After months of fasting as she traveled hundreds of kilometers across the ocean, a female loggerhead sea turtle hauls herself up onto the sand: the shoreline she has returned to…
A multi-national research team has developed a rapid DNA identification method to help customs inspectors detect illegally traded wildlife products, beginning with sharks. The DNA testing protocol, published last month,…
On a midsummer evening earlier this year, Tracy Pham was on a walk along Huntington Beach, California, an outing she usually made to photograph birds. This time, along the way,…
Using drones for wildlife surveys isn’t new to marine wildlife research, but it’s been focused mainly on detecting the large mammals and sea turtles that break the ocean’s surface to…
CAPE TOWN, South Africa — Every other hour, Sonja Krüger logs onto her website and checks the birds’ status. Pharoah is taking a mud bath in the mountains, Jeremia is on…
Monitoring technology deployed in a remote rainforest over time subjects it to high heat, humidity, and rainfall, as well as potential damage by insects and other wildlife. When you add…
Flor Rumayna and Sara Hurtado arrived in Lima this past August from their homes in the Amazon headwaters to learn more about aerial monitoring of forests. They’d been researching new technologies…
Animal tracking has revolutionized our study of animal movements and behavior. Radio transmitter tags, followed by GPS and other satellite-based tags, placed on animals via a collar, harness, glue, or…
Technology users and tech developers don’t always talk directly to each other, but they should. The relatively small size of the scientific/conservation community and its need for a particular suite…
KATHMANDU, Nepal — As dawn peeks through the morning mist on an early spring day in Nepal's Koshi Tappu Wildlife Reserve, a duck-sized bird flaps its wings and throws itself…
Of gaps and limitations Our knowledge about sea animals is riddled with holes. We may study and record sea lion colonies or sea turtle nesting and hatching events as they…
“It’s easy to quantify if insects are dead,” said Harvard post-doctoral fellow James Crall, lead author of the recent study “Neonicotinoid exposure disrupts bumblebee nest behavior, social networks, and thermoregulation.”…
Researchers have developed a web-based application to enable citizen scientists to listen to the sounds of killer whales in the northeast Pacific in real time. Publicly launched on Nov. 1,…
Most of Kenya is arid, and lengthy droughts can lead to livestock loss, illegal grazing in protected areas, and violent interactions between nomadic herders and other landowners. Less known are…
Botswana’s policy of zero tolerance for poaching and illegal hunting has given it the reputation of valuing wildlife conservation. But an increase in human-wildlife conflict in recent years appears to…
NYERI, Kenya - It took nine hours for Margaret Wanjugu and neighbors to put out a fire that razed Gathorongai forest near her home in central Kenya, in 2016. She…
In a high-rise just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, a conference room echoed of clacking keyboards as fluorescent lamps glared down on whiteboard scribbles and hunched shoulders. This was…
An extensive study of the leopard population in the wildlife-rich southern Indian state of Karnataka has indicated that these big cats are thriving there, buoying hopes the species’ genetic pool…
An international team of scientists has developed a method to assess the detection area of acoustic monitoring devices. These instruments, which can record the calls and other sounds of animals…
When Osa Conservation project coordinator Juan Carlos Cruz met a local landowner angered by the presence of a pair of camera traps on his land in this southwestern section of…
Since the arrival of the fall armyworm (Spodoptera frugiperda) caterpillar in West Africa in early 2016, true to its name, it has been marching quickly and mercilessly through the continent,…
African elephants use areas of grassland, bushland, and woodland, but how do they move through these different vegetation types in different seasons, especially where water becomes a seasonally scarce resource?…
The iNaturalist species data- and image-sharing platform reached a milestone earlier this month with its one millionth observer. The platform consists of a mobile app and corresponding website that help…
Chief Antonio Manquid Jiménez, an elder and shaman of the Matsés tribe of northeastern Peru, hasn’t always used a smartphone to document what he finds during his hunting and gathering…
The non-profit Conservation X Labs (CXL) recently announced twenty finalists for the Con X Tech Prize – subtitled “Hacking Extinction.” The finalists will receive $3,500 to continue developing their projects,…
South American bats speak dialects different from those of their North American counterparts. In response, a group of scientists has developed the first artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm for acoustic identification…
The survey looked easy on paper. All they had to do was to go the Babai Valley in western Nepal and fly a drone (or unmanned aerial vehicle, UAV) along…
A team at University of Texas Austin has developed a new method for identifying whether a mosquito is of the Aedes aegypti species, which is responsible for transmitting Zika, dengue and other deadly diseases. The…
As early as 2009-10, researchers were looking at Twitter data mining as a way to predict the incidence of flu. At the time, the H1N1 virus, or “swine flu,” had…
Small animals form the majority of animal diversity on Earth, but there are fundamental gaps in our knowledge of how animals too small to wear GPS or satellite tracking tags…
