Sean Mowbray

Sean Mowbray

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Sean Mowbray is a freelance writer from Scotland. He often covers lesser-known species that fly under the conservation radar. His reporting also appears in New Scientist, Hakai, Earth Island Journal, Discover magazine, and others.

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205 stories
A captive sand cat in Nushi, Pakistan. Illegal trade is occurring amid a paucity of information about population sizes of small cat populations, says Sheikh. “It's going under the radar to a big extent, and hardly anything is being done to actively stop it or to mitigate this threat.”

Big cats get the press, but small wildcats are being poached and trafficked in silence

Sean Mowbray 25 Feb 2026
Aerial view as a ship sails through the sea ice in the winter.

Petrostates stymie effort to rein in Arctic shipping carbon emissions

Sean Mowbray 23 Feb 2026
A white-backed vulture in Zimbabwe. Image by Chris Collyer/ Birdlife Zimbabwe.

Africa’s vulture safe zones face tough test across vast landscapes

Sean Mowbray 19 Feb 2026
A caddisfly in the Oligotricha genus.

Insects are moving pharmaceutical pollutants from rivers to land; risks unknown

Sean Mowbray 13 Feb 2026
Open burning of plastic in a community in Guiyu, China. This practice is fast becoming a common way to dispose of plastic and other waste.

Plastic household waste burned as fuel on rise in Global South, risking health

Sean Mowbray 5 Feb 2026

Wildlife attacks and strange animal behavior — fake images spark conservation concerns

Sean Mowbray 28 Jan 2026
Soil microbes. Invisible to the naked eye, microbial communities play a huge role in planetary processes, such as nutrient cycling, and are vital to ecosystem and human health.

IUCN launches group to conserve at-risk microbes vital to life on Earth

Sean Mowbray 21 Jan 2026

Year-end ‘good news’ as flat-headed cats reappear in Thailand after 29-year absence

Sean Mowbray 26 Dec 2025
A fungi in the family Hygrophoraceae. This fungi, which may represent a new genus, is rare and restricted to California’s coastal regions, says Singer.

Statewide survey aims to put California’s fungi on the conservation map

Sean Mowbray 20 Dec 2025
A sewage outlet in Bangkok.

Marine heat waves and raw sewage combine to put human health at risk

Sean Mowbray 18 Dec 2025
The African golden cat (Caracal aurata) is a medium-sized felid (though it’s classified as one of the world’s 33 small cat species). In Echuya Forest, it’s the largest predator remaining due to the extirpation of leopards from that forest.

Small cat conservationists hail Uganda’s new Echuya Forest National Park

Sean Mowbray 11 Dec 2025
Smoke rises from a coal-burning power plant. Refuse-derived fuel (RDF), which includes large amounts of plastics, is replacing fossil fuels in some energy and industrial furnaces. But critics say this practice is merely replacing one dirty fuel for another.

Boom in burning waste for fuel could put human health and environment at risk

Sean Mowbray 10 Dec 2025
Unlike other ocean-based energy solutions such as offshore wind, OTEC systems could provide baseload energy.

For fossil fuel-dependent islands, ocean thermal energy offers a lifeline

Sean Mowbray 5 Dec 2025
Asian golden cat caught on camera in Nepal.

Asian golden cat range expands, but declines continue amid rising threats

Sean Mowbray 7 Nov 2025
A free-ranging chicken amid metal scrap in Thailand. The mismanagement of ash from incineration and metal production is another serious public health issue.

‘Alarming’ levels of toxins found in free-range eggs near dumpsites globally

Sean Mowbray 15 Oct 2025
Mountain yellow-legged frogs have a wide array of color variations, ranging from yellow and brown to red and gray.

Uphill battle to save California’s endangered mountain yellow-legged frog

Sean Mowbray 10 Oct 2025

IUCN downgrades guiña threat status, prompting conservation warning

Sean Mowbray 10 Oct 2025
A giant dust storm approaches the metro area of Phoenix, Arizona, Aug. 25, 2025.

Climate change is messing with global wind speeds, impacting planetary health

Sean Mowbray 3 Oct 2025
A rapid response to a poisoning event in Kruger National Park in May this year saved more than 80 vultures. Such activities are vitally important, say conservationists, but more action is needed to address drivers of poisoning and poaching.

Mass vulture poisonings expose need for cross-border action in Southern Africa

Sean Mowbray 18 Sep 2025
A white-backed vulture in Kruger National Park. This critically endangered species is often a victim of poisoning incidents.

Poisoning crisis could drive vulture extinction in South Africa’s Kruger region

Sean Mowbray 16 Sep 2025
A hooded vulture chick in the newly discovered nesting site in KwaZulu-Natal. Image courtesy of Wildlife ACT.

A nest with a chick brings rare hope for hooded vultures in South Africa

Sean Mowbray 16 Sep 2025
A cocoa pod opened by hand. Exclusion of smallholder farmers from markets, a potential consequence of the EUDR, could result in loss of income leading to environmental harms but also exacerbate existing problems including child labor on cocoa farms. “These risks are known,” says Rainforest Alliance’s Fanny Gauttier. “That's something that we have highlighted many times.”

EUDR implementation comes laden with potential unintended consequences

Sean Mowbray 4 Sep 2025
Scientist Anneliese Hodge collecting seaweed.

Sunscreens protect us but also pose real planetary health concerns

Sean Mowbray 26 Aug 2025
A sperm whale.

Ocean-based carbon storage ramps up, bringing investment and concern

Sean Mowbray 19 Aug 2025
Person standing in front of a fallen tree.

Global warming is altering storms lightning, impacting tropical forests

Sean Mowbray 28 Jul 2025
NASA's Artemis program plans to return humans to the moon, with the U.S. government agency working with SpaceX to develop the company's Starship human landing system.

Commercial space race comes with multiple planetary health risks

Sean Mowbray 22 Jul 2025
Camera-trap image of the caracal spotted in Kirthar National Park. The cat appeared only once during the span of two weeks of camera trapping.

In rare triumph, camera traps snap endangered wildcats in Pakistan

Sean Mowbray 21 Jul 2025
A waste site near Mombasa, Kenya. Separating plastic waste from growing mountains of domestic trash is a huge hurdle facing the world’s communities.

Open burning of plastic is an escalating public health threat, say experts

Sean Mowbray 17 Jul 2025
The Andean cat is a rare and endangered species highly specialized to life in the high Andes. It’s estimated that around 2,000 mature individuals, living in fragmented populations, are spread very thinly over a vast alpine expanse in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Peru.

Endangered Andean cat is imperiled by climate change and its solutions

Sean Mowbray 10 Jul 2025
brown spider monkey Colombia

Forest corridors protect Colombia’s critically endangered brown spider monkey

Sean Mowbray 2 Jul 2025
A ray swims over seagrass in Australia.

As ocean acidification ramps up, experts call for speedy ocean protection

Sean Mowbray 26 Jun 2025
Nontoxic dye released from an artificial upwelling experiment off the Canary Islands. That experiment, set to last weeks, ended after just one day when the pump failed. “To most of us that proved … the technical readiness of this approach is not there,” says Michael Sswat, a postdoctoral researcher at GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research, who was part of the research team.

Marine artificial upwelling, problematic climate solution slow to advance

Sean Mowbray 2 Jun 2025

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