive and adapted to life in some of Earth’s most inhospitable deserts — that makes it hard to study and conserve, with lots of unknowns about its behaviors and populations across its range.
UAUÁ, Bahia, Brazil — In the backlands of northern Bahia state, nobody ever thought about putting up a fence in the woods. According to the tradition that governs fundo de…
This story is the first part of a Mongabay series titled “Climate Crisis in Cape Horn” that won the Inter American Press Association Award for Excellence in Journalism in the…
The government of New Caledonia recently announced that it would highly protect 10% of its ocean to safeguard ecologically important marine areas for sea turtles, sharks, dolphins, whales and seabirds.…
Japan is home to two rare subspecies of leopard cat, one found only on Iriomote Island and the other on Tsushima Island. Neither larger than a housecat, each subspecies has…
NOVA XAVANTINA, Brazil — This past July, 15 Indigenous women made the thousand-mile journey from their home of Rolim de Moura, in the Brazilian Amazonian state of Rondônia, east to…
CAPE TOWN — The endangered African penguin (Spheniscus demersus) could be extinct in the wild in just over a decade. To protect the bird’s food supply and slow its population…
"One of the greatest pleasures I had when I came here was telling my friends, 'Today I planted 5,000 fig tree seeds,'" says Yacov Kilsztajn. "Planting seeds here at the…
The Amazon Rainforest — together with other forests around the globe — lies at the center of concern over climate changes inside Brazil and worldwide. Yet little is studied and…
“This here is really great. I feel so good! I’m not stressed, and I’m not sad. When I’m here in the garden, everything is good,” says Waldir Francisco de Almeida,…
Each year from June to August, it's tapir hunting season in Suriname, the only country in South America that allows hunting the animal, which already faces a host of other…
A new study identified the presence of up to seven transgenic genes in single seeds of traditional, or “creole” corn from more than 1,000 samples collected in 10% of the towns in Brazil’s Caatinga.
Between March 2017 and January 2018, researchers tracked the movements of a female puma as it prowled around the Boqueirão da Onça protected area complex in the north of Brazil’s…
Released in February 2022, the latest report prepared by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) stressed that greenhouse gas emissions are increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme temperatures…
In the Chapada dos Veadeiros area, in Goiás state — 230 kilometers (143 miles) from Brasília — members of seed networks from several parts of Brazil met for almost a…
Big cat conflict is a threat to charismatic species like tigers and leopards. Small cat conflict, though often less severe, can also harm the livelihoods of communities and farmers and…
JAKARTA — Male orangutans that resettle to a new area appear to be imitating the behavior of local individuals in an effort to survive and find a future home range,…