Five countries that are home to some of the most iconic and threatened animal species in the world have joined forces in a high-tech collaboration to improve wildlife law enforcement.…
Nature reserves frequently operate with scarce resources, relying on revenue from tourism or donations for their survival. When managers of the Mara Triangle portion of Kenya’s renowned Maasai Mara National…
The well-known trumpeting call of an elephant indicates anger or alarm. The more common but less familiar rumbles are a range of low-frequency sounds that elephants use to communicate different…
Fish talk. They boom, buzz, croak, and chatter. They even create a dawn chorus similar to birds. Shrimp vocalize too, by snapping and popping. A reef’s soundscape—the variety of sounds…
How does a country’s per capita Gross Domestic Product relate to its forest or biodiversity intactness? Where do areas of deposits of minerals or fossil fuels coincide with the singular…
This coming weekend, nature lovers from cities around the globe will have a chance to test their species identification skills in a global competition. The third-annual City Nature Challenge takes place April…
When Colleen Kamoroff and her graduate advisor Caren Goldberg collected water samples to look for the DNA of non-native fish species, they could not have guessed the potential importance of…
Years of studying birds and their relationship with their environment taught John Swaddle, professor of biology at the College of William & Mary, the importance of understanding animals’ instincts and…
An unlikely group of experts have teamed up to apply software developed to find distant stars to help solve problems in conservation ecology. The “astro-ecology” project at Liverpool Johns Moores…
Sharks are in trouble worldwide, with one study estimating that people kill up to 100 million of them each year through illegal fishing, shark finning, and bycatch. The negative public…
Dwarfed both in size and fame by the Amazon rainforest, the Gran Chaco, South America’s second largest vegetation complex, is a diverse mix of thorny dry forest and palm savannahs…
Hundreds of students from science and technology programs around the city of Los Angeles, California have begun participating in a hands-on effort to apply ingenuity and technology to protect the…
Satellite imagery has transformed how we assess changes in forest cover. The standard optical sensors carried by Earth-orbiting satellites capture the energy from sunlight reflected off objects on the Earth’s…
The arduous task of assessing animal populations in the wild takes plenty of sweat and tears. Now a group of scientists is adding blood to that mix, in an innovative…
Researchers have identified a genetic analysis technique that pinpoints the harvest location of trees—a breakthrough that could help officials detect illegally traded timber. The multi-national research team tested the potential…
Scientists in Antarctica recently tested a novel technique to measure the body size and mass of wildlife — aerial photography. The method, used on leopard seals (Hydrurga leptonyx), allows scientists…
Tens of thousands of indigenous people in the Peruvian Amazon have been fighting decades of contamination of their natural resources by foreign and domestic oil companies. Oil spills, leaky pipelines,…
What if we had a public library for scientific data? The proliferation of sensors monitoring the Earth—from space to planes, drones, vehicles, park rangers, camera traps, and even animal tracking…
Why are scientists turning to aerial images to monitor the health of ecosystems found beneath the ocean’s surface? Coral reefs support millions of species ranging from single-celled algae to sharks…
Jarrod Hodgson is one of very few scientists who have used rubber ducks as part of their Ph.D. research. Hodgson and colleagues at the University of Adelaide compared the accuracy…
Technological advances have revolutionized the global fishing industry. Depth-finders and sonar have taken much of the guesswork out of locating fish, and larger, more durable nets and trawls have drastically…
The United States, a major ivory market The sale of ivory across international boundaries has been banned since 1990, when the African elephant was listed among species prohibited for commercial…
Keeping equipment running in harsh field conditions can challenge any tech project, as can working successfully with volunteers. Some projects have to manage both. A recent Wildtech post describes wpsWatch,…
Is Australia’s Great Barrier Reef losing its male sea turtles? A new study has found that green sea turtle hatchlings in one of the world’s largest colonies are increasingly female,…
Imagine you needed to map the spread of an invasive plant species in a tropical forest. Hyperspectral imaging and LiDAR are great at identifying vegetation, but have their limitations and…
For the last two years, a U.S. non-profit and local partners in South Africa have quietly been catching wildlife poachers using remote cameras connected to a unique cross-continent volunteer monitoring…
The Brazilian Amazon lost 184 km2 of forest in December 2017, according to the country’s Institute of Man and the Environment of the Amazon (Imazon). The data, obtained exclusively by…
Technology is changing how we investigate and protect planet Earth. The increased portability and reduced cost of data collection and synthesis tools, for instance — from visual and acoustic sensors…
Where deforestation is widespread, sometimes it’s hard to see the (loss of) forest for the (loss of) trees. Global Forest Watch’s online forest change monitoring platform has added a new…
Do you know where your endangered species are? A new online tool offers access to and analyses of a wealth of documents and data related to the United States Endangered…