MEDAN, Indonesia — Smugglers managed to ship more than 7,000 birds, including wild-caught songbirds, by air from Sumatra to Java in Indonesia, highlighting the country’s weak enforcement against the deeply…
The state of Pará’s Calha Norte region, one of the Amazon’s least studied areas, is the planet’s largest mosaic of protected forests. It is a rich reserve of biodiversity facing threats from illegal land occupation and deforestation. Species could disappear even before they are discovered.
On May 15, authorities in the northeastern province of Si Sa Ket in Thailand arrested two Cambodians and six Thai workers for illegally removing a large Siamese rosewood tree from…
The fishing boat flew a Singaporean flag as it sailed toward Batam Island in Indonesia. But when Indonesian Navy officers intercepted the vessel and boarded it in February 2018, they…
A planned industrial shipping channel would destroy vital fish habitat at the Lourencão Rocks on the Tocantins River in the Brazilian Amazon, while also likely wrecking traditional fishing livelihoods.
When conservationists set up treetop cameras in Côte d’Ivoire’s Tanoé-Ehy forest, they hoped to get video of the elusive Miss Waldron’s red colobus monkey (Piliocolobus waldroni), a critically endangered species…
For the past 15 years, the European Union and tropical timber-producing countries have developed innovative collaboration mechanisms to fight illegal logging and timber trade, and to make sure wood imports…
Nearly 400 elephants have died in Botswana's Okavango Delta since March, in what wildlife experts say is one of the largest elephant mortality events ever recorded. Conservationists have criticized the…
ANTANANARIVO, Madagascar — Four kilometers (2.5 miles) from downtown Antananarivo, Tsarasaotra Park has long been an oasis of calm in Madagascar’s capital city. It is the first private site to…
North America and the U.S. in particular is the world’s hotspot of salamander diversity, hosting about a third of all species, so researchers are concerned about the potential landfall of…
Soaring gold prices, brought on by the economic meltdown and COVID-19 uncertainty, have led to a rapid, largely un-policed, expansion of illegal gold mining in the Amazon.
JAKARTA — Martamis says he’s worried about how he’ll pay for his daughter’s education once schools reopen. He’s an oil palm farmer from the village of Lubuk Mandarsah in Indonesia’s…
The St. Augustine Alligator Farm Zoological Park in Florida prides itself on having every species of alligator and crocodile in the world. By 2019, scientists had recognized 26 crocodilian species…
SAMARINDA, Indonesia — The search for a potential mate for a captive female Sumatran rhinoceros in Indonesian Borneo has been put on hold for the year, one of many activities…
JAKARTA — Indonesia is reopening dozens of conservation areas to local and foreign tourists after months of closure, even as the number of COVID-19 infections in the country continues to…
SAHN, Sierra Leone — The day they came, Margaret Fascia was in her forest garden of cocoa trees, pineapple plants, palms, ferns and cassavas. Like most days of the week,…
Climate change threatens ecological and economic systems. That is why investors are increasingly looking to invest in companies with a plan to address one of the largest drivers of climate…
COLOMBO — Getting out of their vehicle in the middle of the night, armed with small digging tools, UV lights and headlamps, the members of the research team looked like…
Camera traps bring you closer to the secretive natural world and are an important conservation tool to study wildlife. This week we’re meeting the largest species of hyena in the…
In 2006, when the first large environmental monitoring project began in the Peruvian Amazon, its objective was not to uncover new environmental crimes in the forest. Instead, the project was…
Conservationists set up two camera traps near a watering hole in a Thai forest — and then they waited. The first animal to step in front of the lens was…
The global furniture giant Ikea used illegal timber from Ukraine in its supply chain and one of the world’s preeminent forestry certification organizations failed to stop it from happening, a…
In his 2006 book, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, science writer David Quammen says, “Some people admire soldiers, or surgeons, or firemen, or astrophysicists, or medical missionaries, or cowboys. I admire…
This article was co-published with The Gecko Project. This post details the analysis we carried out to estimate the revenues generated by the Korindo Group from harvesting timber as it…
Filipino lepidopterist Jade Aster T. Badon is accustomed to traveling to some of the remotest parts of the Philippines in search of new butterfly species. In August 2019, he made…
MBONJO, Cameroon — The first time Emmanuel Elong wrote a letter to Vincent Bolloré was in 2013. “The impact of the group that you are controlling on our lives is…
Between 1885 and 1908, Belgium’s King Leopold II exerted control over a vast area of Africa that would later become the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His rule was characterized…
It was the middle of the afternoon in one of the world’s largest metropolises when the sky went black. Thousands of miles away, tens of thousands of fires raged, plunging…
There is only one photo of the smooth handfish: an image of a withered, yellowing specimen with pectoral fins that extend like arms, and a triangular crest attached to the…
QUITO — As COVID-19 sweeps across communities in the Amazon rainforest, the Indigenous Waorani in Ecuador are celebrating a bittersweet victory after a provincial court ruled in their favor in…
