Illegal wildlife trade across the eight countries of the Hindu Kush Himalaya region has more than doubled since 2019, according to a January 2026 study. This surge in trafficking, which targets species of carnivores, elephants, and pangolins, poses a significant threat to the fragile mountain ecosystem and the 1.8 billion people who depend on its biodiversity, reports contributor Vandana K. for Mongabay India.

The Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH), which hosts four global biodiversity hotspots, spans roughly 3,500 kilometers (2,200 miles) across eight countries: Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, China, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Myanmar.

For this region, the researchers analyzed wildlife trade and seizure data from 2001-2020 and found that India and China recorded thousands of seizure incidents, with animals trafficked for live trade, body parts, and traditional medicine. The volume of illegal wildlife trade more than doubled from 2019, compared to previous years.

The study noted researchers linked the increase in wildlife trade between 2019 and 2021 to the COVID-19 pandemic. Lockdowns led to reduced surveillance and law enforcement, while economic hardships and disrupted food chains pushed low-income communities toward poaching. India reported a 151% increase in poaching during the pandemic, with rises also noted in Nepal and Bangladesh.

The illegal trade is driven by consumer demand for exotic pets and wildlife products for luxury fashion and traditional medicine. To meet this demand, a large variety of species and their parts became part of cross-border trade, the study said.

“The illegal goods were taken through porous borders and also high mountain passes that were poorly monitored. Because of difficult terrain and complex geography, monitoring has been difficult,” said study co-author Kesang Wangchuk, who works as an intervention manager for human-wildlife coexistence at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) in Kathmandu, Nepal.

Study co-author Babar Khan, also from ICIMOD, noted a significant rise in digital wildlife trade, with syndicates operating via social media platforms under coded names.

Beyond biodiversity loss, the study said wildlife trade increases the risk of zoonotic diseases, noting that more than 75% of pandemics can be traced back to wildlife.

The study’s authors recommend strengthening institutional capacities for legislation and enforcement. They also call for greater regional cooperation through bodies like the South Asia Wildlife Enforcement Network.

Wangchuk said mapping supply chains and poaching hotspots using satellite imagery and GPS tracking is needed as well as more investigation of digital platforms.

Khan proposed a One Health Approach, by adopting a strategy that treats the health of humans, animals, and ecosystems as inseparable.

Read the full story by Vandana K. here.

Banner image: Pangolin scales worn as a charm bracelet (left), and scale and claw worn as talisman (right). Images by D’Cruze N, Singh B, Mookerjee A, Harrington LA, Macdonald DW via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0).

Along Earth’s coastlines, grassy wetlands flooded by seawater, called salt marshes, trap and store carbon at rates roughly 40 times higher than forests on land. As salt marshes have expanded in some regions, scientists were hopeful their carbon stores might have largely recovered as well, but a new study found that’s not the case.

Researchers measuring carbon storage in salt marsh soil found that destruction of the world’s salt marshes resulted in a net loss of roughly half a million metric tons of surface soil organic carbon (SOC) between 2002 and 2019 — the equivalent of the emissions from 6,600 passenger cars over the same period. Most of that was from mature salt marshes that stored much more carbon than newly established marshes.

“The most surprising finding … is the paradox that salt marsh area is recovering globally, yet soil organic carbon is undergoing a net loss,” study co-author Xinxin Wang, a wetland ecologist at Fudan University in China, told Mongabay.

The southern U.S. is a global hotspot for SOC loss from marshes, the study notes, with Louisiana’s Gulf Coast ground zero. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit the region in 2005, causing immediate damage to rich marshlands. Louisiana’s salt marshes have suffered from decades of industrialization, including more than 75,000 oil and gas recovery wells and nutrient runoff from agriculture.

The weakened salt marshes were torn apart by the storms and largely transformed into open mudflats. Nearly 200,000 barrels of oil and other petrochemicals were spilled during Hurricane Katrina. The same pattern was observed again with the 2017 hurricane season, worsened by rising sea levels. The U.S. made up around 60% of global salt marsh losses from 2002-2019, according to the study.

By contrast, Asia has added almost a million metric tons of surface SOC to the global tally since 2002, the study found; more than three-quarters of it from China, which expanded and restored existing salt marsh areas without suffering any major losses.

“China has not simply restored a few isolated wetlands but built a complete framework from top-level design to on-the-ground implementation,” Wang said.

“This model, which relies on human activity retreatment plus natural recovery, is low-cost, fast-acting, and suitable for most coastal nations worldwide,” he added.

Salt marsh ecosystems “cover less than 10% of the global land area,” the study said, but store one-third of global soil carbon. When these ecosystems are degraded, a significant amount of climate-warming carbon is released.

“Salt marshes are the most capable and silent ecological guardians and carbon storage warehouses along coastlines,” Wang said. “They can lock large amounts of carbon dioxide in soils for centuries or even millennia.”

They’re also crucial habitat for wildlife like fish, crabs and migratory birds, and protect humans from natural disasters and coastal erosion, the study says.

Banner image: Nansha Wetlands Park, China. Image by Sam May via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).

A tiny wasp, collected in the early 1980s in Chile’s Valdivia province, lay inside an unsorted drawer in the Natural History Museum, London, for more than 40 years. After taking a close look, researchers have recently confirmed it’s not only a new-to-science species, but also represents a new genus.

The wasp, only 3.5 millimeters (0.14 inches) long, is a kind of ichneumonid or Darwin wasp. This is a family of parasitoid wasps that lay their eggs inside the larvae, pupae or eggs of other arthropods, killing the host as the young wasp develops.

Researchers have named the newly described wasp Attenboroughnculus tau. The genus name is in honor of nature broadcaster David Attenborough, who marked his 100^th birthday on May 8.

The authors write that they wanted to recognize Attenborough’s his contributions to humanity’s understanding of the natural world. In particular, they highlighted his work featuring Chile’s diverse and extreme landscapes, its unique environmental challenges, and the world of parasitoid wasps presented in his documentaries.

“When I was young, five or six maybe, I was given the Life on Earth book. In it [Attenborough] mentions taxonomists and what they do, and I was hooked,” Gavin Broad, study co-author and principal curator of wasps at the museum, said in a statement. “I decided from a far too early age I was going to be a taxonomist, thanks to David Attenborough, and weirdly I’ve ended up as a taxonomist. So I’ll pay something back.”

Study lead author Augustijn De Ketelaere, from the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, chanced upon the new wasp while examining a collection of ichneumonid wasps at the Natural History Museum in London.

A detailed examination of the wasp’s physical and anatomical traits revealed that it belongs to a small subfamily called Pedunculinae. With the addition of Attenboroughnculus tau, there are now four known species, representing four different genera in the subfamily.

However, very little is known about Pedunculinae due to a lack of taxonomic work, the authors write. “No photographs of any Pedunculinae seem to be available online, so we hope that the publication of our photographs will draw attention to this interesting little subfamily,” they add.

“We hope to inspire global scientists to take another look in their collections to see if there is something small that could contribute to our collective understanding and therefore the future of our natural world,” Jennifer Pullar, science communications manager at the Natural History Museum and a co-author of the study, said in a press release.

Banner image of Attenboroughnculus tau, courtesy of the Trustees of the Natural History Museum.

Nearly a decade since Scotland established the South Arran Marine Protected Area and banned bottom trawling across much of it, life on the seafloor has thrived, a new study has found.

Scientists surveying the area found three times more seabed organisms and twice as many species compared to nearby unprotected waters.          

“What looks like a boring desert of mud, it’s actually really, really dynamic,” lead author Ben Harris, a marine ecologist at the University of Exeter in the U.K., told Mongabay by phone. “We saw not necessarily the most glamorous things … but once you get a bit nerdy about it and look a bit deeper, you realize that they’re playing a really important role.”

Researchers found more than 150 species in a small sample of the seafloor, including spoon worms (subclass Echiura), bobbit worms (Eunice aphroditois) and shell-building organisms like tower snails (genus Turritella), which Harris called “important gardeners of the seabed … all performing different roles.”

“There’s like eight Mount Everest’s worth of sediments being turned over every minute of every day on the global continental shelf by these small animals,” he added. This movement is important for carbon storage, and in the South Arran MPA, these animals are starting to rebuild a long-lost ecosystem that once thrived at the bottom of the sea.

Europe’s seabeds are the most trawled in the world. Heavy fishing gear has been dragged along the seafloor there since at least the mid-14th century, destroying those ecosystems. Approximately ”86% of the assessed seabed in the Greater North Sea and Celtic Sea” showed “evidence of physical disturbance by bottom-touching fishing gear,” the European Environment Agency previously reported.

In fact, Europe’s seabeds are so extensively destroyed that to find a reference for a healthy seabed ecosystem, researchers turned to historical records. There are no surviving seabeds that meet the old descriptions.

“So much of the continental shelf that is soft sediment has been trawled for so long, that we haven’t really recorded what was there very well before we destroyed it,” Harris said. The records that describe what a healthy European continental shelf looked like are from 150 to 200 years ago.

“Some of these records are incredible, and they describe these animal forests just off the coast of the U.K. that are covered in very biodiverse animal communities,” he said. “There’s all these descriptions of biogenic crust.”

That “crust” could have been a layer of marine animals, species like oysters (Ostrea edulis) or honeycomb worms (Sabellaria alveolata) blanketing the soft, muddy seafloor, and forming a rich substrate sustaining other forms of life, like corals and sponges.

In total, the research team recorded more than 1,500 organisms in approximately 100 liters (26 gallons) of sediment. “Extrapolate that over the entire region of the MPA, and you’re looking at billions of organisms,” Harris added.

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  Image courtesy of Henley Spiers.
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  Image courtesy of Matt Jarvis & Adam Porter.
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  Image courtesy of Henley Spiers.
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Banner image: Seabed in the South Arran Marine Protected Area. Image courtesy of Henley Spiers.

Native plants are rapidly declining in Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu, replaced by invasive species historically introduced for ornamental and urban greening purposes, reports Mongabay contributor Bibek Bhandari.

Botanist Bharat Babu Shrestha said he has observed traditional medicinal plants like the Indian pennywort (Centella asiatica) slowly vanish from Kathmandu over the past decades, displaced by dense, flowering shrubs of Crofton weed (Ageratina adenophora), native to Central and South America.

“There has been no qualitative assessment in Kathmandu, but our observations show that our native vegetation has been dominated and displaced by many invasive species,” said Shrestha, a botany professor at Tribhuvan University, Nepal. He added that research in Nepal’s national parks suggests these invasive species can reduce native species by nearly half, a trend being mirrored in the country’s capital.

According to experts, dominant invasive species in the city include Crofton weed, common lantana (Lantana camara), Santa Maria feverfew (parthenium weed, Parthenium hysterophorus) and blue billy goat weed (Ageratum houstonianum).

A 2024 study found that 48% of observed plant species in the Sanobharyang region, close to protected areas and community forests, were non-native. Similarly, researcher Ronish Pandey, who submitted his master’s thesis on Kathmandu’s plant species composition to Tribhuvan University last year, found that more than half of the 437 species he surveyed in the capital’s green spaces were exotic; 21% of those naturalized species categorized as invasive.

Krishna Prasad Sharma, the 2024 study’s co-author and an assistant professor at Tribhuvan University, said that some non-native species are less harmful, such as jacaranda (Jacaranda mimosifolia) and avocado (Persea americana), since they stay confined to where they’re planted. But many do become invasive by releasing allelochemicals to inhibit the growth of surrounding plants, he said. Botanist Shrestha warned that popular ornamental plants like the common lantana create thick canopies that block sunlight, suppressing and eventually killing native species.

The spread of non-native plants in Kathmandu is exacerbated by urban planning preferences and weak regulations. Experts said authorities often opt for exotic trees like jacaranda and eucalyptus because they need minimal care and have high survival rates for street beautification projects.

Pandey’s research shows parks maintained by the city also favor exotic flowering plants. “It’s because they mostly don’t know what species to select, and the decisions are based on contracts with the lowest bidder,” he said.

Which city institution is responsible for managing these species remains unclear, according to Sunita Ulak of the environment ministry’s Forest Research and Training Center. While regulations have existed since 1972, implementation is lax and invasive plants are openly sold in private nurseries.

To address the crisis, the Forest Research and Training Center issued an 18-point declaration in December 2025, calling for better monitoring of non-native species and streamlined policies. Shrestha stressed that authorities must strictly enforce the recommendations and invest in risk assessments before non-native seeds reach Nepal’s borders.

Read the full story by Bibek Bhandari here.

Banner image: Lantana on display at the botanical garden in Kathmandu. Image by Abhaya Raj Joshi/Mongabay.

Beavers are expanding their range into Canada’s western Arctic, and a recent study has reconstructed when these ecosystem engineers first became active in the area — sometime around 2008.

Historically, North American beavers (Castor canadensis) have been associated with boreal and temperate waterways. However, they’re increasingly being observed moving northward in the Arctic tundra. This range expansion is partly aided by a warming climate and the growth of shrubs they depend on to build their dams and lodges.

When local Indigenous communities in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region in the Canadian Arctic noticed an increase in beavers, they “flagged this as an urgent issue requiring investigation,” study lead author Georgia Hole, from Durham University in the U.K., told Mongabay by email.

Beavers are known for their ability to build dams in streams and rivers, which blocks the flow of water, creating ponds. For the Inuvialuit, the impacts of busy beavers led to “creeks running dry, dams blocking access to historic established travel routes and harvesting sites, and changes in vegetation,” said Hole, who carried out the work while at Anglia Ruskin University, U.K.

However, in the absence of long-term scientific monitoring, nobody knew exactly when the beavers had moved in and colonized this remote Canadian Arctic region.

When beavers chew through woody plants such as trees or shrubs, their browsing leaves behind scars in the stems’ growth rings. So, to peek back in time, the researchers examined growth rings in the stems of willow and alder shrubs — local species the beavers fell — and found they record “the moment a beaver appeared and started cutting them,” Hole said.

Researchers also looked at surface water levels in satellite images over time, and found that these time stamps coincided with an increase in flooding, possibly due to the beavers’ damming activity.

Hole said these two independent lines of evidence “tell the same story” — that beavers arrived in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region starting in 2008 and have been active in the area since. This timeline fits with the real-world experience of locals, she added.

Kevin Arey, an Indigenous environmental guardian and Imaryuk monitor who worked alongside the researchers, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that the beavers are everywhere and impacting the traditional way of life in the region. “What we do for a living, our fishing, our hunting, it’s making obstructions, moving water, making the rivers act differently,” Arey said.

Researchers say beaver ponds can also speed up the warming of permafrost, a concern in areas already impacted by climate change. Tracking beaver colonization and its impacts on landscapes with the new method will help inform local communities and decision-makers.

“The Arctic is transforming faster than many people may appreciate, and I hope this methodology helps us understand one ongoing change that would go otherwise go untracked,” Hole said.

Banner image: North American beaver in the Northwest Territories, Canada. Image courtesy of Helen Wheeler/Anglia Ruskin University.